David Duchovny's X Factor
By Michael Shnayerson
From Vanity Fair Magazine, June 1998
What's a former Yale doctoral candidate doing in a place like this? After 125
episodes as Fox Mulder, the world's most paranoid F.B.I. agent, in the Fox hit The
X-Files, David Duchovny has 30 million fans and a brand-new marriage to actress
Téa Leoni, and earns $100,000 an episode. This month he stars in the X-Files
movie, the top-secret, $60 million, special-effects-packed feature that addresses five
years of X-Files mysteries. Michael Shnayerson talk to the man who is and isn't
Mulder.
He's with Scully at the end of a dark, dusty hallway. No hint of expression crosses
his face as she speaks. "You want to hear the latest?" she says, deadpan herself.
"Detective Pennock ran the gloves for blood-typing and found two different
samples. One type matching Marty Glenn's."
A flicker of curiosity appears, like a breeze on a glassy sea. Then his lips move,
though just barely, as he replies in a voice so soft I strain to hear from 10 feet away.
"She was examined. There were no cuts or wounds on her." Never flustered, rarely
shocked, he has the quiet cool of passions contained: a haiku in human form. To give
so little away, yet be so intriguing-is it acting? Or is he just lucky enough to play a
character as laconic as himself?
"Cut and print!"
Released again, the world's most paranoid F.B.I. agent, Fox Mulder, alias David
Duchovny, gives me a "Let's get out of here" look and heads down the stairs of what
is, in fact, an old bank building in downtown Vancouver, Canada. Outside, he slips
into a chauffeured four-by-four, past a claque of autograph hunters, to ride the two
blocks back to the alley where his double-wide trailer is parked.
In the back of the car, Duchovny looks boyishly fresh, his face unlined at 37 and
unembellished by stage makeup, his full head of dark hair unsullied, as far as I can
see, by a single strand of gray. He's very handsome, though in a winsomely flawed
way, his nose a bit too large, his grin slightly geeky: not by chance does Mulder
almost never smile. The key to his enormous television appeal, and to Mulder's, is
the mind behind the looks. Any other doctoral candidate in English literature at Yale
who dropped out to be an actor would probably come across as smart. Duchovny
is quick.
Which is why, after nearly 125 episodes of The X-Files, he's also frustrated. "Doing
the same part for five years, no matter how great the part is, gets kind of boring," he
admits. Over the course of a 12-hour workday, the man who is Mulder will shuttle
from set to trailer and back no fewer than 20 times--sometimes to do a single line in
a scene. At the end of two such days, I will feel something I never expected to feel
for a television star who earns a reported $110,000 an episode: sympathy. This is a
really dreary way to spend the week.
Also, since this is Vancouver, it's raining. But Duchovny knows he can't complain
about the weather any more than he can about his schedule. As we enter his trailer,
he points to a color snapshot of a local strip club. The marquee in the photo reads:
DAVID DUCHOVNY IS BARRED. GO HOME. It's a reminder of the citywide
indignation he stirred last fall with an idle gibe on a late-night talk show about
Vancouver's "400 inches of rain a day."
Stripping off his suit jacket and button-down oxford to reveal a white T-shirt,
Duchovny slides into the 60s-style lounge chair where he waits out the breaks,
reading poetry (John Berryman, John Ashbery, and Wallace Stevens are favorites),
novels (he's currently enmeshed in Don DeLillo's Underworld), perhaps some film
criticism (a Pauline Kael omnibus is on the kitchen counter), or just contemplating his
lava lamp (even cerebral stars space out). In repose, he's as low-key as Mulder. But
as droll as comic Steven Wright.
"I used to think that if you ran through the rain you wouldn't get as wet," he says with
a sigh. "But it's not true. It's a matter of how much ground you cover. In fact, if you
go faster, you're actually running into raindrops that you would miss."
"So you actually get wetter?"
Duchovny gives me a look. "Well, no, you don't get wetter, because you're out less
time, but you're hitting more rain. You get the same amount overall. You'd be the
same amount of wet either way. I was depressed when I heard that. I thought
running through the rain really worked." A beat. "Science really spoils your fun."
