David Duchovny thought he'd left
alien-busting behind when he quit The X-Files. The trouble was
film-maker Ivan Reitman didn't know much about the long-running
television series when he handed the 40-year-old actor the script for Evolution.
"Ivan just basically said, 'I want you to do this movie' and handed
me this script," recalls Duchovny with a smile. "I walked out
of his office thinking, 'Yeah I wanted to do a movie before I went back
to finish my last year of X-Files, perfect."
But when he got home and opened the script he found it was about a
couple of professors who discover that a meteorite, which lands in the
Arizona desert, contains protoplasm, that gives rise to - aliens.
"Aliens! I was like 'God Damn'," laughs Duchovny. What changed
his mind was Reitman, who directed Ghostbusters, had turned the
potential sci-fi thriller into a comedy.
"The style of comedy in Evolution is 180 degrees from what
I've been doing. The fact that there's aliens in the movie is just a
kind of coincidence," he says.
This time Duchovny gets to do a goofy version of the relentless agent
Mulder and Evolution is sort of an alien-busting version of Ghostbusters,
with the special effects of Alien and Jurassic Park thrown
in.
Duchovny plays Dr Ira Kane, a community college biology teacher, who
along with a geology colleague (Orlando Jones) finds something odd about
a meteorite that crashes in the desert. This in turn drags in a clumsy
scientist (Julianne Moore) with Dan Aykroyd hamming it up as the uptight
Governor of Arizona.
While the actors go through their paces, tongues firmly in their cheeks,
the stars of the film are undoubtedly the special effects that give rise
to slug hybrids and snarling drooling beasties.
It's silly and hardly a step upwards in Duchovny's film career, but the
actor was keen to work with Reitman again with whom he worked a decade
ago on the film comedy Beethoven.
"I'm a fan of Ivan's style of comedy, I appreciate it," says
Duchovny. "I did the movie because I think it's a clever idea and I
wanted to do this type of comedy."
The baggage he brought from The X-Files had nothing to do with
Reitman, adds Duchovny. "He didn't care about me being involved
with aliens again, so I decided the kind of acting I would do in this
movie would be so different from any I've done it would be a superficial
coincidence."
Reitman thinks Duchovny is actually a
good comedian. "When I met him way back I thought he's a
good-looking guy who's also smart and funny," says Reitman.
"Then he got hired on The X-Files and he didn't smile for
eight years."
The shadow of his eight year run in The X-Files is going to hang
over his film career for a long time, aliens or no aliens, admits
Duchovny. "It's such a successful and culturally pervasive show.
People are going to see me as Mulder no matter what I do.
"I think for the rest of my life people are going to say to me, 'I
didn't know you could be funny?'"
Getting out from under that legacy is now his focus, he says. The actor
was last on the big screen with British actresses Minnie Driver and
Joely Richardson in the romantic comedy Return To Me.
Married to actress Tea Leoni, recently seen alongside Nicolas
Cage in Family Man, with whom he has a two-year-old daughter
Madelaine, Duchovny says he has a lot of trouble coming to terms with
the sex symbol image he inherited from The X-Files. Certainly
nobody could accuse the actor, who has a Masters degree in English
Literature from Yale, of being an airhead.
"I don't know why there is this big deal about my appearance,"
he says. "I remember for a long time I wished I was blond. I wished
my nose was smaller and my eyes bigger."
He puts all the fuss down to the fact that he was in a high profile
television hit. "I think people's perception of you comes from what
they see on the screen. It gives an illusion that I'm somehow more
compelling than I really am."
While he is not quite the macho hunk of his Mulder image, neither is
Leoni the sexy siren her screen image implies, he says. His wife is
really quite tough and he's a bit of a softy.
"We know these anxieties about gender identities. I've never felt a
macho sort of guy and if you looked at Tea you'd think she's a girlie
girl and yet she's not."
And despite enjoying working in the Hollywood milieu, Duchovny claims
he's happiest away from the spotlight at home with his wife and young
daughter.
He says: "The great benefit of monogamy is you get to trust the
person you're with and she gets to trust you."
