A Man and His ‘X’

When David Duchovny started dating Tea Leoni, the sitcom star and rising movie actress, she told him she had never watched “The X-Files.”

In fact, she told him, she thought the television show that had made her date (eventuallyher husband) a global star, an object of Internet sexual obsession, a multimillionaire and a ceaselessly written-about magazine cover boy, was just a stupid science-fiction show.

He agreed.

“I said, ‘I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a really stupid science-fiction show, but it’s good.’ I said, ‘You just have to watch it, because if I explain it, it’s going to sound like what it is--a lame, dumb-ass show. But you watch it and somehow it’s good.’ ”

He delivers this with his usual deadpan aplomb, the one quality that Duchovny most shares with his small-screen alter ego, Fox Mulder. He gave Leoni a few of the best tapes (“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” among others), she fell in love with the show--and him--and now he’s sitting in his roomy trailer on the 20th Century Fox lot, his upholstered recliner within view of a couple of snapshots of Leoni lovingly tacked to cabinet doors. They’ve been married five months.

“They said it wouldn’t last, you know,” he says with a sigh.

Ditto for the show that went from being a tentative add-on to the Fox network schedule five years ago to a blockbuster series that fuels millions of insatiable fans and has already spawned a much-talked-about movie, shot this summer under a cloak of secrecy and slated for release next summer.

All those contradictions about the show that Duchovny tried to explain to his wife reverberate even more so as he stands at a crossroads in his life and career--or at least at the curb of it.

For four seasons, Duchovny has made eccentric FBI agent Mulder, who investigates unexplained cases related to paranormal phenomena (the so-called X-Files) and believes his sister was abducted by aliens, into one of television’s smartest and most watchable characters--as opposed to the nut case the character could have been.

But as he wrapped up work on the “The X-Files” movie and prepared to head up to Vancouver in Canada for a fifth season of the television show, Duchovny was tired of Mulder and proud of him at the same time.

The actor worries less about the movie roles he will be offered after “The X-Files” and more about when after will begin. “I get worried that it’s never going to end,” he says ruefully.

If he could, he would have the show end after this fifth season, but the chances of that happening are practically nonexistent, so he’s asking that the show be moved from its Canadian locale to Los Angeles.

“I’m married,” he says. “My wife lives in L.A. I have to go work in Vancouver. That’s a great hardship.”

Whether he’s really delivering an ultimatum--move the show or I won’t be back--seems up to interpretation. His agent indicates that it’s not a threat. “David will do the show,” says Risa Shapiro. “He loves doing the show.”

In the space of one interview, Duchovny zealously defends each season’s body of work (“You’re talking about 24 hours of television, 15 of which can stand up to any movie that comes out over the year”) and laughingly skewers the sometime-windiness of scripts packed with scientific and FBI jargon.

“It’s like, who’s writing this? Do you ever, like, stand up in the middle of the room down there in L.A. and try to read it out loud?” He chuckles. “Off a page? Forget about memorizing it and making it, like, talk. Just try and read it.”

(This, by the way, is nothing the producers haven’t heard directly from him.)

The unconsummated on-screen chemistry between Duchovny as Mulder and co-star Gillian Anderson as his partner, FBI agent Dana Scully, is palpable. But in real life, Duchovny and Anderson have a relationship as much a conundrum to outsiders as any X-File.

“We have a relationship that is completely odd and fabricated,” Duchovny says. “We’ve been thrown together, two people who don’t know each other, and we’ve been forced to spend more time together than married people do. So you can’t describe our relationship as ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ ”

Sounds a little frosty.

“It is frosty,” Gillian Anderson agrees when she is read Duchovny’s description of their relationship. “But it’s accurate.” She laughs. “It’s not that we don’t like each other. It’s complicated.”

Duchovny says he was annoyed that Anderson chose to make an issue of the fact that her salary was half his when she complained publicly at least half a year ago that she deserved a salary increase.

“To make it a gender issue is total [nonsense],” he says. “That’s not what it is. It’s just a seniority thing--seniority in terms of the initial contract, which stipulates all subsequent contracts. That’s just the way it goes--and the way it’s always gone. . . . There’s nobody out there who gets less than they can get. I want her to be as happy as she can be. If that means making as much money as she can, then I want her to make as much money as she can. That’s why I didn’t like the tone of the pronouncements, because it has nothing to do with me. Her contract has nothing to do with mine.”

Anderson, who just won an Emmy for her portrayal of Scully, says she got a raise after the season ended.

