David Duchovny: X Marks The Star

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Biography Magazine, June 1998
by Bart Mills

David Duchovny took the long way around to become the most unlikely of a thrill-a-minute actors. The X-Files star grew up an intellectual in Greenwich Village, went to prep school with John F. Kennedy, Jr., then logged four years at Princeton and five at Yale in pursuit of a doctorate.

He never picked up the Ph.D., but the onetime student of North American fiction and poetry has inspired some 800 Internet sites, including on called The David Duchovny Drool Brigade.

Even after marrying The Naked Truth star Téa Leoni last year, Duchovny remains the thinking woman's pinup. Equipped with the quickest and driest sense of humor around, the quirkily handsome actor enters the nation's living rooms each Sunday night wearing a deadpan scowl and leaves an hour later with the same expression.

Few top performers try harder to resist stardom's shape-shifting pull, or joke about it so often. He hasn't become a gland-hander. He cheerfully admits he hates to smile. When told that his X-Files costar Gillian Anderson said he was like catnip to women, he responded, "Just call me David Ducatnip." At the edge of the abyss, somehow he maintains his balance.

Because he went into action only after reaching a crisis in his quest for an advanced academic degree, he lacks the compulsion to confess and exhibit himself. He jokes that he asks his friends for personal anecdotes so he can pretend they're his when he appears on talk shows.

"Being recognized everywhere has disadvantages," he says. "Another disadvantage is that you've got to do the Dave Letterman show - I had trouble breathing just before I went on. Ah, but the advantages of fame - I get good tickets to shows, and free sneakers."

Talking with Duchovny is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride, as he moves from dour silences to left-field irony. Or maybe it's a joust, for he enjoys the cut and thrust of verbal banter. But don't ask him about magic and technology in contemporary North America fiction and poetry. That was the subject of the thesis he never wrote, and he still knows more about literature than anyone outside the academic world probably should.

One of the writers he would have analyzed was Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow. This is a masterpiece of paranoia, which also happens to be the dominant theme of The X-Files. So Duchovny is more tolerant of the show's wacky ideas than most unbelievers. When he first began playing Agent Fox Mulder, he insisted that he didn't believe in alien landings, prehistoric parasites, or demonic possession. Now, he says, "The show is no more paranoid than previous shows have been. There have been witch hunts forever.

"Whether we are alone or not is a religious question I don't want to go into. I get tired of people asking if I believe in aliens. They don't ask the guys on ER if they believe in euthanasia.

"My job [on the show] is to sell the reality of what's happening, which, when you look at it, is very far-fetched. I couldn't happen, but we have to make people feel it could. You have to trust Agent Mulder, so he can't be a nut - otherwise, the show would be nutty."

No less an authority than M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart sees Duchovny's playfulness behind Mulder's poker face. Gelbart says, "The funniest guy on TV is David Duchovny - he's always saying things that are very flippant in situations that are anything but that." For example: A vampire asks Mulder if he wants to live forever. He replies, "Not if drawstring pants come back into style."

Worldwide renown and a Web site devoted to images of him in a swimsuit are all very well and good, but from birth Duchovny was destined for higher things. Born in New York on August 7, 1960, the second of three children, young David was pointed toward a life among books. "My academic ambitions were implanted rather than instinctual," he says now. His educator mother, Margaret, was born and raised in Aberdeen, Scotland. His father, Amram, is an author-playwright-publicist from Coney Island who now lives in Paris. His older brother, Daniel, directs commercials in Los Angeles and his sister, Laurie, teaches school in Brooklyn.

Of his roots, Duchovny says: "I feel half-Scottish, but I've only been there twice, both when I was under ten. I'm also a New York Jew, which is different from any other New Yorker and any other Jew. I'm a little schizophrenic, as you'd expect a Scottish Jew to be." In another mood, he describes the legacy of his parents' union as "mongrel vigor."

That union didn't last. But his parents' divorce (when he was 11) and his mother's subsequent financial struggles only reinforced his drive to excel in class. He won a scholarship to a top prep school, Collegiate, and took an after-school job in a meat market to help his mom make ends meet. Of his first work experience, he remembers, "I rode around on a bike with a square basket. It was interesting to get glimpses inside people's homes when I unloaded their groceries.

"One thing, though - people feel free to throw things a boys on those bikes in New York. They're big and slow and noisy. People can hear them coming and get stuff ready to throw, and you're not going fast enough to avoid being hit. You get eggs thrown at you, tomatoes, and paper cups full of warm Coke."

At Collegiate, where a classmate was John F. Kennedy, Jr., Duchovny played basketball. Instead of holding "most likely" votes, his senior class chose a theme song for each member of the class and an opposite-sex equivalent. Duchovny's theme song was the Mothers of Invention's "Duke of Prunes," because his nickname was Duke. His female equivalent, in his friends' judgment, was Angie Dickinson, "which I thought was right on," he notes. "I saw the resemblance." Those who recall his transvestite character on TV's Twin Peaks would agree.

As a member of Princeton's class of 1982, he dropped basketball but continued to excel in the classroom. He recalls snickering at a roommate's acting ambitions while he kept his own nose in his books.

But at Yale, where he had a teaching fellowship, he gradually loosened up and began questioning his academic commitment. He realized that "I wasn't ready to sentence myself, writing. I began searching for something else.

