From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 1999

Duchovny appearance stars Good David, Bad David
by Joanne Weintraub

Pasadena, Calif. - You think Fox Mulder is moody? Try spending an hour with David Duchovny.

The star of "The X-Files," whose brooding, beleaguered Agent Mulder makes Hamlet look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, spent an hour with a roomful of critics Thursday and apparently couldn't decide between getting all squirrelly and charming the pants off us. So he did both.

When a foreign journalist dared to ask if Duchovny believed in the supernatural, the actor, who has heard the question before, moaned: "Oh my God! She's been asleep for five years. Please, security, grab that woman."

To the critic who wanted to know whether Duchovny wished his character and Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) would put an end to their long-, long-, long-simmering romantic-sexual tension: "You know, I couldn't tell you how uninterested in that I am, really. I could not make it clear enough. I don't mean to be rude when I say that it's just not interesting to me in any way, shape or form."

That was Mean David. When Nice David was in the house, Duchovny chatted amiably about the baby born in April to his wife, actress Téa Leoni; the fun he had in Chicago with actress-writer-director Bonnie Hunt, who put him in her not-yet-released movie, "Return to Me"; and his "terrifying" experience directing an "X-Files" episode, "The Unnatural," last season.

"I woke up one morning and I just said, 'I can't do it. I don't know what I'm doing. I quit,' " said Duchovny, who also wrote the episode.

"You're trying to have every shot . . . in your head at one time, so your head feels about the size of a beach ball as you're walking around (on the set). I was walking around and bumping into walls. (But) then, when I got out there, it was great."

Inevitably, Duchovny - whose contract is up in spring 2000, when the show's seventh season concludes - was asked whether he might be persuaded to stick around for an eighth year as Mulder.

"I wouldn't say never about anything," he replied, "but, as of right now . . . I'm living my life as if this would be the last year, and I'd be fine if it were the last year."

A moment later, when someone asked him what had kept the show on the air for six seasons, with a seventh starting Oct. 31, he seemed to be composing an "X-File" eulogy aloud.

"It was just a (expletive) good show, you know?" he said. "And it was fun and it was exciting and it was well written and it was well acted and it was well directed.

"And sure, it had some kooky elements that might have been, you know, end-of-the-century oriented. But in the end, it was cool and it was good and it was different."

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 24, 1999.

Weintraub, Joanne. July 24, 1999. "Duchovny appearance stars Good David, Bad David." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.