From Mr. Showbiz, October 1997

X-Man
By Scott Roesch

Playing God didn't make David Duchovny a big-screen
star, but it appears that playing Mulder will.

If only the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade could see this. The subject of worldwide Web worship, the thinking woman’s sex symbol, the actor who, incidentally, plays FBI agent Fox Mulder in a creepy TV hit called The X-Files, has shed his dressy threads in favor of jeans and a pale blue terrycloth polo shirt, and curled into fetal position on the bed in his Hollywood hotel room. David is tired. He’s been working nonstop for two and a half years now, aside from a paparazzi-infested honeymoon with Téa Leoni this summer, and to top it off, he’s spent the entire day doing interviews to promote Playing God, his first film as a media superstar.

So you’ll have to excuse him if he appears even more laid-back than usual. But fatigue doesn’t seem to affect the David Duchovny experience much. If anything, the languid, deadpan demeanor that’s made him a fixture in the pop consciousness is in even drier focus today. David is smart, just like they say. Yes, David is funny. And to his credit, David remains attentive and wide awake throughout a conversation with Mr. Showbiz that touches on his foray into leading-manhood, his abbreviated college basketball career, mind-altering drugs, that red Speedo, his "Muldering ambition," life with Téa, and much, much more.

Whether or not it ultimately helps his career, Playing God has already done wonders for Duchovny’s psyche: his role as a disgraced, drug-addled surgeon who falls in with a nasty underworld crowd allowed the actor to whup some FBI ass for a change. You see, however large the cult following he’s earned over the past four television seasons, he’s grown a bit weary of playing the straight man to a steady stream of spooks, aliens, and conspiracies. But ironically, with Playing God performing poorly at the box office this fall, it could be the upcoming X-Files movie that gives him the big-screen clout he needs to make a clean break from the show.

David, you’ve been doing a few interviews today?

Uh huh.

It shows.

I . . . have . . . never . . . talked so much in my whole life.

Welcome to movie-stardom.

Oh . . . God.

The image I’m going to take away from Playing God is that of you manhandling an FBI agent.

Yeah, that was kind of funny. [Laughs.] That was a happy situation--it was good to be on the other side of the badge.

Did you have an urge to insert a line, something like "I hate the FBI," at that point in the film?

You know, I hate that stuff. I hate it when people refer to their own celebrity, or shows where they became famous. I hate it on The X-Files. I mean, I hate it when we refer to ourselves at all. They’re always trying to do it, and I’m always trying to catch it in the script and say, "This is lame. Please don’t do this."

When was the last time you remember doing that on a show?

I don’t know; I try to block it out of my memory. I’m sure the fans know. That’s the kind of stuff they love to know.

I’m sure you could find it on the Web somewhere. I've noticed that you seem fairly disinterested in all things online, even though you’ve got a huge following there.

Yeah. My stance toward it is that there are people interested in the show and what I do, but I think that once you start seeking out what they think about you and things like that, it’s trouble. There may be a hundred nice things and one nasty thing and it’s the nasty thing you’re going to remember. And I try not to focus on what people are thinking about me anyway. That’s not the way to live, you know? It’s hard enough as an actor to try and disregard reviews and people’s opinions of you. So if there’s a forum out there where people may be talking about me, I’m aware that it’s going on, but I don’t have to actively seek it out. I’m going to get smacked enough with it at some point.

But not everybody on the Net is out to smack you. The "David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade" site, for example--

Yeah, I like them. I’ve corresponded with them a bit. They’re nice.

After four and a half years of doing The X-Files and developing Fox Mulder, how is the challenge different to create a character like Playing God’s Eugene within the span of a ninety-minute movie?

Well, actually it felt like a vacation. It didn’t even feel like work. You know, you become an actor because you like creating new characters like that, so it was like, "Oh God, this is why I became an actor! Now I remember, this is fun!" Because after you’ve been playing the same character for three or four years, it’s not so much fun anymore. It’s difficult to bring new challenges to playing the same character. It was really rejuvenating in a way, and it really made the year on X-Files better afterward, because even though I hadn’t taken a vacation, it was like I’d rediscovered something. Like, "God, this is all right! It’s not just a job."

You’ve been working now for about a year straight, is that right?

Two years. More than two years. I’d say two and a half years straight.

Part of the problem with your workload recently was the X-Files movie. I hear they’re going to be running the trailers for the Star Wars prequel before that movie next summer. You’ve got the whole weight of the Empire riding on your film.

Is that right? [Laughs.] "Use the Force, Fox."