Science keeps trying to spoil Mulder's fun, too, but after five seasons it hasn't begun
to explain away the visiting aliens, vampires, mutants, and other creatures that he and
Scully, played by Gillian Anderson, encounter as fellow agents checking out the
F.B.I.'s "X Files"--those dealing with paranormal activity. This month, science takes
more of a battering as the first big-screen version of The X-Files opens to generate
new fears of extraterrestrial invasion and government coverup. Star Trek seems the
obvious precedent, especially given the show's cultlike following of "X-philes," who
trade arcane details, trinkets, and heartthrob gossip at X Files conventions. But
Duchovny sets me straight. "There is no precedent," he says. Star Trek was actually
canceled after three years, became a cult hit in reruns, then spawned the movies.
The X-Files, by comparison, reaches 20 million viewers-and that's just on prime
time Sunday night. As of last fall, its reruns also appear seven days a week, and
have consistently ranked first among hour-long shows in syndication, thereby
reaching another 10 million viewers. So the show may be powered into orbit as a
big-screen serial, each installment appearing every three or four years like a brilliant,
unexplained sighting in the night sky. Or so Duchovny hopes. Then the show might
end after one more season--even though the contract he signed back when he was
relatively unknown binds him for two more seasons, the mention of which makes him
wince. He would be free at last to have a movie career, yet also keep the franchise
alive. If reaction to the X Files trailer is any indication, the movie may indeed be big:
at the first mention of Mulder, audiences at two theaters I happened to be at erupted
in spontaneous applause.
Duchovny's more immediate goal has just been realized. As of next season the
show will move to Los Angeles. Its creator, Chris Carter, made the decision
reluctantly, since the Canadian exchange rate and lower costs mean higher profits.
But both Duchovny and Anderson keenly wanted to bring the Vancouver years to
an end. "I could've kept the show there," Carter says. "There was never an
ultimatum." The movie just seemed to cap an era, and as Carter concedes, "You
want to keep the actors in a good environment." For Duchovny, L.A. was home
well before May 1997, when he married Téa Leoni, the lithe, fine-boned actress
who starred in 1996's Flirting with Disaster and the recently released Deep
Impact. Now the pull is that much greater.
From the kitchen counter, the two-way radio squawks. "David, you're on in five.
Tom's asking what's this new line and how do you want to say it?"
"I want to say, 'Even if the gloves fit, you must still acquit."'
A pause of obvious incomprehension from the other end. "O.K.... "
Duchovny rolls his eyes. "Canadians ... They don't get O.J. around here."
As a star who likes to write, Duchovny weighs in with more than line changes and
the occasional plot. Early on, he decided that a guy on a lonely quest to learn if his
sister had been abducted by aliens had better be cool, buttoned-down, well
spoken-sane in every respect but the one in which he wasn't. Hence the laconic
style. "A lot of the style has come from David," acknowledges Anderson, who plays
Scully with similar understatement, "because that's the way he works. But also,
we're dealing with so much all the time--aliens and maniacs and psychotics-that if we
responded big every time, it would be incredibly melodramatic and boring."
As the show took off, Duchovny helped imbue what might have been a mere sci-fi
drama with what he refers to, a bit self consciously, as its mythology--a creative
contribution that reportedly earns him a higher-than-scale piece of syndication
revenues, which seem likely to reach $1.5 million per episode. A seminal influence
was--and still is Joseph Campbell. "It isn't Campbell specifically, but Campbell is a
structural anthropologist--he's like Levi-Strauss, boiling down all stories into
archetypes," Duchovny says. "I wanted Mulder to go through an archetypal journey:
starting from a position of innocence, which is one of trusting his father--the elders,
in mythology--being a good boy and a good son, to being an outcast, feeling like his
father is Darth Vader, then going to almost as innocent a phase, in which he believes
that everyone's a liar, and everyone's out to get him, then maturing to a kind of
enlightened cynicism."
As the movie opens, Mulder is in the last of those stages. He's come to believe that
all the U.F.O.'s and extraterrestrials he's seen may be nothing more than hoaxes
planned by government agents who are using him as a guinea pig. Whereas Scully,
the skeptic, thinks they may be real. Since the movie has a budget of $60 million,
much of it for special effects, it's a sure bet that Mulder will rediscover his faith in the
great beyond. "Part of that is, you know, when you pay your eight dollars you want
to see something," Duchovny says. "It's, like,'Show me some aliens, man.' "
The season's last episode sets up the plot, ending with a cliff-hanger as tantalizing as
that of any 1920s radio serial. "There seems to be some sort of colonization plan by
an alien force that certain shadow members of governments across the world have
been in cahoots with," Duchovny allows. The human collaborators will get to
oversee their soon-to-be-enslaved fellows; like the French Vichy government, they
justify their duplicity as pragmatism. Meanwhile, there's dissension among the aliens:
some are against colonizing Earth. "Like anti-imperialists in America," Duchovny
says. "So they've come to Earth to warn certain people that the aliens aren't actually
going to hold to their bargain, even with the collaborators. They're going to
exterminate or enslave everybody." Mulder has to figure out what's true, and whom
to trust--those archetypal issues. And if the aliens do intend to conquer by means of
a virus that turns people into lizards, where's the anti-dote? ("I'm on a roll,"
Duchovny says of his plot summation. "Usually I don't understand it.") Before the
film is over, many of the mysteries Mulder has pondered on The X-Files will be
reconsidered, starting with his sister's disappearance. "It's the culmination, really, of
five years of questions."
