THE STORY:

David Duchovny Files a Return Fatherhood mellows him. The X-Files irritates him. He’s starring in Return to Me. Where does he go from here? And other taxing questions. By Mary Kaye Schilling

The camera closes tight on the grieving husband, his white tuxedo shirt stained with the blood of his wife, killed just hours ago in a car accident. His face, until now a frozen mask of disbelief, begins to crumble. And then the tears, a great torrent of salty misery, wash his face. His gulping sobs eventually turn to gasping anguish, as the silent crew breathlessly witnesses what few have seen before: David Duchovny - *emoting*.

For fans of The X-Files, it will be the equivalent of Garbo Talks. Duchovny, best known for his deadpan portrait of oddball G-man Fox Mulder, collapsing into a sobbing, heaving, Daytime Emmy-award-worthy heap of grief. Mulder’s had his upsets of course; tears have been shed. But not with the utter poignancy, the extreme abandon of architect Bob Rueland, the character Duchovny plays in Return to Me, a romantic comedy (and it does get funny) about a widower who falls in love with the woman (Minnie Driver) who receives his dead wife’s heart.

“He didn’t make a big deal about preparing,” the movie’s director, Bonnie Hunt, says of shooting the scene, “and everyone on the set was so moved. He literally had a cameraman crying when he was done.”

“That’s because I insulted him,” Duchovny cracks nearly a year later, while killing time in his X-Files trailer - a messy hodge-podge of boredom therapy (exercise ball, CDs, books) and still-fresh fatherhood (a copy of On Becoming Baby Wise, a Kermit the Frog doll); last April, he and wife Tea Leoni welcomed their first child, Madelaine West. His new family interests him enormously, as does his first foray into romantic comedy. What leaves him cold is the frenzied speculation over his return to The X-Files for an eighth season (“Fox knows my terms,” he says blithely of negotiations with the show’s studio), and any surprise over the aforementioned waterworks. “You just service the script,” he says simply. What depths of sense-memory despair did he plumb to uncork such sorrow? “That’s my secret,” he says. “But I’ll tell you that it doesn’t work the whole time. If you’re shooting a scene for three or four hours, what was working in the beginning gets pretty stale. It’s kind of like Andrew Dice Clay’s bit about jerking off. He keeps this Rolodex in his head, and he’s like, ‘Nah, not working tonight.’ Acting is a lot like that.”

Hunt - who also cowrote and acts in Return to Me (see page 32) - says she had no problem imagining Duchovny as a dashing comic lead, a “Cary Grant type.” She’d worked with him on 1992’s Beethoven (technically a comedy) and “we kept in touch. I’d see him in stuff, and I just wanted to see him flap his wings more. I think he’s a great actor and I felt creatively frustrated for him.”

The feeling was mutual. After seven seasons on Fox’s murky hit and occasional parts in even darker films (1991’s The Rapture, 1993’s Kalifornia, 1997’s Playing God), Duchovny was itching for light. A chance plane encounter with another Hunt pal provided the scratch: “George Clooney mentioned Bonnie had written a script he liked,” says Duchovny. “I got a copy, thought it was great, and called her. I asked why she hadn’t considered me right away - I was a little hurt,” he adds with a small smile. “She said she didn’t want to impose on our friendship.”

According to Hunt, Duchovny went after the wholeheartedly sentimental part like Mulder after a liver-eating mutant. “David is funny but dry, like Mulder, and his face seldom moves at all,” says Hunt. “Bob is much more expressive, and David had to work hard at showing what he was feeling.”

Perhaps not as hard as he might have three years ago. Personal happiness - his 1997 marriage to Leoni and the birth of their daughter the week before Return to Me began filming in Chicago - has had a distinct effect on Duchovny offscreen and on; the cerebral and trenchant actor has, according to Hunt, mellowed noticeably. “A lot of things shifted over the last couple of years,” agrees Gillian Anderson, his X-Files costar. He’s become gentler.” The actress hints that their own complicated relationship - one the media have tended to promote as tortured - has eased up: “Not many people are willing to see the middle ground,” says Anderson. “They either want to think we’re madly in love or hating each other. But it’s neither of those things. It’s magical and difficult, and wondrous and painful, and frustrating and joyous, as any intense, intimate relationship is.”

Duchovny guardedly admits to some personality adjustment, though “I can’t stand when actors talk about how having a baby has affected their acting - it just seems so self-serving,” he says. “But I do think I chose Return to Me because I was in a certain place.” He also concedes that, given “the cynicism which taints everything these days,” American audiences might be in a different place: The movie could be “a tough sell.”

