X-Files Star's X-Rated Role
New Weekly — October 30, 1995
by David Gerrie
David Duchovny — who plays FBI agent Fox Mulder in the hit paranormal series 'The X-Files' — has revealed he has an X-rated secret he'd prefer was hushed up. Like Sylvester Stallone and Kevin Costner before him, David, 35, has discovered, since reaching superhunk status, that your past can haunt you in a very non-supernatural way.
Much earlier in his career, David appeared in a nude scene in a steamy film called 'The Rapture.'
Now that he's a prime-time star, stills from the raunchy movie of his nether regions are fetching top prices among female fans.
"I was naked in bed with Mimi Rogers, my girlfriend in the movie, and she decides to make the bed and turf me out," David recalls. "So the director said, 'Get out of bed and put on your underwear with your back to the camera, because we can't do a frontal shot'.
"When I got out, I bent over and pulled my shorts up — which is probably one of the least flattering things a man of any age can do."
Despite this embarrassment, David says he still has a penchant for realism in his work. "But this is one of the few nude scenes I've done, and it's really haunting me," he admits.
"Earlier in my career, I did a play called The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California, in which I also appeared nude. But I'm pretty sure there aren't any pictures around from that!"
The fact is, had David not decided to go into acting at the relatively late age of 27, the nearest he would have come to a public romp was reading about it in a steamy novel.
Always a high-achiever academically, David received a classic elite education at Princeton and Yale, majoring in English literature — almost to PhD level — and finally emerging as an English teacher.
The move from teaching to acting was a quantum leap. He gave up the books of academia for extraterrestrials, psycho killers and alien abductions.
"After all the time I put into a degree, I sometimes think it would be nice to complete the process," he says. "The X-Files, starring Dr. David Duchovny, would be an interesting credit!"
But his path to success was no easy road. David's parents divorced when he was 11, and he stills feels the pain of their separation.
"It affected me very deeply and is an experience I've reacted to ever since," he says. "It's meant different tings to me at different times and will always be very important. As I get older, I deal with it in different ways, as I learn more about relationships between men and women.
"My aim in life is not to make the same mistakes as my parents. I'm old enough to know I wouldn't but as I've told my mother, 'If you hadn't made those mistakes, you would've made others'."
With The X-Files now in it's third season, and taking 10 months of the year to film in Vancouver, David has made Canada's west coast his temporary home. But Perrey Reeves, his actor girlfriend, still lives in Los Angeles, and David is the first to admit long-distance love is tough.
"It's really difficult but it's something you have to work out for yourself. We figure out the rules as we go along because we're constantly saying hello or goodbye," he explains.
"I don't have many friends in Canada, apart from a dog that I hang around with, so my spare time is spent reading a lot — and getting depressed." Luckily, David doesn't have much time to mope about, with his heavy X-Files schedule, but he has had time to consider the unusual notions of paranormal phenomena the show presents.
"I'm open to any ideas involving the paranormal," he says. "I believe less in extraterrestrials, although it's probably a better bet to think we're not alone. It makes little sense to think we're the only animate life in the universe.
"I do believe in ghosts, too. The living have such a desire for the dead that it's possible we project an energy to recreate them. There is definitely some kind of dialogue between the living and dead. I don't know where that energy comes from but I believe in it."
For David, though, The X-Files is a job and doesn't appeal to him as a viewer, "If I wasn't in the series, I can honestly say I wouldn't watch it. I tend to prefer more of the real-life stuff."