One question it won't answer is what Duchovny's range is as a movie star. Before
The X Files, he landed leads in quirky, low-budget films (Kalifornia, The Rapture,
Julia Has Two Lovers), modest roles in two of Henry Jaglom's chatty,
home-movie-style films (Venice/Venice, New Year's Day), and one line in a smash
hit (in Working Girl, he says "Surprise!" to Melanie Griffith at a birthday party). In
all of them, the physical appeal is palpable (aided by ample exposure of his
yoga-hard body), as is the intelligence behind those dark, brooding eyes. But his
presence is pretty much the same from role to role. Not wooden, not stiff, just
restrained.
If The X Files were an L.A.-based ensemble TV show that left its stars enough time
to do films, Duchovny might have managed to break the stereotype by now. But
with those 12-hour days in Vancouver, and a window of only six weeks between
seasons, he's been stymied. Last year he let a half-baked script and the right
schedule lure him into a disappointment called Playing God, about a doctor who
lost his license for malpractice and ends up on call for the Mob. Though the movie
had other problems, Duchovny did little to alleviate them: most critics saw him as
Mulder in a medical smock. Now the X Files movie will give him his greatest
Hollywood exposure by far--while typecasting him all the more. "At first we worried
a lot about how to make the film better than the show," Anderson says of their roles.
"Soon enough, we found that wasn't appropriate: it was about doing what we had
been doing."
Why some TV actors can make the leap to film and others fail is one of those eternal
riddles Duchovny professes not to ponder. "We can talk ourselves blue in the face
about the differences between TV actors and movie actors," he says, "and it's all
bullshit, because I'm an actor on TV or film, depending on the form. It's all voodoo."
Still, there must be some reason Woody Harrelson and Bruce Willis have made it
and David Caruso and Luke Ferry haven't so far. Something about emotional range?
"It's the material," Duchovny says a bit testily. "[Caruso's] a good actor. He
deserves success as much as anybody."
A mobile phone rings: Duchovny's wife is on the line. The call is local. With Deep
Impact wrapped, Leoni is up in Vancouver for the week. "This reporter wants to
know how I become a movie actor," he says. "Can you tell me?" He listens,
interested. "Uh-huh... uh-huh... Right. O.K." Then he looks over at me. "She says
you take everything you do on television and then you make it slower and longer,"
he says.
So much for that.
It was a year ago January that Duchovny and Leoni began dating. They'd met once
before, when both were starting out, at a pre-interview for The Tonight Show, in
which, as relative unknowns, they had to prove they were charming enough to be
on-air guests. Leoni dominated the interview, while Duchovny grew silent and sullen.
She got on the show; he didn't. One fall day in 1996, Leoni was in the office of her
agent, Risa Shapiro of International Creative Management, when Duchovny called.
Shapiro is his agent, too.
"I said to him that I was talking to Téa Leoni," Shapiro recalls, "and then they both
spoke at the same time.'Oh, he must be so annoyed with me because I talked so
much at the pre-interview,' Téa said. And David said,'Is she still talking so much?' I
was like the translator. I got off the phone and said, 'This is a match made in
heaven.' Not only were they both funny and talented, they were both from New
York." Both, that is, from prestigious New York private schools, he from Collegiate,
she from its sister school, Brearley--though not, as it happened, from the same social
worlds.
Leoni was wary of dating Duchovny, who'd managed to gain a reputation in L.A. as
a ladies' man. But Shapiro nudged matters along. She urged Duchovny to go to a
party Leoni would be attending in L.A. He arrived just as Leoni was leaving. "That
went well," he said to Shapiro. A few weeks later, the two had dinner in L.A. Things
went better. Three months after that, Duchovny asked her to marry him. "I still ask
her," he says. "It's our little thing."
