TV Times Staff

David Duchovny is a passionate chap. Ask him anything about his family, or his new film, and he goes dewy-eyed. Mention the X-files, though, and he'll tell you he's only in it for the money. Is this anyway way to treat the show that made him famous?

He recently signed a £20million deal to stay in The X-Files, and he's delighted. 'Now the business issues have been settled, ' says David Duchovny, 'I'm looking forward to getting back to work.'

But is he? After all, he's only returning part-time. He will star in just 11 of the 22 programmes in the eighth-series alongside co-star Gillian Anderson - giving him time to work on more movies.

The latest, a romantic comedy called Return to Me, is release this week. C0-starring Minnie Driver, it's about a widower who falls in love with the woman who received his dead wife's heart.

Visiting David, 39, who lives with his wife Tea Leoni, 34, and their one-year-old daughter Madelaine, in Los Angeles, I'm set to wondering where his priorities lie.

Happily for me less so for fans David is in the mood to be brutally frank about the show that made his name.

At this point, The X-files is just about money. Anybody who tells you that creatively there is anything left to on that show' He sighs. 'The only creative thing left for me now is a sheer high-wire act of how long can I keep on making it?'

It was obviously going to take a tone of money to get him to commit to an eighth season. But he had no doubt that he could win them round.

'Are you kidding?' he laughs, when I suggest that he ran the risk of pricing himself out of the job. 'The X-Files makes a hideous amount of money. They could spend $50million an episode and still make back four times that. The X-Files is worldwide. ER and NYPD Blue fantastic shows are only hits in the US and Britain. The X-Files is a hit everywhere.'

So David's a victim of his own success, is he? 'It's a shame to get opportunities and not be able to do them because of The X-Files,' he says then takes a very necessary reality check. 'Well, obviously, it's harder not to get any offers at all!' he laughs. 'I'm sorry, it's just there's a certain creative boredom setting in with me now.

'It's no reflection on the show it's just that I've been doing it for seven years. If you were in Hamlet for seven years, it's be the same. You'd be tired of getting your mum to admit that she slept with your uncle, just as I'm tired of shaking the Cigarette Smoking Man and telling him to admit that he slept with my mother. Oh. Lord. Maybe the X-Files is Hamlet!'

Perhaps it's so he feels he still has a stake in the show, that he's got more involved in its production. On 23 July, SKY One will show the second X-Files episode David's directed. He also wrote this one, in which an old x-file is turned into a TV show. His wife Tea plays Scully, while Mulder is played by David's friend Garry Shandling, who's better known as the chat-show host from hell in the showbiz comedy Larry Sanders. It's almost like he's trying to make a personal film on network TV

That's exactly what I'm doing,' David says. 'I couldn't write anything that wasn't personal. This one is about the difference between truth and fiction, Hollywood and the rest of the world all of which is very personal to me. I wanted to show the way fiction warps reality..

'The most unnerving part, though was directing my wife. Not because she was difficult God, she's amazing, she does things that I would never think of and they work but because she was filming a movie called Family Man and her schedule went over, I thought she was going to have to dump the project at the last moment, which was terrible because I had written this part for her. She actually finished the day before she came to work for me,'

What fans will make of such a personal statement and a comic one at that remains to be seen.

'It's a funny episode,' David conceded. You see Mulder and Scully investigating a serious case, only for it to morph back and for the with the movie version, If it's funny, it's funny because a serious point about fiction and reality is getting communicated.'

However, there's no hiding the fact this episode reveals a lighter, warmer side to David's character. His romantic lead role in Return to Me confirms the change of style 'I thought Return could be a funny fairytale ,' David explains. 'I haven't seen a movie like that in a long time something innocent but funny at the same time,. And that's exactly how it turned out. It makes me feel very smart to have chosen it.'

Suggest to David that his sunnier side has something to do with his one-year-old daughter Madelaine, and you draw a blank. 'I just enjoy working,' he says, 'That's one of the fun things about acting, you get to express all different side of yourself even ones that don't exist.'

Not exactly heartwarming. Indeed David stubbornly refuses to do the usual showbiz thing of talking about his family as though they were his accessories.

The truth is, David's intensely protective of his daughter. 'You open yourself up to such heartbreak when you have a child,' he says. 'I could never recover if anything happened.'

You can't help but feel that fame sits uncomfortably upon David Duchovny, especially now. 'I don't even like Madelaine having her picture taken,' he says. 'For now I don't much care because, well she looks like a baby. But when she starts to look like who she looks like, the game changes. It's too bad for her that we're famous.'