David Duchovny’s pet tarantula, part 1

On his sleeper cable hit, Californication, David Duchovny plays the somewhat failed writer and soulful horndog Hank Moody. When Moody finds his potential comeback book stolen right out from under his nose, by one of the women – girls, really – he has come to know in the Biblical sense, he turned to Academia to earn a living. Which is funny, since he himself came this close to being a professor.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

When I ask him why he abandoned the PhD he’d worked for some years on, he laughs. “Have you ever pursued a PhD?” he says. “I think the most honest answer is that I always felt like an outright impostor. I was interested in writing, and I was trying to find some way that I could live where I could make a living. I thought if I was a professor, I’d have three months off a year where I could write.”

And this was at Yale. After getting a Masters of English at Princeton. In other words, this actor’s no dummy.

I’m sitting with Duchovny at the Lexington Candy Shop, a relic on New York’s Upper East Side. The actor moved to this neighborhood in late 2008 with his wife, Tea Leoni, and their two children, Miller and West. It was her decision. They’d been living in sunny Malibu since Duchovny had the whole X-Files production moved from Vancouver to L.A. near the end of its run. That too was Tea’s decision. “It’s a pattern,” he laughs. “She wanted to raise the kids here. She wanted whatever it is that New York has to offer.” Such ambivalence could be forgiven coming from a man who spent the first three decades of his life here, growing up in what many think of as the real New York, not the playground it’s become, its citizens lugging Whole Foods bags through Central Park in the dead of night without a care in the world. “Not that I don’t love New York,” he says. “But I’m of the opinion that parents raise their kids, not so much cities.”

When he walked away from academia in the mid 80’s, he holed up in a friend’s apartment in Alphabet City (then it really was Alphabet City; now it’s just more East Village). His only real chore at the time was to feed a pet tarantula. “It’s depressing when you buy the tin,” he says, “and you get a nice full chirp… and then it gets weaker and weaker as the month goes on, until there’s one cricket left in there… and he’s next. That was kind of the metaphor for the year. I felt like the last cricket.”

That’s because he spent a couple years auditioning for everything (including Full House; they read him for every single role and still, thankfully, said no) and getting nothing. Nada. Zip. Then he got a commercial, for Lowenbrau. And he blew it. “Here’s to good friends… tonight is kinda special.” If it was so special, you’d have bought better beer. “It was my first time in front of a camera,” Duchovny says. “And I choked. It was improvised. I was [supposed to be] at a bar with ‘an old buddy.’ I started throwing a pretzel up and catching it in my mouth and I was like, ‘Thank God I’ve got something to do.’ An action. After many of those, I remember the director going, ‘Okay, we got the pretzel.’”

Image via Wikipedia

Eventually he landed some decent parts, and his film appearances quickly stacked up. Kalifornia, Beethoven, Chaplin, The Rapture, where he played a guy named Randy, appropriately enough, since he and not-yet-Scientologist Mimi Rogers had themselves a load of naked fun, albeit in the service of investigating deep Religious hokum.

This was not the first time that Duchovny would appear sans couture on celluloid. That distinction goes to his very first starring role, landed back in the late 80’s, in Henry Jaglom’s New Year’s Day, a little movie (unlike all those Jaglom blockbusters) which set a precedent that’s still playing out each week whenever Professor Moody drops trow. Which is a lot. But one of his best trow-droppings was also his funniest, and it wasn’t Hank Moody’s trow hitting the floor, it was Duchovny’s. Sorta.

Duchovny’s wry humor occasionally shone through all the somberness of the X-Files, but the people behind The Larry Sanders Show were really the first to understand that David Duchovny was, deep down, very funny. Playing a lonely, possibly-gay version of himself, he became almost as notorious as Sharon Stone, whose famous crotch-flash inspired this scene:

Check back next week for part 2 of my interview with David Duchovny.