Perhaps he’s underestimating the country’s appetite for a good old-fashioned love story. According to MGM, Return to Me has tested higher than any movie in the studio’s history. High test scores can be cause for optimism (see Erin Brockovich) or no guarantee at all (see Iron Giant). But then Duchovny’s track record for opening films isn’t a sure thing, either: Playing God grossed a very mortal $4.2 million. The actor won’t quibble with the critics’ drubbing of his first starring vehicle (“It was not a good movie”), but he does resent being “personally attacked for the whole thing.... We shot before we had a completed script. Certain things you can’t control. But then I’m just a TV actor; I can’t do movies.”

Sarcasm noted. And, okay, justified. With his own jump from TV to movies, the media are playing a familiar song. “There are a lot of big movie actors who came out of TV - Alec Baldwin, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis - and yet they always throw David Caruso at you,” says Duchovny. “And I’m like, David Caruso’s a hero. He was the best actor on TV. He walked away from millions of dollars because creatively the show was dead for him. And so he stars in a few movies that don’t do well - that doesn’t make him stupid or a bad actor. He and Julianna Margulies are heroes for turning down TV money.”

In David Duchovny’s case, the amount he’s rumored to be walking away from is $1 million per episode. “I haven’t been offered that,” he insists (which a source at Fox verifies). He will confirm his reported reluctance to return to The X-Files, a show he considers creatively challenged. “If they wanted to revamp the whole show and the characters, that’s interesting,” he says. “But seven years of trying to find my sister is enough already. For me as an actor, there’s nothing left.”

Nevertheless, at press time, Twentieth Century Fox and the actor’s lawyers were still negotiating, and getting a straight answer regarding the particulars - well, even Cancer Man couldn’t crack this. “There is a scenario which would bring me back and it’s up to Fox whether they want to meet it,” says Duchovny. That scenario, he adds, has less to do with money than other issues, but he’d happily “bleed the studio for as much as I could get.”

Duchovny, who currently takes home a relatively low $200,000 per episode (ER’s Noah Wyle gets twice that) as well as a cut of the profits is hardly crying poverty. “I’ve been compensated more than an actor should,” he says. “But in the grand scheme of things, if you look at what the show’s made for Fox [which Duchovny’s lawyer estimates at more than $1 billion in profits so far], and you look at people like myself, Gillian, [directors] Rob Bowman and Kim Manners, and [former producers] Glen Morgan and James Wong - people who were instrumental in the success of the show have not been compensated sufficiently.” Duchovny laughs. “It brings up all those 6-year-old issues - you know, It’s not fair! Like I’m yelling at my mom, ‘It’s just not fair!”

To that end, last September Duchovny filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. It accuses the company (a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which produces The X-Files for corporate sibling the Fox network) of intentionally underselling the show’s rights to its own affiliates, thereby allegedly bilking Duchovny out of millions. While he’s entitled to an estimated 5 percent of all profits, he contends in the lawsuit he’s seen only a fraction of that. According to his lawyer, Peter Martin Nelson, it’s the negotiation linchpin. “Duchovny will not come back unless and until Fox settles his lawsuit with them. The ball is in their court.” Other terms are rumored to be a salary commensurate with the show’s success (given that the financial success of The X-Files compares favorably to sitcoms like Mad About You, where the stars ultimately made a million per episode, the figure might not be out of the question) and a less grueling schedule, allowing more time for family and films.

“There will have to be some arrangements made to make the show survivable,” says Anderson, referring to the 70-hour weeks demanded of her and her costar. Duchovny suggests that had X-Files creator Chris Carter developed other regulars into main characters, the pressure on them would be less. “It would have been great if Mitch Pileggi [Assistant Director Skinner] had been made into a third lead.” It might have given the series more longevity, he adds, “but no one’s used well on the show, aside form Gillian and I, and sometimes I don’t think *I’m* used well.”

Although the lawsuit didn’t name Carter as a defendant, it has soured whatever friendship he and Duchovny had. “I think we’re both taking it personally,” says Duchovny, who confirms that they don’t talk much anymore. “His business is private and my lawsuit disrupted that.”

Carter and his executive producer, Frank Spotnitz, are currently in the impossible position of writing the last episode of the season without knowing if it’s also the final chapter of the series. “It’s very frustrating working this way,” says Carter, who adds that although he’s always known how the series will end, he’s unclear as to how he would handle the show if it continued without Duchovny, especially since he and his lead actor are still eager to do a second movie: “I’ve never imagined The X-Files without him.”

