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"X-cellence"
People
Magazine
10/9/95
As Fox's oddball
hit The X Files goes bump in the night even its stars can get the
creeps.
To paraphrase what Steve Martin once said about
comedy, paranormally isn't pretty. Just look at the Vancouver,
B.C., set of The X Files, Fox's macabre, Friday night hit series
about two FBI agents who tangle with extraterrestrials, vampires,
serial killers, Satanists, mutants and (no surprise) nefarious
government officials.
It's sometime around the witching
hour, midnight, and a wearying 13 hours after the shooting day
began. Cast and crew are filming a scene in an abandoned mental
institution that serves, for this episode, as a prison infirmary.
Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny, 35. suave and somber in a dark
suit), and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson, 27, a redhead with laser
intense azure eyes) discover a fresh corpse, murdered, perhaps, by
the ghost of a former death row tenant. The script calls for the
corpse to be covered with maggots.
Ick.
X Files
creator and executive producer Chris Carter, 38, who also writes
about a third of the series' scripts (including this one), has hired
a self described "maggot wrangler" to handle the squirming extras.
She arrives on the set with a plastic bowl containing a slab of
liver and hundreds of feasting bugs, which are gingerly dropped all
over the upper body of a stuntman nlnvinsz the corpse.
"The
smell of death," Carter announces grimly.
Anderson joins the
crew in a chorus of Eeeeeeeughs! Duchovny merely squinches his mouth
like a little boy tasting cod liver oil. Suddenly, Anderson notices
a maggot crawling toward the stuntman's eye and calmly plucks it
off. "Nobody else jumped to it," she explains. Bugwise, Anderson is
something of a pro: In a past episode, she ate a live cricket. "They
spent thousands of dollars making a fake one," she says." But I'd
seen this guy named Enigma who was in the show eat 200 right in
front of us, so it seemed silly not to try one."
For many X
Files fans, a first taste of this strange, compelling show has led
to addiction. Always scary, often creepy and sometimes just plain
mysterious The X Files has grown since its 1993 debut from a cult
favorite into a main stream phenomenon. The series was Fox's top
rated program the week of its Sept. 22 premiere, kicking off a third
season with its largest audience yet (30 million). Like Star Trek, X
Files has spawned novels, comic books, T shirts (emblazoned with the
show's motto, The Truth Is Out There), coffee mugs, conventions and
Internet bulletin boards. (On-line fans call themselves X Philes.)
Though the script isn't finished, there's an X Files film planned.
Good bets to attend the premiere: avid fans Tom Petty, Bruce
Springsteen, Whoopi Goldberg and Steven Spielberg.
While the
show's bizarre plots reflect Carter's entertainingly paranoid vision
was inspired, he has said, by the '70s occult series Kolchak: The
Night Stalker; much of The X Files' appeal, and edge, comes from the
onscreen chemistry between the stars. Fox Mulder, played by
Duchovny, is an FBI agent obsessed with Things Beyond the Pale ever
since his kid sister was whisked away by aliens. His FBI superiors,
concerned that he has gathered too many moonbeams in his jar, have
teamed him with Dana Scully, a forensic physician and professional
skeptic played by Anderson. They become allies, but never lovers.
(About the names: Fox, as any X-Phile knows, was a boyhood friend of
Carter's; Mulder was the maiden name of Carter's mother; and Scully
comes from Dodgers announcer Vin Scully.)
Series creator
Carter couldn't be happier with his cast. Anderson, he says, "has an
intensity that makes her perfect as Scully." And Duchovny? "A clear,
quick mind, an intelligence beyond book smarts," says Carter. "And a
tremendous amount of personal magnetism."
Off camera,
Duchovny is deadpan, but not nearly as poker faced as his character.
(On break while shooting at a rented house, he sticks his head
through the fronds of an outdoor plant and murmurs in his best Arte
Johnson impersonation, "Verrrrrry interesting But stupid!") And
Anderson, one of the most cool headed heroines ever on a TV series,
is all maternal warmth off camera. Between scenes, she beelines for
her trailer, where a nanny helps her care for Piper, her 1 year old
daughter.
"Hello, baby," she coos as Piper toddles toward
her. "She loves the crew," adds Anderson. "It's like having dozens
of mommies and daddies."
While baby at play sounds emerge
from Anderson's trailer, you're more likely to hear CDs of the Red
Hot Chili Peppers and Boxing Ghandis rattle Duchovny's. On his way
there between scenes, he pauses to sign autographs. A little girl
cries out, "Hi! Hi! My mom wants to know if you're married!" "No,"
he answers. As she scampers off, he wonders aloud, "Pretty dicey
question. I wonder where Dad is?"
Duchovny spends most
weekends with his girlfriend of more than two years, actress Perrey
Reeves, who played a vampire on an episode last year. They met in
May 1993 while shopping at Fred Segal's in Santa Monica. Duchovny
couldn't decide between a gray suit and a blue and asked her for
advice. (She told him to buy both, and he did.) When Reeves is at
her home in L.A. and Duchovny is stuck in his rented duplex in
Vancouver, his closest companion is Blue, a border collie terrier
mix.