"Are there any movies you wish you had been in?"
The idea of marriage hadn't exactly spooked Duchovny. "I just couldn't function
successfully in a relationship," he says. "If I'd been born in the Middle Ages I would
have died single. People died at 36!" Certainly his own parents' bitter divorce, when
he was 11, had left its scars. Leoni has parents who have been married happily for
more than 40 years. So, as Duchovny observes, 'she's made happy by simple things
in life, like family, things that I was never made happy by. She's teaching me that."
He pauses. "Well, by example. It's not like we study every night."
The newlyweds chose to forgo a honeymoon; just living together was an exotic
enough prospect. Duchovny moved into Leoni's rental house in L.A. with his dog,
Blue, a "Border/Jersey-collie mix" who got along well enough with George, Leoni's
larger mutt. The problem was a dog somewhere in the neighborhood who barked
incessantly through the night every night. "We got in the car at night and tried to
locate it aurally, like by sonar," Duchovny relates. With Leoni at the wheel of her
BMW sedan (Duchovny, car-wary, didn't learn to drive until he was 27), they found
the dog, and then confronted the owner. "Oh, you'll get used to it," the owner said.
"I did."
Instead, they bought their own house north of Malibu-high enough in the hills not to
have been swept away by Fl Niño. Leoni set about filling it with antiques, many from
her brother, Tom, a dealer. Duchovny isn't sure quite what style they are. "We like
green, comfortable things," he says, trying to be helpful. "Green and yellow." By then
The X Files had resumed; the first time he flew down from Vancouver to visit Leoni
in their new home, he felt like a stranger in it. "I didn't want to touch anything," he
says. "But then you spill that first cup of coffee, and you're in ... " Soon, the
schedule, which allowed him to get home only every other week--"there were a
couple of stretches of, like, 17 days; those were bad"--began to seem intolerable. "I
had to become fairly active in getting the show moved," Duchovny says. In the end,
diplomacy worked. But if it hadn't? "If I'd had to force it, I would have found a way
to make it happen."
"It's raining--yeah!"
Leoni enters the trailer with a large white plastic bag in either hand. Inside is food
enough for six, courtesy of the local spa where she has just undergone hours of
rejuvenation that culminated in being slathered, naked, with warm seaweed. "It was
great," she reports. For the food, she gets no takers: lunch was already served on
the set. Undeterred, she stands at the kitchen counter and digs into half a dozen
plastic containers full of whole-grain salads and other spa food. This is a woman
who loves to eat and clearly has the metabolism to do it without adding an ounce to
her lean, five-foot-eight-inch frame.
"Téa loves the rain," Duchovny says. And Duchovny, it's very clear, loves his wife.
"What's that moment you love in the W C. Fields movie?"
"Oh yeah," she says. "I may have dreamt it. But he was in the hospital and he was
going to die; it was very sad. His girlfriend or wife or whatever says goodbye and
leaves--and oh, the thing is, we know he loves the rain. So he's sort of sleeping, and
we're crying because we know he's going to die. And then he hears the sound of
rain on the hospital roof. The camera pulls back and we're outside, and here's this
woman--with a hose."
"Michael just said we have a 19th-century relationship because we got married
without knowing each other," Duchovny teases.
Leoni pauses, her fork in midair. "David and I both tend to be sort of... heady
individuals," she says, serious for a moment. "To have put that aside and gone with
an instinct, and had it turn out to be so brilliantly right--I now applaud it."
Eighteen months ago, divorced after a marriage of three years from a director of TV
commercials, Leoni couldn't have imagined she'd marry again. "I didn't have a good
reason the first time, and look how that ended," she says. "And I hadn't come up
with one since. I even had in my head, I think, the ideal man, and I still wasn't sure
he could get me to the altar. But I didn't meet my ideal man--I met better. At that
point it was so specific. Would I ever get married again? No. Would I marry David?
Yes. And the speed with which we got married ... I don't know ... "
"I was always a little embarrassed when people would bring it up," Duchovny says,
smiling. "I'm glad we've been married almost a year now, because that feels ...
substantial."
"I kind of like the method of 'Hide and watch, we'll see you in 25,"' says Leoni.
"We like that method about everything," says Duchovny.
Hide and watch?
"Don't defend yourself, just hide and watch," Duchovny explains.
