Many of us first glimpsed David Duchovny as one of the stock weirdoes in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, playing a cross dressing FBI agent. It was a small role, but one made memorable by Duchovny's off kilter magnetism and skewed, symmetrical good looks (traits shared by his wife Téa Leoni, who will someday get a vehicle commensurate with her talent). 

So it made sense that Duchovny's breakout role would come in another bizarro, foreboding TV serial filmed in the Pacific Northwest, the X-Files, that Star Trek for our creepy, hair trigger age. And as Duchovny's fame went supernova and adoring, detailed profiles, detailed profiles cropped up everywhere, including this magazine, it made sense to learn that what lends Agent Mulder his nuanced, barely perceptible expressively is uncommon intelligence, the product of hours spent poring over books in the library carrels of Princeton and Yale, where Duchovny received, respective his BA and his master's.

 Yeah, he's now the object of such depressing on-line worship covens as "The David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade," and people are still talking about the episode where Mulder wore a red speedo, but the virtue of Duchovny is that he's not one of the boys-on-a-stick who star in 90210 and Melrose Place. He's a grown-up man, a transcriber of TV's silliness and juvenility.