DAVID Duchovny doesn't usually ask for favours, but for his upcoming movie, Return to Me, he's making an exception.
'Leave your cynicism at the door,' Duchovny requests.
'Let yourself feel something instead of thinking it to death.'
After playing Fox Mulder on The X Files, a character Duchovny says 'never had a fleeting thought he didn't want to fully autopsy,' the actor says he was eager to play someone like Bob Rueland, the widowed architect of Return to Me, a 'jeans and T-shirt kind of guy with pretty traditional values. I mean Mulder's a good man, he just lives inside his head a little too much.'
By contrast, Return to Me is all about heart - literally. Though Bob has avoided becoming involved again after his wife's death, he surprises himself by falling in love with a waitress he meets
in an Irish-Italian restaurant. The waitress, played by Minnie Driver, has a secret: The year before, she had heart transplant surgery. The donor, she has learned, was Bob's late wife.
Duchovny admits that had someone just described this story
to him, he might not have jumped on it as the chance to establish himself in features after six seasons on The X Files.
But the script was written by an old friend, actress Bonnie Hunt, with whom he had appeared in the hit comedy Beethoven during what he calls 'my pre-Mulder existence'.
'I wasn't surprised at how good Bonnie's script was, but I was surprised I liked it so much,' says Duchovny. 'What I liked most about it was that it wasn't about people who were trying so hard to be hip. I mean people think it's so daring to be hip, to make something like Being John Malkovich. What I think is daring these days is having the courage not to be hip and ironic and post-modern. To be truthful and sincere and even sentimental.
'Sentimental always gets a bad rap. I'm sentimental, and I like to think of myself as romantic. My wife thinks I'm romantic.'
Duchovny is married to the actress Tea Leoni, and they have a year-old daughter, Madelaine West.
'So I'm not usually crazy about these so-called romantic comedies where people banter in insults, where one character says
his line of smart-ass dialogue, and the other shoots back with her smarter line,' he says. 'In Return to Me, the characters actually listen to each other. It's not about being cute, it's about being real.'
Duchovny says making a romantic comedy was not so much a conscious effort to distance himself from the moody Mulder as
a 'way to remind everybody that
I had a career before The X Files, and that I'll be
having one after. Sometimes I
forget I had one before the show.'
Duchovny capped the announcement he would be leaving the series after his contract expires this year with a lawsuit against Fox TV, which he claims conspired with the show's creator, Chris Carter, to cheat him of his rightful share of syndication profits.
That appeared to preclude his ever returning to the show,
but he now says that he might return in episodes he would write
and direct were he asked. So far, no-one has, or even announced if the show will continue without him.
Duchovny has said he thinks it could be a bad idea to continue 'because we've already hit our creative peak'.
But co-star Gillian Anderson still has one year on her contract, and Duchovny says The X Files wouldn't be the first show to
reinvigorate itself with a change of leads: 'Look at NYPD Blue
and Law and Order. They've done all right.'
The X Files, 8.30pm Wednesday, Ten
