From Sci Fi Entertainment Magazine, December 1998
Transcribed by alfornos on alt.fan.david-duchovny

Fox Mulder Goes Hollywood
by Melissa J. Perenson

David Duchovny confronts the 6th season of the hottest show on television.

A good script makes everything fresh right away, even though you're playing the same character," Duchovny remarks sagely. "That's when you want to satisfy that script. You want it to be a really good show, and you're inspired, you're ready to make a great show."

Duchovny knows firsthand what a difference a good script can make: Over the past five years, Duchovny has mastered the fine art of understated acting as Agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files, the paranormal drama tht's widely considered one of the finest shows on television.

The consistent originality of the storytelling is, in part, the secret to The X-Files' success. But there's more to it than that, according to Duchovny. "There are a lot of different elements to it. [The X-Files] is fairly unique in the fact that it takes a hundred clichéd elements, puts them all together, and makes something new," he notes. "Somehow, it comes off as being fresh, unique, and original. It's just one of those things. You could never have sat down and predicted it."

[photo of vampire in Bad Blood. Caption: One of Duchovny's favorite episodes of The X-Files was Bad Blood, which featured the same vampire tale told twice- once each from both Mulder and Scully's points of view.]

[photo of Duchovny, Angelina Jolie and Timothy Hutton in Playing God]

Unlike some actors, who rarely go back and watch the series in which they perform, Duchovny enjoys doing so, escaping for an hour with wife Téa Leoni. "It's much more fun for me to watch the show now. I LIKE the show," he reveals.

If Duchovny likes the show, one can't help but wonder why, then, the candid actor has expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that he's contractually bound to the series through season 7. "It's not really the show or Mulder," he concedes. "It's the bare fact of doing the same show and the same part for five years."

Also coming into play is the all-consuming nature of filming The X-Files. Like his co-star GA (who plays Mulder's FBI partner, Dana Scully), Duchovny has been virtually immersed in The X-Files for the past two-and-a-half years, filming season 4, The X-Files movie, and season 5 in succession. Even the peaceful hiatus between seasons 5 and 6 was disrupted by The X-Files; only this time, it was for a flurry of media commitments in order to promote the movie.

"People see it as being ungrateful toward our show or not liking the show that you're doing, or not liking the people that you're working with, when in fact, it's just a reaction against something that's consuming all your time and creative energy," Duchovny clarifies. "It takes me 10 months to do the TV show and last year it took me 12 months with the movie, so really all that I did every day was go in and be Mulder. And a lot of the time, when I wasn't doing that, I was talking about being Mulder or preparing to be Mulder. So, you can see, it really is human to get tired of it. I would love to leave [the show] behind. But I don't want to leave it behind in a way that ruins it."

Duchovny doesn't rule out returning to play Mulder in a series of XF movies, though. "I would love to do that. Then it would be something that I could come back to have fun with," he says. "I'd get to do other work and try other things."

Ultimately, though, Duchovny has praise for the series that launched his career into the stratosphere. "In the end, I'm very proud to be associated with the show and the character," he emphasizes. "And I'm very proud of the creation of the character."

With the passage of time has come a valuable lesson for Duchovny: "At some point when you grow up as an actor you realize that you're servicing a piece - be it a movie or a TV series - and you realize that what may be fun or better for you as an individual or as an actor may not be better for the show."

[photo of M&S w/Eddie Sr. in Small Potatoes and Mulder and Jeremiah Smith]

Even though it's fundamentally the same process, taking The X-Files to the feature screen proved an eye-opening experience. "It's so much bigger than the television show," enthuses Duchovny about the movie. "I didn't know how small the television show was - in scale, in action, in look and everything - until we did this movie. Not to denigrate the show at all, we make those every eight days and they look amazing for that. But this is a big action movie. It's a different animal."

