David Duchovny’s pet tarantula, part 2

We ended our last segment with David Duchovny blowing his first shot in front of a camera, when he clung to his pretzel trick like we Americans cling to our babies and guns. After his first real film role in New Year’s Day, from the notoriously mean Henry Jaglom, Duchovny, like so many before him and countless others since, went to LA to audition.

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Out in the great salt lick, he read for everything and got nothing. The makers of Full House spent a whole day shoving him into every one of the main roles like so much Playdo. None stuck, thank God.

Imagining David Duchovny doing anything in Full House is as painful as picturing Bob Saget playing Hank Moody in Californication. The truth here, the deeply buried lead, is that Duchovny has always been funny, just not in an obvious way. Even Fox Mulder had his moments; his sly wit was often the only hint of sunshine in an otherwise somber affair. The key to Duchovny’s funny bone is his melancholy. It’s the foundation that Hank Moody was built from. When I point out that he seems to carry sadness around with him like a soldier’s pack, Duchovny laughs first, and nods second. “And there wasn’t room for that in Full House,” he agrees, finishing his milky coffee. Unlike Special Agent Dale Cooper on Twin Peaks, he does not take his cup as ‘black as the sky on a moonless night.’ “It was probably lucky for me that I didn’t get the television shows I auditioned for. I could never book a guest-starring role on a television show, except for Twin Peaks. People would say, ‘Oh you’re a film actor,’ and I’d say, ‘But I don’t have any money.’ That was always my reply. Thank you for the compliment, but loan me fifty.”

Duchovny didn’t remain destitute for long. Though it wasn’t for a lack of trying. In a moment of loyalty that’s either sweet or insane, he decided to turn down the X-Files offer. “I had another job,” he says. “A two-day role or something, and I had promised the director that I would do this role. It conflicted with The X-Files. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna be a stand-up guy, and I told my agents that I’m not gonna do The X-Files. I said, ‘There’s a lot of other shows like that that’ll come along.’ [X-Files Casting Director] Randy Stone said to me, ‘I’ve only said this to one other actor: if you take this job you’ll never have to work again. I said that to Woody Harrelson, Cheers.’ It’s not why I did it,” Duchovny says, grinning, or smirking, or both. “But I was convinced.” He still thinks of the show as the best thing that ever happened to his career, but not because of the money. What he didn’t realize at the time was how much he needed to work, to act, every day, in order to improve. “By the third or fourth year,” he says, “I really started to understand what I do and what I can do. It took me a long, long time. Not until Californication did I really feel like I was able to access what I always thought I could. I’m a slow learner.”

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The X-Files yanked back the curtain on Duchovny, putting his face in every television in town, exactly where he’d never imaged it would be, and keeping it there for most of the nineties. Even his very public contract dispute, which reduced his involvement with the show’s last two seasons, only lead to greater fame. Though his issues over money didn’t keep him out of I Want to Believe, the second X-Files feature film. Despite its disappointment at the box office (it earned less than a quarter of what the first film earned ten years earlier), there are still talks of sending Muller and Scully one more time to the silver screen. Duchovny has said he’s interested. Since finishing the show, Duchovny has worked steadily, if not aggressively, appearing in an episode of another cultural phenomenon (Sex and the City) and a handful of films that passed mostly under the radar, his hilarious turn as a seriously obsessive hand model in Zoolander being the exception.

Duchovny in Zoolander.

He also got back to doing what he’d always wanted to do: writing. In 2004 he made a film called House of D and no, the D doesn’t stand for “Duchovny,” though a hell of a lot of moviegoers stayed away, probably thinking it did. It stands for “detention,” specifically a women’s detention center that once stood in the heart of Greenwich Village. Now it’s a park, but before 1974, windows in its cells allowed the female inmates to talk freely with, or scream obscenities at, pedestrians walking down sixth avenue.

Check back next time for the final installment of David Duchovny’s pet tarantula.