David Duchovny, who made his name as FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files, acts surprised when I suggest that his presence on screen is not the only thing that connects his latest project – Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny – with that 1990s TV juggernaut.
These days, he insists in his droll drawl, speaking via video call from a renovated railway carriage in the grounds of his Malibu home, The X-Files is no longer “part of my daily creative life or even my personal life”.
Yet the very first episode of Secrets Declassified – with its distinctly X-Files-ish tagline, “The truth will always come to light” – sees the 64-year-old New Yorker walking into a warehouse full of documents about “covert wars, backroom deals, classified tech” and delivering a warning to viewers: “Governments and the people who work for them have done strange and even terrible things in the name of national interest.” When X-Files fervour was at its peak, Duchovny, as the more credulous Mulder to Gillian Anderson’s sceptical agent Dana Scully, became a kind of poster boy for conspiracy theorists, despite personally being very far from that way inclined.
He says that some fans were convinced “that I was privy to certain information. But, you know, I’m just an actor. I’m not privy to anything. One of the strengths of the show was that it appeared to be factual to certain people.” He shrugs. “That’s the price of doing business.”
When Duchovny was offered the starring role in The X-Files, he had already had bit parts in such screen classics as Working Girl (1988) and Twin Peaks (1990), and hesitated before signing up to what he initially saw as “just a silly science-fiction show”. His performance won him his first Golden Globe award, before he scooped a second as a sex addict in Californication, went into rehab for sex addiction himself in 2008, divorced his actress wife Téa Leoni, wrote five novels and hosted a podcast on failure.
Today, he says he understands the appeal of counter-narratives, and believes that one unique human strength is to “weaponise or monetise information. When you look at conspiracies, it’s really just people surviving by their wits.” He even has a soft spot for one himself: mind control.
“I like any government that takes the expansion of human consciousness,” he says, “and tries to figure out how to make a better soldier or politician or spy with that kind of information.”
The alternative facts being issued by the Oval Office are quite another matter, however. “It’s like, oh, there’s five new ridiculous things coming out of the White House today. Which am I supposed to focus on? That’s the conspiracy, I guess. I think it’s probably the first time in history where the government seems to be deliberately promulgating falsehoods for the purpose of immobilising a people.”
Duchovny believes that the time is ripe for a reboot of The X-Files; indeed, the Black Panther director Ryan Coogler has a new series in development – though without its original stars, Duchovny insists. Not that he’d be against a new chapter for Mulder and Scully. “The X-Files frame is evergreen in terms of generating stories, and especially today,” he says. “So it’s like, well, how would we exist in a way that was different from the way we existed before, but still do interesting work?”
The original runs of the show – from 1993-2002, 2016 and 2018 – were beset with what Duchovny and Anderson spent years euphemistically referring to as mutual “tension”. For long periods, the two were not “even dealing with one another off-camera”, as Duchovny revealed last year during a heartfelt conversation with Anderson on his Fail Better podcast, in which he admitted to a “failure of friendship” with his co-star. Was there something specifically combustible about their two personalities in combination?
“My memory would be faulty, you know? It’s like Rashomon,” says Duchovny, vaguely, alluding to Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic in which every eyewitness to a murder tells a contradictory version of events. “Just, I don’t recall.”
Duchovny caught Anderson on the hop when he quit the show in 2001 without even telling her. For the last series, Duchovny admitted feeling a sense of rejection when, this time, Anderson was the one who called it a day.
The duo have clearly put the past behind them and now treasure the unique bond they share. And in today’s fragmented TV landscape, with content splintered across countless streaming platforms, Duchovny doubts that any future version of The X-Files could ever replicate the enduring reach of the original.
“Netflix kind of f----- the business in a way,” he says. “Well, I mean, look at The X-Files, which had a foothold on the culture and then lasted. Now, there’s just so much – things become incandescent for a year or two and then they just fade away.”
Although he’s not short of opinions, Duchovny sensibly refuses to hold forth on global politics. When I ask if he has any thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – after all, his 2015 debut novel Holy Cow featured a camel that brings Middle East peace – he demurs. “I’m not knowledgeable enough to wade into that,” he says. “Forgive me.”
What about the explosion of Jew-hatred around the world in the wake of October 7 and the war in Gaza? In 1914, Duchovny’s grandfather was one of 6,000 Jews deported from Jaffa to Egypt by the Ottoman government. “Well, I think anti-Semitism is a zombie idea; it gets reinvigorated,” he says. “It’s a type of conspiracy-thinking that is weak and false and dangerous and vile. But the Jews have been blamed for different s--- many times over, through history.”
His father, Amram, a writer of non-fiction, spent years tackling the problem, working in public relations for the American Jewish Committee. Aged 73 – just a couple of years before his death – he published his first novel. Duchovny Jr has shown a similar creative restlessness: since learning the guitar in his 50s, he has released three albums as a singer-songwriter.
Earlier this year, he married his longtime girlfriend, 31-year-old Monique Pendleberry – “We ran off to Santa Barbara and did it at the courthouse there,” he tells me – and he has put his Malibu home up for sale, saying he is “not sure yet” where he will move next.
His wedding ring is not the only new accessory he’s sporting today: he also has a moustache, grown for a forthcoming film role as the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. After that, he will shoot another movie, in Pittsburgh, while also promoting his first volume of poetry, About Time.
Is there no end to his gifts? Duchovny appears to give this question serious consideration. “I don’t have any other kind of hidden, unexpressed talent,” he says. “In terms of ways to express myself, I think I’m tapped out.”
Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny is on Sky History on Tuesday at 9pm
source: Telegraph UK
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