Duchovny isn't crazy about the 14 hour days he puts in
shooting The X-Files, and he admits that the attention of The X
phenomenon "is beyond my ability to understand," says Carter (with
his stars after the show's Golden Globe win in January). "a bit more
enclosed, a bit more insular." On the bright side, Duchovny
concedes, is the fact that he is now being deluged with scripts "in
all genres." Plus he has some new, famous friends like Garry
Shandling. They've been basketball buddies since June, when Duchovny
taped an episode of Shandling's talk show parody, The Larry Sanders
Show. "He has a good outside shot," says Shandling, "is aggressive
on the court and plays without pants."
Duchovny's sister
Laurie, 28, a teacher at a private school in Brooklyn, doesn't think
her big brother has changed that much. "The fame rolls off him," she
says with a laugh. "He's still a horrible dresser." A Manhattan
native, Duchovny is the second of three children born to Amram
Duchovny, 57, a publicist, now retired, for the American Jewish
Committee (he dropped the "h" in the family name), and Margaret, 55,
a Scottish born elementary school teacher in Manhattan. They
divorced when he was 11.
Two years later, Duchovny, always a
good athlete and student, won a scholarship to New York's elite
Collegiate School (the same school JFK Jr. attended). One of his
classmates was Jason Beghe, now also an actor and still a close
friend. "I was the gregarious one," recalls Beghe. "David was the
one who applied himself." Duchovny went on to Princeton, where he
majored in English literature and then pursued grad lit studies at
Yale. But "he always used to describe everyone there as gargoyles,"
says his sister, and he soon preferred hanging out at Yale's famous
drama school.
At the urging of buddy Beghe, already an
actor, Duchovny tried out and was hired for a Lowenbrau TV
commercial. As he began to study acting, Duchovny says, "I realized
I can have all these emotions, and I don't have to suffer from
them."
Soon he had quit graduate school to try acting full
time. At first, he seemed to specialize in small, offbeat roles,
including a born again insurance salesman in The Rapture and
transvestite detective Denies/ Denise on Twin Peaks. Odd clothing
turned out to be crucial at his 1993 X Files audition. Because
Mulder is seldom seen out of his suit, "I told him to wear a tie,"
says Carter, the series creator. "He showed up in a tie with pink
pigs all over it. I think that got him the job."
If Anderson
seems more down to earth, she also has her "whimsical, mischievous
side," says her costar. A decade ago she was a genuine punker,
hanging out with rock musicians, her hair dyed and nose pierced. (As
she has put it, "I was confused.")
The oldest of three
children, she was born in Chicago but spent part of her childhood in
London while her father, Edward, studied at the London Film School.
When she was 11, the family relocated to Grand Rapids, where her
father, now 51, runs a movie postproduction company. Her mother,
Rosemary, 51, is a computer analyst. As a girl, Anderson thought of
becoming a marine biologist but got into acting on a lark, when she
tried out for a community theater group.
"Being with Gillian
was like going to a surprise party," says Ric Murphy, one of
Anderson's teachers at DePaul University's Goodman Theater School in
Chicago (she graduated in 1990). "Gillian had an eight line part in
a French farce but turned it into a star role just by the attitude
she brought to it. She has an incandescence."
Executives at
Fox initially wanted someone with less radiance and more vavoom as
Scully, but Carter insisted that she had the no nonsense integrity
the role required. Then, just as the show was taking off, Anderson
married Clyde Klotz, the series art director at the time, and soon
became pregnant with Piper. (They now share a three bedroom
Vancouver home.)
She worried she'd be dropped from the
series, but Carter stuck by her again. "Part of the show's success
is the audience's investment in these characters," he says. He
created an alien abduction that kept her off camera long enough for
labor, delivery and 10 day maternity leave. Now "I can't imagine not
having Piper," says Anderson, who chose Carter to be her baby's
godfather.
Both stars say Carter is the soul of X-Files. "I'm
a non-religious person in search of religious experience," explains
Carter, who sat in on a nightlong peyote ritual for one X Files
story line. (He's constantly scanning newspapers and magazines for
inspiration.) "The main misperception about me is that I'm some sort
of a sci-fi maven," he says. "I still think of myself as a 38 year
old surfer."
Carter grew up in Bellflower, a bluecollar L.A.
suburb, and by 12 he was hooked on surfing. After high school, he
studied journalism at California State University at Long Beach,
close by the ocean, and wound up writing for Surfing magazine in San
Clemente. In 1987, he married screenwriter Dori Pierson, who
encouraged him to try his hand at scripts. Neither she nor his old
surfing pals expected X Files.
"We used to spend a lot of
time in the water philosophizing," says Sam George, now editor of
another wave catchers' magazine, Surfer. "You wouldn't have thought
he'd start some show about a renegade FBI agent and space aliens.
There's something going on in the back of his head." And late one
night it plays out in an abandoned mental institution in Vancouver.
By the time the maggots have done their scene, it's getting to be
slaphappy time in Creep City.
Between takes, Duchovny sneaks
away and returns with a handful of white rice from the production
caterer's stash. He flings the larva like grains at Anderson, who
shrieks and jumps back. Duchovny bursts out laughing. "This," sighs
an exhausted Carter, "has been a really fun evening."
THE END |
Transcript appears courtesy of People Magazine, copyright © All
Rights Reserved
Transcript here courtesy of GAWS. |
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