By Ian Spelling

David Duchovny now prefers to search for the truth behind the camera.

Pssst . . .want to know the truth? It all began for David Duchovny with beer commercials.

No fooling. He was chasing a doctorate, hoping to become a professor, when acting emerged as a possible career path. "That was my first paying job, beer commercials," the star of The X-Files recalls. "I was like, ‘I want to do beer commercials. No movies. No plays. Not even a bunch of commercials. Just beer commercials.’"

Taking his tongue out from deep within his cheek, Duchovny elaborates, explaining that he had chosen to pursue acting while earning a doctorate on his way to becoming a scribe or a college professor. "I did both at the same time", he says. "I started getting interested in acting through trying to be a playwright - I thought I should learn a little about acting. I was probably 25. I stayed at Yale until I was 25 or 26, so there was a time where I was commuting from New Haven to New York. I was taking acting classes in New York because I didn’t want my two worlds to know about each other. It was very schizophrenically successful for me to have those two destinations. After a while, I just stopped going back to New Haven."

Acting Agents
Does Duchovny ever regret his decision?

"Yeah, you know, Sliding Doors, he says, referring to the Gwyneth Paltrow movie about a life that could have/would have/might have been. "Teaching is such a worthwhile and under-appreciated profession. The kind of teaching I would have done would have been worthwhile and wonderful, but I think teaching kids is really the most beneficial [kind of teaching]. What I would have been doing was teaching kids who had made it to an Ivy League school. So they would have been pretty much on the path."

That said, is acting fulfilling enough, Sliding Doors and all? "I don’t know," Duchovny replies. "I like writing and directing. I get close to being fulfilled what I do something like ["The Unnatural"], the X-Files episode I did last year. I think that’s the direction where I’m headed. I do really enjoy acting, but I like very much the idea of taking something that doesn’t exist at all and involving a bunch of people, spending a bunch of money and making it exist. And then a year later, you have this little cassette that runs an hour and, God, it just came out of nowhere and it’s a piece of you - it represents the way you think and the way you feel. That’s very satisfying."

Duchovny’s internal satisfaction meter is hitting all sorts of highs and lows these days. His contract with The X-Files is up after seven long, grueling years. He has had his fill of Special Agent Fox Mulder, UFO’s, government conspiracies, porn movies, bees, rebel aliens, and so on. On the other hand, he loves writing and directing, which he did again recently with the "Hollywood A.D." episode, which guest-starred Garry Shandling and Duchovny’s real-life wife Tea Leoni as fictional versions, so to speak, of Mulder and Agent Dana Scully. All of this will have been sorted through by the time STARLOG readers peruse these pages, but Duchovny, at the time of this interview - with just three episodes left to film during the seventh season - is still torn over whether or not to sign on for an eighth year of sleuthing.

"The show holds nothing creatively challenging for me anymore as an actor," he says candidly. "Writing and directing, however, are extremely challenging. So, if I were to go back, it would really be for that more than the acting. I know that people will be upset when the show is off the air, but I think there’s only so much you can do. Seven years is a really a really long time to do a series, so none of us can be faulted for wanting to move on at some point I just think it’s my nature; it’s human nature."

Looking back on his first directing gig, the baseball-themed "The Unnatural," a smile crosses Duchovny’s face. "I was very pleased with how that came out," he notes. "The whole thing worked. I was amazed. The story worked. It that a depth of feeling to it, an intelligence and a kind of allegorical murkiness to it that I really liked. It meant something, but wasn’t heavy-handed. I felt that it was moving."

And what did Duchovny take from helming "The Unnatural" that he applied to "Hollywood A.D.?" "I don’t know," he responds. "I don’t know. You don’t know how to direct until you direct. Once you start directing, then you’re just always learning. I brought whatever experience I had gotten. I couldn ’t tell you specifically; I’m just a little bit more comfortable. I’m still a novice. I’ve got a lot to learn. I was talking with Rob Bowman, who has done probably 60 TV episodes [include multiple X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation hours] and two movies [including the X-Files feature]. He said that after the 15th time, he stopped being nervous. I’m only on two. I have a good time doing it, but I’m always looking at my watch going, ‘God, we’ve got to get this and this done.’ If I had feature-length time to shoot the show, which is the time you really need to do an X-Files, I could be more relaxed. We would probably need two to three times more than we get."

