Interview by Jeff Haywood in Hollywood
The X Files star David Duchovny is about to reinvent himself as a romantic star - but has a problem. He wishes he had a smaller nose. "No matter what you look like there's always things you want to change," he tells teletext. Apart from nose "problems" he wishes he had bigger eyes. He adds: "I remember for a long time I wished I was blond."
His new movie is Return to Me, a story with heart in more ways than one. In Return to Me, Duchovny plays a man who falls for a woman whose life has been saved by a heart transplant from his wife who was tragically killed. The audience knows of the heart but Duchovny's character only learns of it at the end. he likes the movie because it's simple and honest.
"It's sentimental," he says, "but it's also quite emotional and funny. It's not full of the kind of cynicism that seems to be so prevalent. Joely Richardson has a brief stint in Return to Me as Duchovny's ill - fated wife. Minnie Driver plays the girl with the heart transplant.
Duchovny says of his sexy image: "I'm nice enough to look at, but I think people make a big deal of my appearance. My stardom is a function of an optical instrument. "It gives an illusion that I'm more compelling than I am, the camera eroticises whatever it looks at." Duchovny has a masters in English Literature from Yale. He was doing a PhD when he took up acting instead. He laughs about his mixed background. "I'm half Scottish and I'm a half Jew," he says. "I'm a little schizophrenic as you'd expect a Scots-Jew to be."
He lives in LA with actress wife Tea Leoni and their daughter. Before that he confessed to being a "sex addict." So how's married life for him? Of marriage to Tea Leoni, Duchovny says: "The great benefit of monogamy is you get to trust the person your with. And she gets to trust you. "I know I gain something great from it, whether or not it's a natural state. We understand about the roles we are given and how we fit in." "You may think I'm a most macho sort of guy, yet I never felt that way. You'd look at Tea and think she's a beautiful girly girl, and yet she's not."
The worldwide success of The X Files means Duchovny's going to be identified with his character Mulder for a long time. "People are going to see me as him no matter what I do," he says with resignation. He adds "what viewers get from the TV show is the show, they don't get me. The same with films. My real fear is not typecasting. I fear that people will get to know me."
The End