She won’t discuss whether her complaints about earning half what Duchovny made meant she was literally being paid half of his reported $100,000-per-episode salary (a figure he neither confirms nor denies).

“I feel uncomfortable talking about the numbers,” she says. “It’s about what’s fair for two people working equally on a show.”

Whatever the salary, if Duchovny had his way, he would be making a transition from television to movies. In fact, he had a working movie career before “The X-Files” with roles in several films, including Henry Jaglom’s “New Year’s Day,” “The Rapture” and “Kalifornia.” There was also a turn as the narrator of the fuzzy semi-porn “The Red Shoe Diaries” Showtime movie and subsequent series. But none of those roles were the kind of substantial or prestigious ones his television stardom may now make available to him.

Duchovny is testing his big-screen muscle in a quirky, uneven film called “Playing God,” which opened Oct. 17 to a disappointing gross of $1.9 million. The movie’s relatively small budget and odd subject matter mean lower stakes for him personally as he takes on his first starring film role.

Still, as he made the rounds of talk shows in the last few weeks promoting the movie, he was peppered with questions about whether he could make the transition from small screen to big. On NBC’s “Today” show, he was moved to conjure up the hypothetical pairing of one of film’s great stars with one of television’s most banal shows:

“If Robert De Niro had started in ‘Charles in Charge,’ he still would have had the career he had,” Duchovny said confidently. “I think it’s just fate.”

‘Come with me, I have to take my clothes off,” Duchovny says in that nasally Mulder monotone that leaves you wondering if he’s just stating a fact or deliberately being playful. In any case, he’s just emerged from the closed set of the “X-Files” movie--known by its working title, “Blackwood”--into the bright sunshine of the Fox lot, and he wants to shed his rugged outdoor gear of nylon pants, black turtleneck sweater, down vest and hiking boots. (He reveals no clues as to why Mulder is dressed in this get-up for the movie.)

Understatement is his choice whether he’s acting or being delightfully wry. It’s the sort of thing that works perfectly for Mulder.

“I don’t naturally gravitate to overstatement,” he says. “My natural instinct is to make it as real as possible and as subtle as possible.”

In seconds, he’s emerged from the trailer’s bedroom in jeans. He’s tall and so lean he’s almost skinny. His light brown hair falls in wisps over his tanned forehead. Now a swimmer and yoga enthusiast, he grew up an athlete as well as a student, and his greatest disappointment at Princeton University was that he never went beyond junior varsity as a basketball and baseball player. His heartache over falling short of success in the two sports he adores didn’t interfere with his studies. He graduated in 1982 summa cum laude.

Duchovny is not a pretty boy like Tom Cruise or a chiseled matinee idol like Mel Gibson. The nose is a little too long and thick, the jaw a little too rounded. He can take a bad picture. Nonetheless, his look is a sort of late-20th century imperfect urban handsomeness. On screen, he radiates an offhanded sexual allure--as much a function of his looks as his droll smartness--that has captivated legions of women fans. A devoted cadre of them have practically burned a hole in the Internet writing about him.

“I think the camera loves him, his facial expressions,” says Shapiro, his agent. “I find that with actors who do become movie stars, it’s about loving to watch them.”

“I don’t think I look like a lot of other people,” Duchovny muses when asked how he felt about his looks. “I like that I look like my father and mother put together--that’s a Russian Jew and a Scottish Lutheran, and I like that it all looks mixed up. . . . I’m sure my nose wasn’t an asset until I was David Duchovny. Before that, it was, like, ‘Yeah, that kind of Jewish-looking guy with the kind of big nose.’ ”

He sits back in the big lounger in his trailer between calls to the set. His beloved mutt Blue, usually with him on the Vancouver set, is not with him on the studio lot. “It’s not a good set for her,” he says. “It’s all cement.”

His lunch arrives, but he doesn’t touch it. “You don’t want to see me eat. It’s ugly,” he says. He nurses a hot pink potassium drink instead.

The subject of “Playing God,” his new movie, intrigued him--a surgeon who loses his license because of drug use and gets tapped for his surgical skills by a violent underworld figure (played by Timothy Hutton).

“You’ve seen this character in movies when bad guys get hurt and can’t go to the hospital so they go to the bad doctor,” Duchovny says. “I’d never seen him as a focus of a movie, and I thought that was an interesting story to tell.”

The movie turned out to be less the character study Duchovny wanted and more a “colorful ride.”

“I think it’s a good movie,” he says. “It’s not the movie I wanted to make. Like a lot of movies, you think something going in and you want to make a certain movie, but then it takes on a life of its own, something Frankensteinian.”