Returning Roles
Just weeks before "Hollywood, A.D." reached the airwaves, Duchovny’s latest film, Return to Me, arrived in theaters. The romantic comedy/drama stars Duchovny as Bob Rueland, a man who’s crushed by the death of his beloved wife Elizabeth (Joely Richardson), then falls in love with the shy and demure Grace Briggs (Minnie Driver), a woman who, unbeknownst to Bob, received Elizabeth’s heart during transplant surgery.

"When the script came along, I thought it was very straight-ahead sentimental and a nice story," says the actor, whose earlier film credits, include Playing God, Kalifornia, Chaplin, The Rapture, and Beethoven, during which he befriended Return to Me writer-director-co-star Bonnie Hunt. "I thought that if Bonnie brought herself and her crazy sense of humor to it, it could be a really good movie. It would be a really interesting movie, one that I hasn’t seen since Moonstruck, which had the same operatic sadness and really weird funniness to it. I’m just shocked that Return to Me actually happened. I shouldn’t be shocked, because Bonnie worked so hard at it, but she was able to pull off this hybrid sentimental funny movie that isn’t one of these computer-programmed romantic comedies that comes out every two or three months."

Return to Me couldn’t be any further from The X-Files and Bob couldn’t be more different from Mulder. Just how conscious a decision was that? Is Duchovny purposefully seeking, as would be his right, to avoid films and roles that echo The X-Files in any way whatsoever? "No, it’s just kind of a project-by-project thing, and I’m less aware of what people think of as my image," he explains. "There’s nothing I can do about it, so I just do the best work I can in the best movies that I can get. I’ve been asked this question a lot: ‘How are you going to break this image?’ And I really don’t have an answer to it. I’m lucky enough to have been on a show that’s so strong in people’s minds that they want to see me in a certain way. And then I think about other actors. If you think about a great actor like Robert De Niro -- here’s a guy who has done 45 films, maybe. Do you think he gets angry when all people do is say, ‘Are you talking to me?’ I think he might. All actors deal with it."

"At first, I thought it was just William Shatner and me. But I think everyone, even the ones you would never think would have to, deals with it. I mean, look at Jim Carrey. Forever they’re going to say to him, ‘I didn’t know you could be dramatic.’ And forever they’re going to say to me, ‘I didn’t know you could be funny,’ It’s just that how you first come out is the way you make your splash, where you get famous. That’s going to be the mold you’re always fighting. Everybody has to prove his or herself. That’s just the nature of the business."

And it’s OK with Duchovny that The X-Files made him famous. "Yeah," he says "I’m OK with that because The X-Files is a really good show. I have nothing against the character and I love The X-Files. I think it’s amazing television. It’s like a movie every week. There’s nothing like it."

Final Files
If that really good show comes to an end after its current season, it will do so without the benefit of what co-star Gillian Anderson refers to as a mourning period, that time in which she could reflect on what had transpired and deal with the reality of the series and deal with the reality of the series impending demise. That lack of a mourning period, assuming the show really does close up shop, would disturb Anderson. The same, no big surprise, can not be said of her co-star. For him, the end is the end is the end, and so be it. "I think that life doesn’t allow you the choice of knowing when something is going to die," he says. "It’s dangerous to try to go, ‘Gee, I hope I can mourn.’ I think you mourn when you mourn. Everything is going to end. If it ends now, we’ll deal with it. I don’t think I would enjoy it if I knew for sure that it was ending. It would be like a death sentence. I kind of like the way things are."

"If it’s going out this year, then it will be gone. I can always pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, I never got a chance to tell you how much I love you and how much I appreciate your work.’ It’s not like these people are going to be taken to another planet. They’re not dying; just the show is dying.’

Whether or not it dies remains to be seen, but either way, there’s one question Duchovny simply must answer. And the question is this: Does he really understand what the hell is going on on The X-Files? Does he need to understand the conspiracy, the meaning of black oil and all that mumbo-jumbo to do his job effectively? "You don’t have to understand it to play it," David Duchovny concludes. "Ultimately, if you were really to understand what was going on, it would be detrimental to your enjoyment of the show. I say that because I think the show is much better when it doesn’t make complete sense."

"Once you get to the point where you go, ‘Oh, it’s the Rebel Faceless Aliens,’ it’s insane and silly. That’s not the great writing on the show. The great writing is keeping you interested in the three different truths. The problem with existing for seven years is that people say, ‘We want answers.’ And then, when you give them answers, they say, ‘Well, that’s kind of dumb.’ People don’t really want answers. Leave the truth out there. Our show is best when there are a few different truths in the air. I just hate having to say, ‘Rebel Faceless Aliens.’ I feel like an idiot."