David Duchovny is back in the big time as a sleazy, jaded sex addict in the hit TV comedy drama Californication, but is television’s new pin-up really acting? Chrissy Iley reports.
Take a look at David throughout his career
David Duchovny was Agent Fox Mulder for nine series of The X-Files. He was defined as a character who thought much, said little and was possibly asexual. He was not driven by passion or emotion.
Bored and frustrated with the constraints of a long-term TV series, David wanted something else — not necessarily something more, but something different. For the past five years, he has concentrated on writing, directing and acting in independent movies. He was developing a comedic side, but was seen by few. He has to work at achieving lightness, but he’s good at working hard. He attended America’s prestigious Princeton University, then won a scholarship to do a Masters degree in English Literature at the equally prestigious Yale. His thesis was on magic and technology. His first acting job was in a television commercial for Löwenbräu beer, in which he was supposed to look smouldering.
Five years in obscurity was very much David’s own personal journey. He has always said that because of his immense education, he had a brain the size of a house and a heart the size of a pea. Balancing that out has been a life’s work, which has finally come to fruition.
Perhaps he needed to be away that long to make the emotional impact he does as Hank Moody in the TV comedy drama series Californication, a writer with writer’s block, a man who loves women, but who is mostly in love with his ex-girlfriend. He spends a lot of time with his clothes off in sexual disillusionment. He’s tortured, funny and a bad boy — utterly appealing. And not just to women. He is also a gay icon.
Californication is to this decade what the New York babes of Sex and the City were to the last. It poses the right questions. It’s of the zeitgeist. Makes you laugh, makes you cry.
It would all be very neat if that was it. This is the new, sexualised David Duchovny, finally laying Mulder to rest. Yet, bizarrely, after being desperate to leave the TV series and in a love-hate, but mostly indifferent, relationship with co-star Gillian Anderson, who played Dana Scully, he’s about to appear in the soon-to-be-released The X-Files: I Want To Believe, the second X-Files movie.
Things have gone full circle for David, though, from nowhere to everywhere.
Take a look at David throughout his career
Which of David’s characters do you prefer, Fox Mulder or Hank Moody? Tell us below.
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