David Duchovny found Evolution too wacky to resist
By Jamie Portman

David Duchovny has the good grace to look sheepish when you ask him the question.

After all, he's the guy who's determined to part company with his X-Files image and the character of alien-chasing FBI agent Fox Mulder on the hit series. So how come in his new movie he's waging battle against -- would you believe -- extraterrestrial invaders?

Duchovny's expression tells it all. It's a comically resigned expression, the kind that's wordlessly saying: Oh hell, I knew somebody was going to ask me that question! And when he gets around to answering it, he mischievously decides to lay all the blame on director Ivan Reitman.

It seems that way back when, Duchovny played a yuppie villain in Beethoven, a dog comedy produced by Reitman. He decided that this was somebody he wanted to work with again. He was also a big fan of Reitman's 1984 hit, Ghostbusters. Duchovny was about 20 when it came out. "I remember it as the first 'event movie' targeted for someone of my age," he recalls. "I'm a fan of his style of comedy."

So during those eight seasons toiling on X-Files, he kept waiting for a call from Reitman. It finally arrived last year. "He wanted to meet me, so I went over there and he basically said: 'I want you to do this movie called Evolution,' and I said, 'That's great, because I want to do the kind of movies you do.' Then he handed me this script, and I thought -- well, they say show business is hard, but this one's pretty easy. Then I went home and read it and discovered it had aliens in it, and I thought -- Oh damn!

"I mean, what were the odds something like this would have happened?" Duchovny adds, grinning helplessly.

Duchovny is telling his story with the same dry, self-deprecating wit that helped land him the part in Evolution. He says now that -- aliens or no aliens -- there was no way he could have turned down the part just because there was this "superficial coincidence." He found Evolution's wacky send-up of the alien invader genre impossible to resist: "I wanted to do this movie."

Duchovny knows some filmgoers will assume that Evolution, which opens Friday, is specifically targeting the TV series that he nobly served for all these years. But he prefers to see it as "a fun movie" -- a piece of comic escapism similar to Men In Black and Ghostbusters.

Even so, he can't get away from that X-Files connection: During preview screenings, he's been getting an unexpected laugh for a line which fans identify with the TV series.

"The phrase goes, 'I know the government, I don't trust these people,' or something like that. It's apparently seen as a reference to Mulder. I had no idea when I was delivering the line. I don't go around thinking: I am Mulder. I don't think about Mulder at all. I guarantee that when you're interviewing me, you think about Mulder more than I do. So I didn't think that was a funny line until Ivan phoned me from one of the early screenings. 'There's a huge laugh where there's not supposed to be one,' he said."

Evolution presents Duchovny as a community college teacher who becomes suspicious about a giant meteor that has landed in a remote part of Arizona. He's the first person to latch onto the fact that this fallen object harbours some extremely nasty alien stowaways capable of evolving at an astounding rate of speed into slimy, people-crunching monsters with the power to take over the world if not stopped. Assisting Duchovny in his alien-busting mission are Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones and Seann William Scott.

Ironically, screenwriter Don Jakoby's original script set out to be a dramatic science fiction thriller. It was Reitman who decided it had greater potential as a comedy but the veteran filmmaker says there has been no change to the story's underlying thesis that life arrived on Planet Earth through a process of "panspermia." In lay terms this means that life didn't evolve from "the bubbling primordial ooze" -- instead, it travels from one planetary system to another by way of meteors. In Evolution, a new and insidious life form has been deposited here.

Reitman saw rich comic potential rather than horror in the menace of single-cell organisms that take four weeks to evolve rather than the standard four billion years.

And he knew that Duchovny was exactly the actor he needed to portray their determined although occasionally bumbling adversary.

"There is a wonderfully ironic, wry intelligence in the way David does this role," Reitman says. "I loved the irony of his character and the fact that David is playing against what he normally plays."

Duchovny is always baffled when people express surprise at his comic talents. He knows that Mulder tends to be a grave and sombre hero, weighed down by the burden of alien hunting; he just wishes people would remember that the series does lighten up on occasion. "I did almost 200 X-Files hours and of those 200, maybe 20 were really funny episodes.

"I'm done with the TV show. I can't justify creatively going back. I'm really proud of the show. I think it's a great show. I did eight years of it, so I don't feel like I'm abandoning ship. If I'd only done one year, I might feel that way, but I feel I've fulfilled my contract with the show and the fans, and I think the fans understand that.

"I realize I could go back and make great money and do it another three or four years. But there's something within myself that needs to be addressed, and I was no longer addressing whatever it was that drove me to act in the first place."

Something inside was compelling him to make the jump. "It was saying: 'Let's go off and be afraid. Let's go off and try something new. Let's leave the comfort. You do your best work when you're scrambling.' "

So what's all this about being afraid? Duchovny is candid: he's entering uncharted waters. "I'm pretty bold most of the time, but I am scared, I'm definitely scared." But he sees most change in life as scary. Change, he asserts, is good. "But it's also uncomfortable."

Article courtesy of edmontonjournal.com.