Something spooky happened to me at the Dorchester Hotel on a sunny London summer’s day. Something very X-Files. I began to understand what people see in David Duchovny.
The star of the hit X-Files and Californication TV series, now appearing in the movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, has long been rated one of Hollywood’s hottest men. Until today, I couldn’t see it.
Admittedly, I’d had a long flight the night before. I was a guest of Twentieth Century Fox, who gave the film its London premiere in Leicester Square (the traditional venue for such things) a night later and groups of journalists were being gathered at the very posh Dorchester (again, the traditional venue for such things) for a junket, as it is called, and put round a table to chat to Duchovny and later X-Files creator Chris Carter and scriptwriter Frank Spotnitz.
So there we were, six of us, representing Holland, Denmark, Italy, Turkey, Britain and South Africa. We waited for what seemed like an age in the well-appointed room.
Then he is there.
Taller than he seems on screen, Duchovny wears jeans and a blue shirt (untucked, two buttons open at the neck) that complements the grey-blue of his eyes. On one wrist he has a leather thong and a leather bracelet with metal studs. On one finger, in the ring position, there is a cursive tattoo that I struggle to read as he gestures — something like “onyf”, it looks like. What could it mean?
He has a neat, greying goatee, much more fetching than the face fuzz he wears for a time in the X-Files movie, which Duchovny himself refers to as “that silly beard”. He seems laid-back; he even swings in his chair at one point. Yet he is also somewhat insolent, which is perhaps a cover for shyness or self-consciousness. But then who’d be comfortable faced by six journalists with funny accents and bilingual print-outs of their questions, pens and tape recorders at the ready?
“The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” he says, “is a deceptively complicated movie about human relationships. I don’t want to scare people away — it’s not like homework — but I’m impressed by the human scale of it.”
He sees the relationship between the two former FBI agents, Mulder and Scully, as the real story of this film about hunting a killer with the help of an ex-priest who has visions.
There are other important things in it, at least as far as the character of Mulder is concerned. “The journey he takes is rediscovering his true passion,” says Duchovny of a persona he first took on a decade and a half ago. And Mulder’s problem, he avers, is “how to balance his work and his relationship” when he’s “kinda obsessive” about the former.
He is asked a variety of standard questions from around the table. Does the world need a new X-Files movie? No, he says, the world needs alternative sources of energy. What did he learn in making it? Nothing.
Perhaps that’s what happens when you already have a master’s in literature from Yale. He has written episodes of The X-Files as well as, apparently, poetry.
The British journalist has done her homework. She asks if he still writes poetry. He laughs. “I’m kind of between poems at the moment,” he says. Still, he’s keen to write more. He says he “loved more than anything” writing and directing his movie, House of D, a coming-of-age tale set in early-1970s Greenwich Village that came out a few years ago and failed to make it to South Africa.
Roger Ebert, the best-known and perhaps most widely read film critic in the US, coined a new word to describe it: “doofusoid”.
I wonder if there’s a hint of the doofusoid about Carter and Spotnitz, who have the unenviable task of following their star’s 18 minutes around the table of six journalists with their own equivalent period of self-explanation. They are certainly more earnest about The X-Files: I Want to Believe than Duchovny is, for all his patter about how it’s really about relationships.
For Carter, the movie is about “faith”, which is much needed in today’s “depressed” world: “We live in a 24/7 news cycle and you get so much bad news and you really feel the weight of it.” For him, the message of the film (which he says he learned from a religious scholar who studied all faiths and distilled their teachings) is “don’t give up”.
He should mention that to Duchovny, if the actor is going to put his charisma where his mouth is and start campaigning for alternative energy sources.
Should Duchovny do so, I’d be the first to support him, not just because it’s a good cause but because he’s as sexy as they say. I don’t know why I haven’t seen it on screen before. I must be doofusoid.