From TimeOut: London’s Living Guide, August 1998

Great Xpectations
by Josephine Monroe

The top-secret 'X-Files' movie finally reveals not-quite-all next month. Is this the start of a mega-bucks franchise, or will the TV phenomenon prove too hard an act to follow? And why was there a conspiracy to erase Mulder's buttocks? We infiltrated the set last year to demand answers from Gillian Anderson and Chris Carter, and caught up with David Duchovny this month in London.

David Duchovny is in a playful mood. The only human contact he's had for the past five hours has been journalists asking him about kissing Gillian Anderson and chasing little gray men, subjects for which he displays scant affection. So right now he wants to have some fun: he wants to talk about his bum. 'I have a great ass,' he reveals. And he wants us all to know that the reason his arse ended up on the cutting room floor was purely artistic. You know, for the good of the plot.

'The bum shot was great because it had nothing to do at all with the story, and I only like nudity when it's gratuitious,' he says seriously. 'In the script it was just a big joke: it just said " ... and there it is for the first time ... Mulder's ass!"' Duchovny's estrogen brigade has been waiting for the butt shot since rumors of its existance appeared on the internet several months ago. But Chris Carter evidently decided this would reveal too much, at the wrong time. 'I'm apparently resting on my ass for a couple of seconds, distracted from the fact that Scully had been abducted or something.' Clearly gutted, Duchovny wants to set the record straight: 'It had nothing to with the state of my ass. Or the size of my ass. Or anything about the ass itself.'

'I hate what people call "necessary nudity". I don't believe it's ever necessary to be nude in a film unless you're making a movie called "Before There Were Clothes". Like Michael Douglas's ass is ever necessary to a film!'

Duchovny talks with the confidence of a dinner guest starting on his second bottle of Chablis: lucid and cocksure, he emphasizes with his hands, makes eye contact, and is happy discussing anything from poetry to the suicidial of teenagers. Always the smartest guy in the room, he's learnt that he can charm at will, which is probably why he handles these publicity tours with such unwavering grace. Entertaining though he is, you still get the feeling he'd rather be anywhere than a London hotel promoting the new 'X-Files' movie. He's never kept mum about his desire to flee FBI Agent Mulder's clutches; so if the work is a grind, the publicity must be a bind. 'I would rather have just ended "The X-Files" after five series and done movies. Or just ended "The X-Files" altogether.'

But as it's made, and as he's here, he's going to do his best possible sales job for the film. Like a door-to-door rep who flogs fare of dubious quality, Duchovny wears a smart-but-sober suit and sports a cropped hairdo that’s more Luton Airport than LA. When the conversation digresses too far from ‘Fight The Future’ – like a dinner party raconteur, he can tour round the subjects with the speed and assurance of a performance car – he always returns to Mulder, Scully, government conspiracies and the pitch at hand.

And with well polished spiel, he promises that he wouldn’t sell something under false pretences: he accepts, just, that ‘Fight the Future’ might not please everybody. He admits that it might just be a bit of nonsense. ‘Most of the criticism has been positive, though. If people have taken issue with it, all they’ve said is that it’s a bit silly,’ he concedes. ‘But you know, this film had a hard job to do, the introductions to an audience that already knows you and an audience that doesn’t; that balancing act I think we got right. And I think we got all the key moments right. Like the “kiss”,’ he teases. Fans disagree: for them, there’s not enough of the friendship or muted sexual tension between Agents Mulder and Scully that has kept them hooked for five years. And one thing a franchise like ‘The X-Files’ can’t afford to do is piss off its core audience. Cutting Mulder’s bum is one thing, but asking them to pay to see less than they get for free at home could prove disastrous. ‘People say to me that at last I’m in a box-office hit, but this film was a big risk for us. “The X-Files” makes a hell of a lot of money for Rupert Murdoch [who owns Twentieth Century Fox], more money than a film ever could. There was a chance that this wouldn’t work and would damage the reputation of the series.’

What it tries to do is enhance the series by giving answers to questions Chris Carter has been posing for the last five years. The main thrust of the plot has surrounded the abduction of Mulder’s sister by aliens and the ensuing cover-up. ‘One of my problems with the alien-involvement thing is: okay, so aliens exist and have contacted the world, but why is anybody keeping that a secret? It’s an amazing, revolutionary moment in the history of humankind, so why would anybody keep that hidden?’ Duchovny wonders. ‘So I like that this movie makes an interesting theory as to why people would want to keep that secret.’

Of course, it doesn’t give as many answers as fans would like. ‘I didn’t want it to answer any conundrum. We extend the conundrum; that’s one of the joys of the show,’ he muses. ‘If you give the answers, then it’s “Doctor Who” and it’s just a guy in a rubber suit.’

Before its release, the film was shown to fans and non-fans. Although, according to Duchovny, the fans responded with the glee of kids at Disneyland, the virgins in the audience adopted the blank stares of Greys caught in a Texas Ranger’s headlights; the ending had to change. ‘The original ending was between me and the Cigarette Smoking Man,’ a mysterious figure familiar to fans of the show. ‘New viewers knew he was bad because they’d seen him in the movie, but they didn’t understand why I had such an intimate relationship with him. So it ended up being Scully and I. You get the same information, it’s just less confusing.’