Ditto Anderson, who can’t conceive of the “scenario Carter would have to come up with to make it okay and watchable” without Duchovny. “It’s insane the position we’re in right now,” she says. “We’re about to shoot episode 20 out of 22, which means if this is the last season, we have one or two episodes to wrap up *everything*, which is absurd.” Equally absurd, she says, is the notion that Fox would let the last season of their top drama pass without promoting the hell out of it: “Which leads me to think they have no intention of ending it.” More personally, she’d miss what she calls healthy closure. “I don’t want to let go of seven years and have one episode to mourn it or be mourning in retrospect.”

For Duchovny, closure may come April 30, the air date of “Hollywood A.D.,” the second X-Files episode he’s penned and directed. “There’s a lot of love for the show in it,” he says. “I came to think of it as my way of saying goodbye.”

His first effort, last season’s “The Unnatural,” about the extraterrestrial talents of a Negro Leaguer, displayed deft, elegant storytelling, but was almost entirely free of the usual suspects. The alternately hilarious and heartfelt “A.D.” melds a real Mulder and Scully case (involving Lazarus, a resurrected Jesus, and other members of the risen dead) with a biting spoof of Hollywood when the case is turned into a film. Though he’d originally imagined Richard Gere and Jodie Foster as the episode’s big-screen Mulder and Scully (“That was always the joke,” says Duchovny), he cast Leoni and his pal Garry Shandling.

Directing his wife was a revelation. “I told her the other night, ‘I’m scared maybe I didn’t give you enough attention because you’re so good.’ I realize now, not necessarily because I’m good, but because I show up prepared, why I don’t get a lot of attention from directors,” he says. “I tried to imagine if I had to work for her - I’d be nervous and want to please her and I don’t think she was nervous at all. It was really disgusting.”

Shandling - who gets to make out with Leoni in a coffin - says Duchovny directed him to play Mulder “extraordinarily straight and serious. We didn’t have any conflict in that regard.” In what regard were there conflicts? “I think he’s just a little jealous of me because I’m better-looking than he is.”

The script not only continues the homoerotic flirtation of Duchovny and Shandling - featured in a pair of HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show (where the two friends first met) - but manages to both send up and celebrate The X-Files. “I wanted it to be a cynical, ironic piece that ends up on a schmaltzy note,” says Duchovny. “When I write for The X-Files, my hatred and love for it show at the same time.” He’s happiest, he says, when he can screw with the formula and the expectations of the more rabid fans, a group he describes as unrealistically tough on The X-Files. “It’s very hard to write the show,” he says, “and I think we have the best writers on TV for what they do. They have to come up with 22 good stories a year. It’s impossible. You can’t just rely on Sipowicz going into the interrogation room and calling somebody a hump - which is good TV but it’s cheating. Our writers can’t cheat.” Nor can they compete with their cable competition, The Sopranos: “They say ‘f---.’ Every time you say ‘f---,’ you win.”

David Duchovny could cheat and spend the rest of his career doing what comes easiest. “I know I can write well,” he says. “My acting, I need people to tell me I’m good.” (Well, not always: “I remember a Kevin Sorbo quote that went something like ‘Yeah, I read for Fox Mulder and I think I’d have done a better job.’ I was like, ‘F--- him, I’m much better for Mulder.’”)

He’s told friends he doesn’t really want to act and won’t act forever, but, as fellow career hyphenate Bonnie Hunt points out, it can “be invigorating to do something you feel insecure about. It’s a good feeling to walk over the coals quickly and get to the other side.” And most likely Duchovny will follow a path similar to hers, juggling writing, directing, and acting. “I’d love to work with Garry on something,” he says. “He told me Dennis Miller said Garry and I and Jeff Goldblum and Warren Beatty should do a remake of Ocean’s Eleven because we’re all kind of the same, variations on the same thing. But I think it’s already being remade.” (Indeed it is, with Clooney and Julia Roberts. There’s always Robin and the Seven Hoods.)

Membership in a Rat Pack for the 21st century - there are worse fates. And let’s face it, stardom has its privileges. In May, Duchovny will be one of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’s first celeb contestants (“I hope they dumb down the questions for the dumb celebrities,” he says with unnecessary modesty, having “kicked ass” on the far more challenging Celebrity Jeopardy!). And last year, the brainy stud’s charms were extolled in Bree Sharp’s minor pop hit “David Duchovny [Why Won’t You Love Me?],” which spawned a video starring a slew of random celebrities. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, Pam Anderson knows who I am?’” he says, before confessing to a mild case of egomania. “There were moments when I was listening to the song in my car and singing along and I’d think, What if somebody catches me? I’d roll the window up so I could play my own little song in my own little world.” # (Additional reporting by Lynette Rice and Brian M. Raftery)