Evolving all the time
by John Millar

OK Magazine (Freetime Section), UK, June 29, 2001

When David Duchovny was offered the alien hunter role in Evolution, he was worried about getting typecast. But as The X Files actor points out, he can't help looking and sounding like Fox Mulder, so he might as well enjoy himself!

David Duchovny admits that, if he had known what he was getting himself into, the last thing he wanted his next project to be was battling on the big screen with space creatures. Yet after spending eight years hunting aliens in the smash TV series The X Files, here he is starring in the big budget movie Evolution, playing a scientist who has to save the world from all-conquering beasties from outer space.

The tall, handsome star tells Freetime that the reason why he agree to yet another alien encounter was that movie-maker Ivan Reitman, who created the smash hit Ghostbusters comedies, had asked him to do the film before David had even seen the script.

'He said he was interested in me doing it and I was excited because I wanted to work with Ivan,' says David, who had appeared in Reitman's Beethoven. 'So I went home and read the script and I can't say that I was overjoyed that there were aliens in it. But still, I wanted to do this big type of summer comedy. If I had had my choice there wouldn't be aliens in it. But it's a superficial similarity.' He adds: 'Evolution couldn't be more different from the kind of stuff I've been doing for the past eight years.'

Indeed, this film plays it strictly for laughs. But David was pleased to note he did not - pardon the pun - alienate his X Files fans. 'They get jokes that I was not aware of. There is a line where I say that we can't call the government because I know those people,' he chuckles, continuing: 'Ivan called me from an early screening and said: "They laugh at that line and it's not a funny line." They figured out that people were laughing at The X Files reference. And I did not get it when I said it - at all.'

Although it has been The X Files and his character, agent Fox Mulder, which have given the 40-year-old David his international fame, he has also built an impressive catalogue of movie roles. They include Kalifornia, The Rapture, Playing God and Chaplin.

Despite a certain reluctance to working with aliens, he insists that he doesn't deliberately steer away from any script that might feature a character who is close to Fox Mulder. 'People will see him in whatever I do because of the physical resemblance,' says David. 'Unless I take a balloon filled with helium everywhere with me I'm going to sound somewhat similar and look very similar, so that's just something that people are going to do anyway.'

When it comes to the film choices he makes, the American star insists that there is neither rhyme or reason to them. I really don't have a plan. I've been wrong and I've been right.' He underlines that by pointing out that when he was doing the doggy comedy Beethoven, in which he was cast as a villain, he was doing two movies at the same time.

'One was something called Ruby and the other was Beethoven. I had small parts in both. I thought Beethoven was this embarrassing dog movie while Ruby was this prestigious project about Jack Ruby and the Kennedy assassination. And it turned out that it was actually the opposite way round. Ruby was a dismally received failure and Beethoven was actually a sweet movie and a success.' David is relaxed about his lack of box office savvy. 'I have no idea. I don't trust that my judgement will come through in terms of box office success or anything like that. I can only trust what I like and that's what I try to do.'

While making Evolution, David worked for the first time with Hannibal star Julianne Moore, Seann William Scott form Road Trip and Say it isn't so star Orlando Jones. 'Orlando and I got along great. I really enjoyed working with him and I love Seann, he's really funny. It was also a pleasure to work with Julianne, ' he says.

The star also reveals that there was a fire on the set. David is very low-key about the real-life drama. 'We were doing this scene towards the end when the whole cave is exploding and we were all on the stage, and there were some fireballs involved. These fireballs caught on the stuff that made up the set .....which was plastic and toxic. So we had to get out of there. There would have been danger if you had stood there and inhaled toxic fumes, but there was no danger from the blaze.'

Now his time on The X Files is over, Freetime wonders how David feels about the years he spent on the hit series? 'I look back with a whole jumbled mixture of feelings,' he says. 'It's gratitude and exhaustion and fear and nostalgia - just all of the things that you would expect from leaving anything that you had spent eight years doing so intensely for so many hours a day.'

David lives in California with his wife Tea Leoni, the glamorous actress who will soon be seen in Jurassic Park III, and their two-year-old daughter Madelaine West. He says he has been enjoying married life and fatherhood. 'It's great. Every day is a new surprise.'

He laughs when Freetime asks whether Tea, who is a golf fanatic, has got him hooked on the game. 'Hooked in the sense of like being hooked on a bad drug,' he says with a chuckle. 'I think about golf. I occasionally like to play it. But I am eternally frustrated by it. I figure I won't shoot my age unless I live to be 100.'

In the future David says that he is looking at writing, directing and acting. 'I'm trying to do all three of these things. I have a project in mind but I have to execute it. Everybody has a project in mind,' he says, laughing again. 'I'm just taking it as it comes right now. I'm going to draw a deep breath. It has been an eight-year sprint, occasionally working in my breaks from The X Files. So I just want to catch my breath and see what I want to do next.'

Source: OK! Magazine, thanks London Connection! (you can link to or archive this article)