"It's a Texas thing," says Leoni. "My mother used to say that all the time. She'd say
that particularly when you were in trouble: 'Hide and watch.' Meaning, just get out of
sight and don't mess ... "
After a short stretch of banter that manages to cover rats, regurgitation, excretion,
and sutured penises--these are newlyweds who like grossing each other out--Leoni
polishes off the second of two chocolate crullers and gathers up the empty
containers. "All right, I'm going home to nap," she declares. "And then I'm probably
going to drink! It'll just be a perfect day!" She nods over to Duchovny. "What time
are you going to be home?"
Duchovny sighs. "Maybe eight? Tell him how hard I work. Because it doesn't sound
good when I say it."
"No, it doesn't," Leoni agrees. "But it's true. I don't work one-fifth as hard as he
does."
Much of the last year Leoni spent filming episodes of her own TV show, a sitcom
called The Naked Truth, which unfortunately was just canceled. Her schedule was
lighter than Duchovny's, especially when a day's script had lousy jokes and had to
be scrapped. The next day, though, she might have had to memorize 45 new pages.
"She's pretty photogenic," Duchovny says, then hears his mistake and cracks up.
"No, I mean, she's got a photographic memory."
"Go with the first one," Leoni says.
"She has a photogenic mammary," Duchovny amends.
"Are you going to want dinner?" Leoni asks.
"I'll just have some of that soup you made when I come home."
Leoni pauses. "Did that give you gas?"
"Not more than usual."
"I made this soup," Leoni explains, "and I didn't soak the beans overnight ... "
"Actually, it did."
"But I didn't tell him that."
"It did, it did give me gas."
Fond embrace, kiss; Leoni Exits trailer door, right.
For both Duchovny and Leoni, one of the worst parts of long-distance marriage is
the flying. It makes both of them nervous. Once a month, as written into his contract,
Duchovny gets a private plane for the weekend round-trip to L.A. But that's almost
worse.
"I feel safer on the big ones," he says. "Because I have this feeling that it's a
cooperative act to keep the plane aloft. Everybody has to concentrate. And if it's
just me back there, it's exhausting. Like, if I don't keep vigilant, it will all go to hell."
In that respect, life was easier before The X Files. "Whenever I used to get on a
plane in L.A. that had a celebrity on it, I was happy," Duchovny recalls. "Because I
thought that was the charm. Then I realized I had become the charm--for other
people. I wasn't as happy about that. Because if the plane started to go down,
they'd all give me looks of 'You're not even enough!"'
Jokes tell: that fear, of not being enough, is what drove a boy who hadn't yet grown
into his handsome looks to be an academic overachiever. It's what drives him as an
actor now, too.
Duchovny's father, Amram, was a publicist who wrote gimmicky books for money
(The Wisdom of Spiro T Agnew and an Off Broadway play (The Trial of Lee
Harvey Oswald). The gambits apparently failed: David and his siblings--a brother,
Danny, and a sister, Lori--grew up in what was then a pretty scruffy Manhattan
neighborhood, on 11th Street off Second Avenue. When David entered Collegiate
in ninth grade on a scholarship, he was christened "Hayseed" because he lived so far
from his wealthy uptown classmates (including John E Kennedy Jr.). When he went
to his first party, he was astounded to see the elevator door open directly into a
classmate's opulent apartment; he'd never seen anything like it. Leoni, six years
younger, wouldn't have been at the party, but this was her world. She lived on Park
Avenue; her father was a partner in a New York law firm.
By then, Duchovny's parents had divorced, and times were tougher. To earn the
$600 needed every year to supplement his scholarship, Duchovny worked as a
lifeguard on Fire Island, where his grandparents had a summer house in Ocean
Beach. During the school year, he studied hard. "I always felt, If I go out tonight,
I'11 get a C in math," he recalls. "I was nervous. I thought I was going to end up in
the gutter if I didn't get straight A's." Much of this was the influence of his mother, a
teacher and administrator at Manhattan's Grace Church School. She had, as
Duchovny puts it, "that Depression-era, lower-middle-class fantasy of the educated
life, the life of a professor." Even the basketball he excelled at was a means to the
end of getting into an Ivy League college.
Surely, I ask, he did one reckless thing in his Collegiate years. Duchovny pauses.