His agent and manager are looking for scripts for Duchovny now. “I would love to see him do a comedy at some point,” Shapiro says.

Duchovny is not averse to the idea of a comedy, though he’s not high on the romantic comedies that were so popular this summer.

“They look silly to me,” he says. “I don’t want to do a movie just because it’s a romantic comedy.”

Duchovny says he doesn’t care what the genre is as long as the script is good.

“If there was a science-fiction script that came my way that was the best script I ever read, I would do that.”

Anyone who works with him--or interviews him--knows what a dry wit he can be.

“He told me when he first came to Hollywood and would read for sitcoms, no one thought he was funny, because his delivery was so dry,” says “X-Files” creator Chris Carter. “He’s one of the funniest people I know. He’s got a comedian’s timing.”

Duchovny was sublimely funny as himself on “The Larry Sanders Show,” the HBO series starring Garry Shandling that satirizes the talk-show business. He did two shows, but it’s the second one, in which he played having an unabashed crush on Sanders, that won him one of his two Emmy nominations this past year. (He didn’t win.)

But at the moment, it’s Mulder that his fans are waiting to see him play when the show has its fifth-season premiere next Sunday. The start date is later than usual because the cast and writers were working on the movie this summer, and Fox was reluctant to put the season premiere up against the World Series. (In an unusual marketing ploy, the movie will pick up where the show leaves off when it reaches the end of the season next spring.)

One thing you probably won’t see is Mulder and Scully kissing. (Though all bets are off on the movie.) The sexual tension will likely remain sensed but unplayed.

“And that is enough,” Gillian Anderson says. “The touch of our hands on ‘The X-Files’ is more arousing than a kiss on another show.”

Duchovny attributes whatever sexual tension exists in the show to Mulder’s and Scully’s mutual respect.

“I think it’s sexy when you see a man and a woman caring about what the other one thinks.”

This will be their lightest season so far--only 21 episodes as opposed to last year’s 24.

“Personally I’d like to do 20, because I think it’s a grueling schedule,” says Duchovny, who has done 97 “X-Files” episodes. “I think the quality suffers when you turn out more product. I could easily take away six or seven from last year and be very happy.”

Which ones?

“Off the top of my head? ‘Teliko,’ ” he says and pauses. “See? I’ve already repressed them from my memory.”

But he hastens to add: “At our worst, we’re still watchable. That’s just me--I want them all to be great.”

He says he has studied all the seminal acting techniques, but sometimes he just uses something basic.

“My approach is: whatever works. If it means holding your bladder, OK. Sometimes I’ll be leaving my trailer and go, ‘I have to pee. Nah, that’ll work for the scene.’ Then, of course, you’re out there for two hours. So it doesn’t work for the scene.”

After four seasons, Duchovny is weary of the questions about Mulder or how he’s like Mulder. For instance, he has said before that he does not believe in paranormal phenomena.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he cracks.

There is little Duchovny or the writers can or would do to change Mulder at this point. If anything, Duchovny wants to make sure that Mulder is not treated by his FBI colleagues with any of the newfound deference accorded Duchovny.

‘I’m sure my nose wasn’t an asset until I was David Duchovny. Before that, it was, like, “Yeah, that kind of Jewish-looking guy with the kind of big nose.” ’

“It’s important that Mulder is a joke to everybody else,” he says. “What I like most about Mulder is his integrity, his lack of interest in what other people think about him. That’s what makes him a hero.”

Duchovny asks to make changes in script or emotional content when a scene seems wrong. When Scully first tells Mulder in last season’s “Memento Mori” episode that she has brain cancer, the writers wanted him to cry. He objected.

“That’s not interesting to me,” Duchovny says. “It may be true, some people may react that way. But in my life, most people try not to feel. I see actors trying to feel. To me that’s unreal. We go through life trying not to cry.”

Instead of crying, Duchovny played composed but struggling. “Who cares if I’m crying. Are you crying watching?”

And when Scully misled Mulder on how sick she really was, potentially putting them in danger, Duchovny thought his character was being too sympathetic too often. He would have been angry.

“I said, ‘I would love Mulder to be an unreasonable and objectionable human being at this point and maybe get mad at someone who’s dying of cancer.’ To me that’s more interesting than going, ‘Hey, brave soldier, buck up.’ ”

The writers let him adjust Mulder’s attitude.

“It didn’t help. The show still sucked. It was called ‘Elegy’ ” he recalls. “That was a bad, bad show. I mean, you had the killer nurse. It was bad.”

