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Halfway through our hour-long conversation, David Duchovny slumps in his seat a little then gently chastises me. “I got tired while you were talking,” he groans. In fairness, I had been talking a lot, but only because I was trying to list everything he’s managed to do in the past year.
There’s his podcast, Fail Better, in which he’s wrung incredibly candid interviews from notoriously reticent stars like Alec Baldwin and Robert Downey Jr, more on which later. There’s his book of poetry, About Time, which came out last month. There’s his History Channel show Secrets Declassified With David Duchovny. As we speak, he’s just finished an eight-date tour, where he performed songs from the three folk-rock albums he’s released over the last decade. We are ostensibly here to discuss Malice, his new Prime Video series. Had we spoken a couple of weeks later, God knows how many new projects he would have flung himself into. In other words, no wonder he’s tired.
But Malice is a good place to start. A six-part psychological thriller partly set in Greece, it’s a series where Duchovny’s boorish wealthy venture capitalist and his family are terrorised by a deranged nanny played by, of all people, Jack Whitehall. I have to confess that, at first glimpse, the premise sounded a little like one of those made-for-TV movies Channel 5 broadcasts on weekday afternoons. However, Malice was written by James Wood – the man who created the all-time great sitcom Rev – so its tone is enjoyably sharp and ripe. And anyone possessed with a desperate need to see David Duchovny’s buttocks will be fully satisfied within the first five minutes.
“I hate that that’s the introduction to the character,” he grimaces when reminded of this. “That’s not the way it goes. That’s not who this guy is gonna be. But I guess that’s OK.”
What he is going to be – and this isn’t a spoiler, since it’s explained in the very first scene of the series – is dead. And it seems fairly certain who did it. Call it Chekhov’s Deranged Nanny if you like.
“This isn’t a whodunnit, because you know who did it straight off the bat,” Duchovny smiles. “And I was scared about this at first. Like, who’s going to continue to watch if we give it away? For me, the balancing act was how can it make sense that my character doesn’t figure out that this guy is trying to kill him? How can he not be stupid?”
Duchovny is quick to praise Whitehall, who makes his dramatic debut here. “If comedians commit to the acting part of acting, they’re some of the best actors,” he says of Whitehall’s uncanny creepiness. “Doing standup is the most terrifying situation, standing with a bunch of people and having to make them laugh. They can be very brave people.”
You could argue that Duchovny is just as courageous. The bulk of his work outside acting revolves around a form of intensely personal bloodletting, allowing him to probe his demons in a manner that his acting career doesn’t allow. Part of the reason he’s able to get his Fail Better guests to open up so freely is his willingness to go there first. He convinced Downey Jr to talk about his period of addiction and incarceration – a subject that has previously caused him to walk out of interviews – by mentioning his own experiences with AA.
His interview with Gillian Anderson, with whom he had a fractious relationship during the filming of The X-Files, is revelatory; an hour of two people discussing things that had been deliberately left unsaid for decades, from Duchovny’s unwillingness to support Anderson’s request for equal pay to their failure to inform each other about their desire to leave the series.
What’s more, his poetry book is sometimes so intimate it’s almost uncomfortable to read. One poem, Dead Seven, concerns the death of his father; another describes the moment he had to reckon with the sight of a dead mouse during a walk with his three-year-old daughter (“It is Daddy who cannot face too much death,” he writes).
The introduction of the book states that “Poetry is not useful. And that is exactly why we need it.” More than anything, this sentiment feels like it informs Duchovny’s entire worldview; that a meandering search for personal fulfilment will always outshine relentless careerism. “I have young kids who are entering the workforce, and it just seems so much bleaker than it was when I was their age,” he says. “When they were in school, everything was all about ‘How is this useful? How is this going to be used?’ Everything is used. Everything is efficient. And it’s moral. Like, if you can’t use it, there must be something wrong with it. Imagine not having to worry about whether we can make money off this thing and it’s just the thing that we’re playing at.”
As such, he says, his writing and music and podcasting represent a form of play. “I like to play different games,” he says. “I take play very seriously, but I don’t want to be a pretentious asshole either.”
Duchovny describes Malice as “a bingey thing,” with all six episodes available at the same time. It’s a far cry from the role that made him famous, as Fox Mulder in The X-Files, on which he worked for 10 months a year for seven years. As soon as I bring it up, I feel slightly guilty; surely every time Duchovny sits down with anyone he must sense in the pit of his stomach that the subject is bound to come up.
“It’s not the pit of my stomach, but it’s like, I probably don’t have anything to say about it,” he shrugs. I marvel at the fact that The X-Files was a product of the old network days, where seasons would run for 25 episodes, then have another 25 ready for the same time next year. “It’s unthinkable now,” he nods. “You look at something as great as Game of Thrones or even The Sopranos. We did over 200 episodes, and they’ve done 60 or 70. And that’s not to denigrate them at all. I mean, that’s fantastic artistic work, but the sheer volume is something to be impressed by as well.”
What’s even more impressive to him is the fact that every X-Files episode had to stand alone. “It’s really a testament to the writers’ room, and to [creator] Chris Carter,” he says. “We’re not even talking about 25 episodes of Law and Order, where you need a case each week. We’re talking about 25 episodes that could each stand as a movie. I’m glad I only had to memorise the fucking lines.”
This, the fact that the show went on so long and maintained such high standards, seems to be the thing that gives him the greatest sense of pride. “Nobody gives awards for that,” he says. “Nobody gives awards by cross-referencing quantity with quality. But I think they should. In my mind, I give Chris Carter and the writers’ room awards, and I give Gillian and I awards for the amount of work it took to do 25 episodes in 10 months. Nobody gives awards for how hard it was to do that show. But I know it.”
Duchovny left The X-Files after seven seasons. Although this was partly down to tiredness, he also started to feel boxed in by the phenomenon the show had become. “When I first got off The X-Files, it was like, ‘I just want to make art, and I only want 100 people to like it.’ I was reacting against this global embrace. I was like, ‘Oh, never again. I’m gonna do arty things and little theatres and make a really unpopular TV show.’”
Arguably, it was the best move he could have made. Although he went on to star in another long-running show (Californication, popular enough to win him a Golden Globe), walking away from a show like The X-Files at the peak of its global success has given him both the space and the courage to show us who he really is.
He admits he’s still torn between the safety of a television set, with its schedules and its routine and its money, and the more adventurous avenues of his career where he’s willing to give more of himself to a potentially smaller audience. “I approach the smaller stuff almost like mom and pop stuff, because I control it all,” he says. “And then you contrast that with something like The X-Files or a big Amazon show which is not mom and pop.”
“For me, at this point, it’s always about trying to find that thing that speaks to me,” he continues. “And some of the projects I do speak less audibly to me, but they’re interesting in terms of life. You know, I think saying yes gets you further than saying no.”
Looking at everything he’s done, not just in this last year but over the past three decades, it feels like this might be Duchovny’s motto. “Saying no might get you a coherent career,” he smiles, “but saying yes gets you an adventurous one.”
Malice is on Prime Video from 14 November.