"My best friend, Jason Beghe, and I, used to think that we had a chance with the
lower-school teachers because they were always relatively young," he says. "So we
used to sit in the lounge area of the cafeteria, and Jason used to take his down
jacket off, the kind you could crush into a pretty small shape, and he used to stuff it
down his pants, so it looked like his penis went down to his ankle, and was the size
of an elephant cock. We'd sit there as they went by. And his expression when he
was doing it was: 'It's not a coat."'
As his class valedictorian, with board scores of 690 in both math and English,
Duchovny got into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown. Harvard was out be cause
his father had moved to Boston, and the proximity would have upset his mother.
(Duchovny's father has since moved to Paris.) Yale he nixed because New Haven
looked even worse than East 11th Street. Brown at the time was seen as less good
than the other three. That left Princeton, where Duchovny studied English and
roomed with a student who, to Duchovny's amazement, wanted to act. "I used to
tease him relentlessly.'You got into Princeton to study acting? What are you, an
idiot?'"
Working hard--a nervous boy still--Duchovny graduated summa cum laude and
went on to earn a graduate degree in contemporary literature at Yale. He was a
second-year teaching assistant, starting classes for his doctorate, when Jason Beghe
made a fateful suggestion. Duchovny needed to earn $2,000 during the summer of
1987 for school-year expenses, and was bartending. Beghe, an actor who has since
appeared in Thelma & Louise and G.I. Jane, pointed out that if Duchovny landed a
single commercial he could make that much money in a day. "I'd known him already
12 years," Beghe says. "Everything he set out to do, he did. And if I loved him, why
wouldn't everyone else?"
With an agent, and some acting lessons, Duchovny landed a Löwenbräu
commercial. Before long, to his mother's lasting regret, he let Yale, and academia,
go.
The radio squawks: "David in five." A change of clothes is needed, so Duchovny
strips down in his trailer bedroom. He favors dusty-rose Jockey shorts--a factoid
for the fans who swooned at the sight of him, in one episode, in a tight red Speedo
bathing suit, and crowded various David Duchovny Web sites with feverish
speculation about what might lie underneath. It's strange to be a sex symbol; and
Duchovny's wariness of it seems genuine. In the recent Milan Kundera novel
Slowness, Duchovny recalls, "there was a question one of the characters posed:
'Who would want to drag the pots and pans of celebrity behind him?' I feel that way
when I walk down the street, like I've got these pots and pans."
The Internet groups are easier to avoid than paparazzi or autograph hunters:
Duchovny is Internet-oblivious. Once, though, he admits, "I was at my manager's
office, and I said, 'Let's go visit some site about me.' I forget which one it was, some
chat room. I logged on and said,'Hi, it's David Duchovny. Anybody want to talk?'
First of all they just ignored me, because I guess they get people like that all the time.
So I typed, 'It really is David--please ask me a question so I can prove it's me.'
They were, like, 'Get out of here, asshole.' And I realized I could never convince
them it was me. If I came up with something they already knew, they'd think I was
just another fan who'd learned it like they had. And if I came up with something they
didn't know, they would think it was a lie anyway."
In a sense, the same Catch-22 dogs Duchovny as an actor. His work as Mulder is,
to his mind, proof of his talent. But so well has he done Mulder that until he plays an
utterly different character few will believe he isn't Mulder, even when he's David
Duchovny. And with the kind of acting he does, he admits, the gradations are always
going to be subtle.
"If I have a morality about performance, it's kind of a Protestant one," Duchovny
says. "It's not celebratory; sometimes I wish it was more that way. When I look at
my wife I see a physical expression of acting that is fun. Or when I look at an actor
like Al Pacino or Nicolas Cage or John Travolta. And given the chance, I'd like to
try that, because I recognize the joy in the performance. But my natural inclination is
to keep it real, and to try at all costs to hide, which is what people do [in real life]."
Some people get it. A lot still don't. "When I got the success of this show, I thought
that people would start to appreciate what I was doing," says Duchovny. "Instead of
being called 'flat,' I'd be called 'subtle.' Instead of being called 'low-energy,' I'd be
called 'real.' But every time you try to move out, you're going to be attacked again.
That's where my battle is: in either listening to them and deciding, 'Gee, they're right,
there's something I have to do here that I'm not doing,' or sticking to my guns."
"David, we need you," the radio squawks.
Duchovny slips on his shirt and jacket, opens an umbrella at the door, and heads out
to his waiting car. It's been a long day, and where he'd like to be is with Leoni,
eating a quiet dinner. But the alien forces are gathering even now, out there beyond
the rain-gray Vancouver skies. And who, if not Mulder, is to stop them?
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