That’s going to be quite an event. Can you drop any hints about the film?

Well, I can just say that it’s kind of a nice balancing act between the television show and a film in that if you’re a fan of the TV show, you won’t be disappointed in that it goes further and it tells more and it shows more. And if you’ve never seen the TV show you won’t be lost because it gracefully, I think, gives enough backstory and explains enough about the characters in order for it to stand alone. It’s kind of a good straddling act. Chris [Carter, the show’s creator] did a nice job with that.

And the movie is going to wrap up the season-ending cliffhangers we’ll be seeing on the X-Files this spring?

Exactly. It’s going to be like five years of preview: Here is a 125-hour-long preview. [Laughs.] It’s all been a prelude; we didn’t know! We just thought we were doing a TV show. We didn’t know we were doing a trailer!

That’s almost criminal in a way. You know, you’ve addicted these helpless viewers--

Criminal? Of course it is. It’s like the pusher that says, "First one’s on me. Here’s the heroin. This one’s free--but now this one costs eight dollars." [Laughs.]

Speaking of drugs, what was that substance you were taking in Playing God?

It was an opiate, it was a downer. Actually, what I took when I screwed up [in the movie] was liquid cocaine. That was to get back up, because I was really tired.

And when you were in the apartment, early in the film?

That was . . . I forget. Oh, that was fentanyl citrate, it’s called. It’s a pharmaceutical drug; you wouldn’t know it unless you were a doctor.

You’re very convincing as an addict in those scenes when you’re really flying. Have you done that kind of thing before?

That kind of drug? Well, I mean, everybody’s had some experiences with mind-altering drugs--that’s what college is for--so you just take it to the degree you need to take it. You research and talk to a doctor and say, "You know, if I took this much fentanyl citrate, what would happen?" And he says, "Well, you’d lose this kind of motor coordination," and then it’s just paint by numbers at that point. But the more difficult thing is like how do you create a character that needs to take drugs?

The basketball in Playing God was interesting to me, considering your background as a hoops fan and player. Eugene seems to shoot hoops when he really needs to think, to relax.

I’m a little pissed-off about it actually, because I was told that it was this long shot, so I had to hit three in a row, and I think I only hit two. And they weren’t easy shots--they were fifteen, eighteen feet out.

This is going to drive you nuts, but that wasn’t a stand-in shooting those, was it?

Oh, no, no.

What about your own basketball career? I know you played at Princeton--

I played one year there. Didn’t go well for me, even though [Princeton coach] Pete Carrill just got inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He didn’t like me. I wanted to play for him, but he didn’t want me to play for him. It didn’t work out. I just didn’t get to play. But I was on the team.

Well, Carrill’s teams didn’t run enough anyway.

Hey, I’m not a great runner! [Laughs.] That would’ve been okay.

You’ve got one swimming scene in Playing God, but surprisingly, you’re not wearing the swimsuit you made famous on TV. Were you ever tempted to break out the red Speedo for that shot?

You know what’s funny about the swimsuit . . . issue, if I can call it that? That’s pretty clever. The bathing suit I wear in the movie is actually the bathing suit I turned down for the scene in the show. And I used my own bathing suit, the red Speedo, in the show, but I kept the bathing suit that I turned down because I thought it was cool--it was kinda square. And I started to work out with that one, swim with that one. And by the time the movie came around, it was worked in enough to wear.

You don’t want to wear a shiny new one, of course. It has to look like it’s been used, right?

Yeah, that’d look bad. It’s gotta have some rot hanging off of it. It’s got to have those little pills hanging there.

Yech. That isn’t going to be a good image for the people who do those Duchovny/red Speedo poems on the Web.

Really? There are poems? Is that because I did a poem about it in Rolling Stone? Well, I wouldn’t mind seeing that. That sounds okay.

You’ve got a good bit left on your X-Files contract, and yet you were presumed dead at the end of the last season. That’s a lot of episodes to do dead.

No kiddin’. It’s good work if you can be dead. Gives you plenty of time to do movies. [Laughs.]

If you could create a project for yourself at some point, either on TV or film, what might it be? What’s your burning ambition in this business?

Hmmm.

Or maybe your smoldering ambition . . .

My "Muldering" ambition? Uh, you know, I don’t know it right now. I haven’t written it, so I couldn’t tell you what it is, nor have I seen it written. If I knew what it was, I would be writing it, or having somebody I thought was a good writer write it.

Do you do some writing of your own? I know you contribute to the X-scripts from time to time.

