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You wouldn't think that a guy who's been combating aliens for the last eight years would be intimidated by anything in our humdrum world. But actor David Duchovny - famous as the preoccupied Mulder in "The X-Files" - is defeated by those pesky instruction sheets that come with a new toy or appliance. "I'm really bad at reading directions and doing anything that's mechanical and takes patience," he says, stretching his Levi-clad legs on the walnut coffee table in a quiet hotel room here. "You know, having a kid, you get things with 'some assembly required.' And those three words for me are the scariest words in the English language." He says he tries to follow the convoluted instructions. "But, all of a sudden, I hear the sound of the subway and the words start to spin in front of me. You look at the diagram they're 'A,B,C,D,' then 'A-1, C-3.' 'Put C-4 in A-2,' and I can't do it. But my wife is really good at that. She can time a motor. I don't know what timing a motor means, but she can do it," he says, grinning. Duchovny and his actress wife, Tea Leoni, have a 2-year-old daughter and more than once he's been called upon to summon up his bravest front. The truth is that Duchovny has been putting up a brave front ever since he started acting. Acting was not something he wanted to do. It didn't even occur to him. While he's always had a facility for athletics and writing, a show-off he's not. Well, he tried it once when he was a little kid, playing one of the Magi in the Christmas play. Unlike most actors who find their calling in some ancient school production, Duchovny hated it. "I had to wear purple tights. I thought I looked like a jackass." People who've only seen the 40-year-old Duchovny as the foxy Fox Mulder don't realize how funny he is, both in real life and on film. He gets to elongate that funny bone in his latest movie, "Evolution," in which he plays a community college teacher who discovers a new life-form replicating itself after the crash of a meteor. "At the risk of sounding humble," he says, "I feel I have to work hard to nurture whatever talent I have as an actor. I feel like it's not natural to me. So I don't take it for granted. Sometimes I realize how hard I've worked on 'The X-Files.' Eight years of teaching myself to be the kind of performer that I could be and to be comfortable enough to let other parts of myself out. So I don't take that for granted. What I think is my natural ability - which is writing - I think I totally take that for granted," he nods. Duchovny had already earned a scholarship to Princeton and a fellowship to Yale, where he was studying English literature, when his best friend (who wanted to be an actor) convinced Duchovny to accompany him to a commercial audition. It was summertime and Duchovny was getting a bartending job to see him through the next year. If he were lucky enough to land a commercial, his friend told him, he wouldn't have to work for the rest of the summer. "Well, I had the summer and it sounded like there might be girls there, so I went to acting class and I just started to like it. Then it kind of took over my life. But I was 26 years old at that point but did it the reverse way, I had the agent before I ever wanted to act." It slowly grew on him. Duchovny's mom, who'd taken out a government loan to help finance his first years at Princeton, was worried. "She'd worked so hard so I could get an education and there was that thought that I was throwing all that away," he says, adjusting his shoulders into the back of the chair. "But I think ultimately what she feared is what any parent fears: you don't want your child to be in a profession that's painful, and we all understand the odds of being successful in this business are minuscule, so I think she probably didn't want me to be hurt." His parents divorced when he was 11 and he lived with his mom, a schoolteacher. She retired two years ago after 25 years, and it's obvious that Duchovny is very proud of her. Though by now she must be greatly relieved about his future, acting is not without its turmoil, he confesses. "Anxiety is part of creativity," he says, "the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within. "It's all painful," he admits. "I'm not a guy who says there shouldn't be any pain in life. So if it's not painful, it's probably not worthwhile in some weird way." It's not easy to leave a hit show like "The X-Files," either. "I realize I could go back to the show and make great money and probably do it maybe three or four more years, but you just feel it. It's something in yourself that goes: 'I need to be addressed here. I'm no longer addressing what it is I got into acting to do.' No offense to the show - great show, great character - but I'd done it. And whatever that was in me that drove me to act in the first place was saying, 'Let's go off and be afraid. Let's go off and try something new.'" Back to Quotes Back to David Duchovny Dreamland
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