In translating Fox Mulder to the big screen, Duchovny found he had to make a few minor adjustments in his approach to the character. "What I've always liked about Mulder is that he aggressively did not play to any audience. Actually, I did tone him down a little bit," he admits. "It's an interesting process to watch what works on film, what works on TV."

The movie introduced a new dimension to Mulder and Scully's relationship and, like everyone, Duchovny is waiting to see what direction the series takes. A relationship would offer some interesting acting opportunities, Duchovny notes. "But around the third year I realized that it's better for the show, even though it may not be more fun for me as an actor. If it was developed in a way that moved on from that point, it could work, but my instinct is to not do that." However, he adds, "I think it's best not to, because once you form a relationship between a man and a woman that's physical or sexual or emotional, that becomes the focus of the show."

Nonetheless, he thought the topic was deftly handled in the feature. "I just thought the whole bee sting business was a really clever way to go about doing it," he says. "It's funny and smart and is a way to get what you want without getting it. The fact that Mulder actually initiates [the near-kiss] is interesting. I just loved the reaction of how, when she gets stung, I say, 'I'm sorry,' It's like, 'Oh, God that was stupid, I know.'"

Although he feels the series should stay away from the relationship issue, Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have nonetheless worked together to subtly maintain a strong undercurrent of emotions between Mulder and Scully in the series - even when it's not in the script.

"It's really hard to say [how much is us and how much is in the scripts]. I mean, if I look at the scripts, it's not written in there. I guess a decision that was made early on was to make the character as human as possible and therefore give the character as many human qualities as possible because the show really wasn't about humanity, it was about aliens," muses Duchovny. "So, it was always very important to me to have that as an undertone."

As television's reigning dynamic duo, Duchovny and Anderson have an indisputable and rare on-screen chemistry; off screen, their strong professional relationship helps facilitate what's captured on screen. "We have a working relationship that works for us on the set," he offers. "She's very focused. She doesn't move on unless she's happy with what she's done, which is nice, especially in a film. On a TV show, sometimes it's two in the morning and you want to get home. It was a decent take; it wasn't your best, but it was good enough and you can sleep. But she usually does another one at that point, which I always find pretty impressive."

After five years of episodes, Duchovny is hard pressed to name a specific favorite. "One of the great things about the show is how versatile it is. I have many different favorites. Some are funny, some are dramatic. I like Bad Blood, the vampire one. I tend to like the fun [stories], such as Darin Morgan's, but then," he appends, "I also like the big action stuff."

Duchovny liked the fact that his character's belief system was shaken up last season, but would have preferred to see a longer trajectory to the flip-flopping between Mulder's believer and Scully's skeptic. "The exchange of traditional roles last season for Mulder was interesting, but it wasn't something that we really got into deeply enough. I felt like it was a little cosmetic," says Duchovny, who's perfected the art of understated subtlety in acting. "It was like a little bit of a cheat. 'Okay, now Mulder's not going to believe, but we're not going to say why or what it means.' We'd do it in the mythology [episode] and then we'd have a stand-alone show and all of a sudden Mulder's exactly the same. I would have been really interested in taking the character on a continuous journey."

[photo of Mulder in the spaceship in FTF]

Playing the skeptic offered Duchovny a brief respite from the norm, and a chance to do something a little different. "When I'm the skeptic in the show, it's fun to play because it's fun to get in the way rather than to push, push, push," he notes. "It's hard to arrive at work every day and realize that you have to push the story forward. Mulder always has to believe and try to get everybody else to believe. And sometimes it's fun just to go 'talk to the hand.'"

Duchovny's penchant for deadpan and dry humor - witness his guest turns on The Larry Sanders Show - is in evidence throughout the course of The X-Files, and is why the actor enjoys playing comedy within the context of the show. The most prominent example, of course, is Duchovny's wonderfully comedic performance in the classic 4th season episode, Small Potatoes. "The scripts that are ironic toward the show, the funnier scripts, are fun to do because there's a hard tone to try to find, where you're still playing the same character and yet you're not," remarks the actor. "You're playing Mulder and yet he's a lot more incompetent than he usually is. He's having reactions that may not be like Mulder, and yet you still want to make it believable so that the people at home are still watching the same character. So that's a difficult, challenging thing that keeps [the role] fresh."