"I said, 'I know, I'll write drama. That way I can work with actors, a lot of whom are pretty girls.'" He got involved in Yale's strong theater department and started to act.

"I enjoyed myself more than I had for years, not since I'd played sports as a boy. It was like singing in church, passing the ball and the crowd cheers, kicking the enemy's head into the goal like the Aztecs. It was a peak experience. I couldn't get it from writing."

Duchovny tried to juggle his two lives. He started sneaking off the New York to model and do commercials (his first, in 1985, was for Lowenbrau beer). Once, flown to Los Angeles to test for TV pilots, he lay by the pool at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, dialed Connecticut, and called in sick. Meanwhile, when his showbiz associates asked him about his background, he let them think it was Yale's Drama School that had drawn him to New Haven.

In 1987 he committed to acting, which prompted a lingering guilt trip that leads him to call himself "happiness-handicapped." His decision to plunge into acting at 26 "drove my mother nuts," he recalls. "Any parent should fear for a child who wants to act. She feared for me, and in retrospect, I fear for myself."

Duchovny spent more than a year sleeping an a friend's couch and auditioning unsuccessfully. He read for Bull Durham, but Tim Robbins looked goofier. He tried out for Valmont, but Colin Firth looked better in a cocked hat.

Finally, director Henry Jaglom spotted him and pegged him as a seducer, casting him in New Year's Day (1989) opposite his girlfriend at the time, Maggie Jakobson. He played a string of dirty talkers on Julia Has Two Lovers, The Rapture, and Red Shoe Diaries, establishing the smolder factor that still works for him today, even though The X-Files' Mulder never lays a finger on Anderson's Agent Scully.

After bits in Beethoven, Ruby, and Chaplin, Duchovny played what he still calls the lead in the 1993 kill-fest Kalifornia, opposite Brad Pitt, who was about to become Brad Pitt. When reporters at the Golden Globe awards ceremony that year asked him what it was like to work with Pitt, he replied, "I tried to learn to be sexy from him."

Joke or no, Duchovny learned well; immediately afterward he was cast in The X-Files. He never speaks flippantly of the show, remaining loyal to its creator and executive producer, Chris Carter, who is also his squash partner after many a 12-hour workday in Vancouver. The series has maintained its top-20 ratings, and Duchovny asserts, "TV is as good as the movies. The X-Files can compete with any movie on any level except special effects."

And just to cover that exception, Duchovny spent last summer making an X-Files feature, The X-Files: Blackwood, scheduled for release this summer, for which he earned $4 million. He'll reveal nothing about the film, which reportedly has Mulder and Scully fighting an alien virus that turns people into lizards. He does say, "It has to do with themes that are similar to the show's. We did whatever you have to do to make it into a movie - that is bigger, faster, slicker."

Duchovny's future as Mulder probably involves building The X-Files into an L.A. - based movie franchise along the lines of Star Trek. Soon after meeting Leoni last year, he declared, "Either they'll move the show to L.A. or I won't be on the show any more." If that happens, he and Téa can make full use of the $3 million beach house they recently bought in Malibu.

Duchovny's and Leoni's marriage, a surprise to all but a few, came after a courtship of only four months. Introduced my their mutual agent, they agreed to meet for dinner, but filming his show tied him up in Vancouver, while hers kept her busy in Los Angeles. It took three weeks of increasingly intimate phone dating before they sat down together.

After on kiss at a restaurant, Duchovny's bachelor days were over. Previously, he had been involved for several years with Perrey Reeves, and had been liked in gossip columns with Winona Ryder on the strength of one dinner date that did not produce a kiss.

Leoni, who had been married once before, took the lead in bringing their relationship to a quick boil. "She closed the deal," Duchovny has said. The two New Yorkers returned to the city for the wedding, held in the courtyard of the school where Duchovny's mother works.

So far, marriage agrees with Duchovny. "It plants your feet firmly," he observes. "You can take a better swing that way." However, managing an international marriage means racking up all too many frequent-flyer points. "We try to spend as much time together as we can," he says. "Whoever has more days off will make the flight. It's a constant battle with our schedules." He gives a characteristically flip answer to the questions about future fatherhood: "Sure, at some point, But at this point I don't know what I'm having for lunch."

In the meantime, working up north suits Duchovny's Spartan tastes - he lives in an apartment not much grander than a grad student's digs. He can walk around Vancouver without exciting an American style fan frenzy everywhere he goes. On a free night he likes to swim laps, which he can do unmolested in a public pool. "After my swim I go eat at a health food restaurant," he says (he's vegetarian). "I have my one beer, and that's it. That may seem too disciplined, but if it's what you like to do, it's not discipline, is it?" he remains in close-enough-to-good basketball shape to sink a few hoops now and then. Yoga helps him relax.

Success, on the other hand, hasn't brought him peace. He dislikes small talk and obvious questions, and when humor doesn't work as a defense, he can seem a little surly. And he has to downplay his extensive education. When you're too smart for your job description, you have to live with having you jokes taken literally.

Some days he can't help saying things like, "I have a wide frame of reference, so when someone shows me something and asks if it isn't the best thing I've ever read I have to say 'It's pretty mediocre compared to Dostoyevsky.'"

Other days, he remembers, "If you're smart, you'll always be somebody who's never read a book who'll know twice what you know."

Mills, Bart. June 1998. "David Duchovny: X Marks The Star." Biography Magazine.