I try. I try. I mean, I will try. I haven’t really yet, in a real way. There are stories I want to tell; I just don’t know what they are yet.

George Clooney recently said--this is serious business--that he does not want to be considered for People’s Fifty Sexiest People award. How do you feel about that? It’s got to help your chances a bit.

I think I coulda kicked his ass anyway. I think he’s just pulling out before I beat him. [Laughs.]

Clooney’s been on an anti-media crusade of late, particularly with the paparazzi since the Diana accident. You’ve had your own share of run-ins with the press, yet I’ve noticed that you’ve been rather quiet on the issue. Have you made a conscious choice to stay silent when there’s so much hubbub right now?

I think the issues are a lot less clear than the way people portray them. I think that aspects of the media are hurtful, personally, but I don’t think that’s actionable, legally. I think there are aspects of the media that are hurtful, physically, and I think that is actionable. I think we have to deal with issues of the rights of public people in public. Whether or not I have a right to privacy when I walk down the street from cameras, and why I don’t have that right.

I think that it’s not just an issue of pointing fingers. Nothing gets achieved when people start blaming each other. It’s not the fault of the paparrazzi, because the paparrazzi are paid by magazine publishers, and magazine publishers are paid by the people, and these people are the same people who watch these shows and make us stars, so you can’t point the finger at them. It’s possible that there are hideous people among them. But I think the real issue is this: in this country, public people are held up to such moral and personal scrutiny by the media that you will find that there are talented, expressive people who will not go into the arts and politics in the future because they don’t want to be scrutinized, and that’s a great loss for everybody. Because what kind of a man can withstand that scrutiny? What kind of a man would want to put his family through that scrutiny? So I think we have to realize that as a nation and a people and a human race, we’re all going to lose because of this. It’s not just some whiny celebrities that are losing. I could sit here and whine all day, because it’s been a huge pain in the ass to be scrutinized like that.

Has it been any better in the last month or two, when media-ambush tactics have really come into question?

No, no, no. It won’t change. It won’t change until you have laws. It won’t change until the lines are drawn. Nobody is going to change because a celebrity tells them that his or her life is miserable.

That’s the goal, right?

Yeah. [Laughs.] They will change if you tell them that their country is going to fail, eventually, because the most talented and smartest people are going to want no part in being public.

Have you ever thought about running for office?

[Laughs.]

A funny thought, but really, what about it?

No, no, but you know. I don’t know. Public service . . . public entertainment . . . short segue . . . could happen.

It’s happened before.

Clint. Reagan. Selleck. Bono.

And maybe Duchovny. Shifting gears a bit, one article about your wife that appeared at the time The Naked Truth debuted called her "The New Lucy." Well, you’ve shared some domestic time together now, and I want to know, is that description accurate?

Well, when I left this morning, she was in the bathtub smooshing grapes with her feet. [Laughs.] That famous episode, so yes, she’s just like Lucy. Actually, though, I never liked Lucy. I think Téa’s great at what she does. I think Téa’s phenomenal; I love watching her.

You don’t see yourself in the Desi Arnaz role in that scenario then, I imagine?

Hmmm, I can play bongos, but no. I think I’m more like Fred Mertz--Ethel and Fred, that lived next door.

You and Téa are both in the early stages of building movie careers on top of television success. It’s a tough proposition though. TV stars are seen by tens of millions of people every week, but often when they do a movie, nobody comes. Why do you think that transition is so tough?

Well, people go to see a good movie. That’s it. Period. There’s maybe two or three guys and two or three girls who can get you to see a bad movie. And if they do that more than once or twice, then they’re not that guy anymore. You know what I mean? So I don’t think it’s a matter of people all of a sudden not wanting to see you because you’re on the big screen. As an actor, you just want change. You don’t want to have to work ten months out of the year at the same character. You want to be able to tackle different roles and have different challenges. It’s just a matter of getting out of the grind of a television show. But whether or not the people come, I think that really has to do with the movie, and not the actor.

Playing God is your first big-screen lead. You must have fielded offers for a lot of films before you decided on this one. What was it that made you want to play this role?

I saw this character that I saw as like a minor character in other movies--you know, the wino doctor that the Mob goes to? Or the failed doctor. And this was a movie about him. And I thought, "That’s an original idea." Or at least close to an original idea, which you see so few of in Hollywood, so I thought, "Yeah, this is an interesting enough character to carry a movie, and I’d like to see that movie." So I made it, so I could see it.

Roesch, Scott. October, 1997. "X-Man." Mr. Showbiz.