Keeping a straight face through some of the verbose - as opposed to the absured - dialogue required of Mulder is, in a sense, a badge of honor for Duchovny. "It becomes a matter of pride to me, how can I make this talk [work]. That's actually kind of fun. Sometimes I can't pull it off. And sometimes the writing's great, and the writing plays itself," he explains. "It's a function of having to write 24 of those shows and having to tell a very complicated story and having to lay it out on the line. It falls to the actor to make it seem like, 'Hmmm, we're just having a conversation.' I want [the dialogue] to be as chunky and as nonspoken as possible. Then that becomes the challenge - actually giving it a rhythm of speech - because [executive producer] Chris [Carter] likes to use five or six subordinate clauses in each sentence, which people do in life, but they don't do grammatically, like he does."

Jokingly, Duchovny adds, "Sometimes I say to Chris, 'Your highest ambition - and I'm the only one in the world that sees it - is that you want to be in Bartlett's Quotations. Every show, you come up with a pithy little aphorism like 'Deny everything,' and you put it in my mouth, and I've got to sell it like it's actual language."

A native New Yorker, Duchovny was educated at Princeton, earned his Master's in English Literature at Yale, and was en route to getting his Ph.D. when he became interested in acting and switched direction altogether; he soon built a career playing minor roles in quirky, interesting, and often just-outside-mainstream projects. He may have a formidable background in literature, but Duchovny doesn't have a burning desire to bring any literary protagonists to life. "It may be an act of snobbery to say, but I feel like the better the book, the worse the movie," confides Duchovny. "I don't think an adaptation of a great book will ever stand up to that book. Movies do something a certain way that is specific to the cinematic form. They just can't be like a great book with a rich interior life of a character; it's just not possible."

It's tough to get the writer out of the actor, though: Duchovny has often helped shape the direction of his character over the course of the series, introducing such back-story elements as the fact that Mulder was, apparently, married prior to The X-Files (Duchovny purposely wore his wedding ring in the 5th season flashback episodes Unusual Suspects and Travelers.) The actor has also helped develop stories, earning story credits on such episodes as season 2's Colony and season 3's Avatar.

After a solid theatrical debut that grossed over $130 million worldwide by the end of the summer, The X-Files returns to the air for a 6th season. "The pressure in the 6th year is immense," comments Duchovny. "We're in the 6th year of a story-heavy drama. It's not a soap opera. It's tough to come up with new ideas and keep it fresh."

The actor downplays the brouhaha that surrounded the announcement. Although he was very outspoken in his desire to move the series to LA, a move that had been under consideration for some time, Duchovny is still stinging from the harsh reactions in the press. "I take my job very seriously, even though I like to act like I don't. And when my decisions are portrayed as being whimsical, I guess I'm somewhat to blame for that because I like to portray myself as being glib or whimsical. But it's still kind of infuriating sometimes," he says honestly. "I take the show very seriously. I wouldn't have pushed the move to LA if I thought it'd ruin it. I know that we can do the show here."

Duchovny is the first to admit that it won't entirely be business as usual for The X-Files now that the series has relocated to LA. "The show is going to be harder to do in LA. I mean, I never said that Vancouver wasn't the place to do it. Vancouver is the best place to shoot The X Files. The show will change," he admits matter-of-factly, "but I think that's a good thing because it's been five years. We're going to be challenged and maybe it'll be better, maybe it'll be worse, but it will be different." More importantly, Duchovny adds, "It will be very calming as far as the show goes."

Perenson, Melissa. December 1998. "Fox Mulder Goes Hollywood." Sci Fi Entertainment Magazine.