Of course, this season the biggest change is not in Mulder but in Duchovny, who now sports a thick gold wedding band. His bride wears a matching one.

Their agent got the idea to fix them up as she sat chatting with Leoni in her office and fielding a call from Duchovny at the same time.

“As an agent, you put things together all the time,” says Shapiro, who was struck by her clients’ similarities.

“They are both extremely good-looking people, they are both extremely well-educated, they went to private school in Manhattan, they went to Ivy League schools, and they are both about to have great movie careers. He wasn’t dating anyone, she wasn’t dating anyone . . .”

But Leoni, the star of the NBC sitcom “The Naked Truth” and an actor known for her physical comedy, passed on her agent’s suggestion at first. She’d heard the rumors about Duchovny being a lady’s man. (“But that’s not really true,” Shapiro says.)

The agent suggested that Duchovny show up at a party that she knew Leoni would be attending. Unfortunately, Duchovny got there as Leoni was leaving.

“Hi!” he said.

“I’m going home,” she said.

“That went well,” Duchovny told his agent later.

But eventually each asked Shapiro about the other, phone numbers were exchanged, and they started chatting long distance, Vancouver to L.A., around January. They dined together three weeks later in L.A.

“She’s so--” Duchovny pauses, contemplating how to describe Leoni, “smart and funny, and she’s so loyal. She’s honest and she’s kind. The most gentle person I’ve ever met. And she really seemed to care about me. Which shocked me. I thought, ‘I don’t want to [mess] this up.’ ”

He quickly asked her to marry him.

“I ended up asking her every day until we got married. It was like our little thing. I still ask her. She’ll say, ‘Ask me,’ and I’ll ask her. She never said no.”

By May, they were sneaking off to New York to get married. “Well, we’re old,” says Duchovny, 37. Leoni is 31. “We know what we want.”

Through a publicist, Leoni declined to talk about Duchovny--as he had warned. “We’re not going to cross-pollinate that way.”

They are a favorite target of paparazzi who followed them incessantly on their wedding day in New York and snapped them around Los Angeles house hunting.

It’s a long-standing issue for Duchovny, who chafes at the relentlessness of the photographers as well as the fans.

“I understand why people get a little nutty, but it’s annoying too. Some people grab you. You’re walking around in your little bubble and all of a sudden there’s somebody grabbing your shoulder and you’re, like, ‘What ?? ‘ Yeah, I’ll say, ‘Don’t touch me.’ And then it’s like, ‘Ooh, what [a jerk].’ There is no way to win in any situation.”

Not that he expects you to feel too sorry for a guy with a house on the beach in Vancouver, a house near the beach in L.A.--and all the free Nike gear he can cart home. That’s one perk of celebrity that he truly enjoys. (One of his few extravagances is a collection of sneakers that numbers about 100.)

Duchovny didn’t come to acting until his late 20s, when he was deeply involved in another career: academics. He was working on a doctorate in English at Yale University, preparing to write his dissertation, “Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry.”

“Sings, doesn’t it?” he says.

He went to New York one summer in hopes of earning $2,000 tending bar. His best friend, a struggling actor, suggested Duchovny try to get a commercial instead.

“He brought me to an audition and I got a couple of callbacks,” Duchovny says. An agent expressed some interest as long as he promised to take a class. His acting training was nil, save for a small role in a Yale playwriting student’s production.

After a while, Duchovny was spending more time in New York studying and auditioning than he was working on his thesis. So he made the leap to full-time aspiring actor. Suddenly it wasn’t just a lark, it was his potential livelihood. He felt himself stiffen up.

“There was a period there,” he says with a chuckle, “when I decided to become an actor when I was probably doing the worst work I’ll ever do and having the worst success.” And he was 28--old to be starting an acting career.

“I’m glad it worked out,” he says, “because it was certainly a stupid thing to do.”

Probably more memorable than his movies is Duchovny’s role as the transvestite FBI agent in David Lynch’s television series “Twin Peaks.”

He expected “The X-Files” to have a shorter run than the avant-garde “Twin Peaks” and be no more memorable than his smaller parts in movies.

“Whatever money or power that I get from being able to choose what I want to do because of doing this show, that’s incidental,” Duchovny says. “The most important thing for me is that I’m ready to do my best work now because of this show, because I had to go to work every day, 250 days out of the year. And act. If I had gone from doing one or two movies a year, I would have never gotten that self-training. That’s been the greatest gift of the series for me.”