Other changes were made as they went along, and one scene bound to please fans turns out to have been improvised. When Mulder tries to persuade Scully that he wasn’t frightened during a bomb scare, she says, ‘I’ve seen your scared face.’ ‘No you haven’t,’ he insists. ‘This is my scared face.’ The face he pulls doesn’t change. ‘There was something in the script that wasn’t funny,’ Duchovny explains. ‘So I tried that and Gillian laughed. And she never laughs at *anything*.’

The scene is a perfect example of how Duchovny and Anderson have created an intimate, sexually charged on-screen relationship even though most of the contact they have is through mobile phones. It’s something Duchovny is proud of. ‘I like it when I can make it funny, genuinely funny growing out of a real situation. And I’m proud that I kept doing things my way, rather than giving them more. Now I’m going to have journalists write ...’ – he takes on a newscaster’s voice – ‘”the writers have the good sense to poke fun at Mr. Duchovny’s dead-pan acting style.” I’m like, fuck you all, I know exactly what I’m doing.’

Indeed, he warns against changing anything just to please the rabble. ‘I don’t like the winking at the audience that we do – the “are they gonna kiss?” stuff or me peeing on a poster of “Independence Day”,’ he says, referring to a scene that Carter put in to have a dig at ‘ID4’ in which Will Smith says, ‘This pisses all over “The X-Files”.’ ‘Chris, however, seems to be engaged with a very extensive dialogue with the fans. But he’s the head writer and he gets off on it, I think that’s ass-kissing on our part.’ But wasn’t it nice for the fans when names of the organizers of an X-phile website turned up on the passenger list of a plane that crashed in the fifth series? ‘Sure, let’s make our fans the names of dead people,’ he jokes. ‘It gets dangerous when you start trying to anticipate what fans want.’

There seems to be signs of a shift in Duchovny’s relationship with Carter. Two years ago, he said series five would be the last, and that the only way he’d do a sixth would be if Carter used emotional blackmail. Now we know there will be seven. ‘There’s certainly a way in which personal loyalty has been used to perpetuate the business,’ he says carefully. ‘But on the other hand, it’s all been very beneficial for me, it’s not like I’m being abused.’ But when you don’t need the money, how do you get up in the morning and do a job you hate? ‘My mom raised me to do my job, and I’m a professional. Everybody else is showing up, it’s not like I’m special.’

A thousand websites dedicated to the show say different, however. Fans rhapsodize endlessly about his brain, his arse, and his acting: from his university thesis on Beckett to how many lengths he swims a day, there is little X-Philes don’t discuss about him. He grew up in New York, his parents – a Scottish teacher and a Jewish playwright – divorced when he was 11, he attended Yale and then went on to Princeton for his PhD (he dropped out to concentrate on acting) and came to ‘The X-Files’ through minor parts in films and TV (notably a transvestite drug enforcement agent in ‘Twin Peaks’). Now it’s his occasional, Emmy-nominated appearances on ‘The Larry Sanders Show’ that fill the cyberspace. Curiously, one that that isn’t mentioned anywhere is his odd eyes. ‘Like Bowie, I got into a fight about ten years ago,’ he explains. ‘I nearly lost an eye and now I have one pupil bigger than the other.’ He invites me to take a closer look. It adds to his ‘look, I’m a kook’ persona, and you can imagine the bookish undergrad in his dorm listening to Bowie, reading Derrida, wearing black and trying to impress. Now Duchovny plans to revert to type and publish a book of poetry. He has previously given permission for some of his work to be printed. ‘Movieline’ magazine recently ran an ode called ‘Cliché Juice’. Although warm – it’s a devotion to his wife – and artful, a cynic might thing the title is designed to deflect any criticism of plagiarism.

‘An actor writing poetry is like saying “Can you throw an egg at me? Here, I’ll just paint a bull’s-eye on my forehead.” So I want to work with an editor, give him some scribblings on napkins and just let him sort it out. I just want to make sure I’m happy with it.’ And the subject matter for these verses? ‘Oh. Pastoral odes.’

Now that the series has relocated to LA, he may find he has less time for such artistic indulgences. ‘It’ll be an adjustment. In Vancouver I had no distractions. If I wanted to do yoga for an hour, or have a nice lunch or read the paper, I could. But now I have Téa [Leoni, his wife and star of TV sitcom ‘The Naked Truth’] and need to be with her, which I want to do, but there will come a time when I need more space.’

And then there’s the new series to make, in which the team will have to explain a little of what goes on in the movie. Like, if aliens have been on Earth for 37,000 years, how come they haven’t taken over yet? ‘They’re waiting for something,’ he says like he knows. ‘It’s hard to figure out the motives of an alien. They’re kind of cagey.’

What would be nice, he says, is if Mulder could actually get a result some time in the next couple of years. ‘What I love about Mulder is that he’s so inept. It’s been five years and he’s not solved one case. He spends hundreds of thousands of tax-payers’ dollars and his success rate is zero. He should have been fired by now,’ he reckons. ‘There’s never been anyone brought to trial, let alone put behind bars. And he’s killed lots of people and jeopardized that lives of so many innocent people.’ Duchovny pauses. ‘He’s also rented a lot of cars.’

In the film, Mulder goes one better and – quite implausibly – rents a snowmobile in Antarctica. ‘Yeah, the rental company must really value his custom.’

Monroe, Josephine. August 1998. "Great Xpectations." TimeOut: London’s Living Guide.