"BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS: IN THEIR OWN WORDS by Karen Hardy Bystedt 

DAVID DUCHOVNY
In the summer of 1992, I met David Duchovny at a beach party in Malibu given by a mutual friend, publicist Jimmy Dobson. Jimmy told me that David was a really talented actor and he lent me a tape of David's movie, JULIA HAS TWO LOVERS.

 I found David's performance both magnetic and refreshingly original.

Several weeks later, I ran into David at a premiere for Brad Pitt's movie JOHNNY SUEDE and later at a private screening of KALIFORNIA, which co-starred David and Brad. The only people in attendance were David, Brad, their agents, the director, Dominic Sena, Jimmy Dobson and me.

We met for our interview at his older brother Danny's house in Malibu. David decided to put on one of Danny's wetsuits for the shoot. We walked down to the beach to take the photographs. Afterward, when we sat down on the deck to talk, David pointed out the pelicans diving into the crashing waves.

David Duchovny, through his role as FBI agent Fox Mulder in THE X-FILES, has become a worldwide phenomenon.

"I am from the Lower East Side of New York City. We lived on 11th Street and Second Avenue. It's a cross between a Ukrainian and a Puerto Rican neighborhood. Growing up, I went to both private and public schools, so I had a street education and a preppy education at the same time, although as I went into higher education I became more preppy. I went to the Collegiate High School for boys, which is a really fancy school in the middle of Manhattan. Everybody had tons of money. I was the Lower East Side contingent on a scholarship. A lot was made of being smart in my family because both my parents were lower middle class. They put a lot of emphasis on getting ahead through education and it was very important to my mother that I get a college degree and for me to be a good student, which I was. If you learn to be a good student you run the risk of not finding out what it is you truly want to do because you're good at a lot of different things or you're good at getting by the system that people have set up. From ages five to 20, I'd always list that I wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor on all those tests they give you. What I really wanted to be was a basketball player. I played a lot of basketball but my hands never grew. I'm only six feet tall and I can't jump very well but I'm a good shooter. My father always used to joke with me because he knew that I wanted to be a pro ball player. He'd always tell me I had small hands. I'd come out in the morning when I was eight or nine years old and tell him if you watch my hands closely you'll see that they're growing. Of course it was all in my mind. So basketball was no good and second to basketball would have been pro baseball. All I ever wanted to do was play ball. I don't know why but that's the way I felt. I went to Princeton College, which is about as preppy as you can get. I guess I had a hell of a lot of discipline and a lot of fear and those combined made me a really good student. I could study eight or nine hours a day and still be on the basketball team and get my A's. But nothing penetrated me. I was just afraid to fail. I really didn't know what I wanted or what moved me beyond basketball or sex. Those were two things that were very black and white to me, where I could feel in the moment. I had a high school girlfriend and then I met a girl in college who I stayed with for five years. I'm not saying that my experience with sex was any more mystical than anybody else's. I'm just saying that it was an area where I felt alive. I was kind of drifting along, which might seem like a weird thing to say because I was seemingly doing so well. I was talented in a bleak way and I was just scared shitless that I wasn't going to be the best at what I was doing. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just wanted to be the best. That's kind of sick when I think about it. I guess I wanted to be loved and then I thought the only way to be loved was to be the perfect person or some kind of golden boy. After college, I took a year off and bartended in New York City. I applied for scholarships thinking that if I continued to be a student I could somehow put off defining myself. Many great thinkers have the point of view that one is an eternal student. Emerson said, ""Each man is my master in something and from that I endeavor to learn from him."" Zen tells you to have a beginner's mind and that's true. But there's also something about being subservient and not having the confidence to say, ""All right, I control my world here and I'm going to do something as a master rather than a student."" But I continued to be a student. I knew how to work well within that system. I got a scholarship at Yale, and they actually paid me money to go there. They paid graduates who were interested in becoming professors with the hope that they would teach at Yale. So now I feel guilty because I took their money and I'm not a professor. I have an ABD, which means ""All But Dissertation."" My mother still hopes that I will one day finish my Ph.D. but I don't think so. Yale is famous for its drama school. There was a bunch of actors running around. I thought they were more fun to hang around with than my peers. I started writing a play, and in order to learn more about writing I decided to take an acting class. In acting, I felt like I was playing ball again. Acting brought me to the surface. I felt the education I had was cerebral and academic and that I hadn't educated a part of me that gets angry or that cries or that plays a lot. I really hadn't educated my heart. I had a brain the size of a house and a heart the size of a pea so I had to even that out a little. I didn't wake up one morning and say, ""Well David, you've become awful cerebral. You're a very dry, cold person. Why don't you see what your emotions are like underneath all this vocabulary?"" But I think people are instinctually drawn to people and areas that can teach them something. At the time you don't know why. But then ten years later you go, ""Oh, that's why I was with that terrible woman."" It was to learn this lesson which I didn't learn till now. There's nothing wasted. I think the the better part of me was drawn to a discipline where I could feel rather than think. I mean, I didn't set out to become an actor. I set out to act. And that was so much fun. The idea of actually making a living at it was so frightening because so many other things are contingent on it. It's the most frightening thing to try and make a living at because you put all your shit in other people's hands. It was hard at first because I had been so embraced by academia and all of a sudden I was getting rejected from Foot Locker commercials. Before I thought of being an actor professionally, I had no fear because I was a teacher and a writer already and I thought, 'Well why not try this?' I auditioned for anything: commercials, soaps, TV, movies. My first acting job was a Lowenbrau commercial. I was petrified. If you can suck on a commercial without any copy, I sucked. I remember I was so tight that the cameraman and director put tape over their noses to make me laugh. That even made me tighter 'cause I thought, 'My God, I'm so bad that they're treating me like an infant.' I was on screen for a few seconds and they actually paid me money. But I remember going home and thinking, 'You stink, you'll never do this, you're too uptight.' After that I did a movie called NEW YEAR'S DAY by Henry Jaglom. That was the first time I'd ever spoken on camera. I didn't even audition. The star of the movie was a woman named Maggie Jacobson, an ex-girlfriend of mine. They wanted someone to play a bad ex-boyfriend. Henry likes to advertise that his movies take off from real life. So it was tiresome for people to think that I was as scummy as I was in the movie. That was my first movie job and I thought I was going to be a star and get all the roles I wanted after that, but I found you have to work for it. I did NEW YEAR'S DAY over Christmas vacation. Then I went back to school and finished up that year, but I knew it was over. I came out to L.A. because I wasn't getting anywhere in New York. That initial fearlessness that I had because I hadn't committed to life left me immediately. All of a sudden the auditions became more important. I had to learn how to be a professional. I first moved to West L.A. and then I got a rent-controlled sublet in Santa Monica. I wrote a lot of poetry. I went through a period of rejections, getting close on things but not getting them, having no money, leeching off friends and losing lovers because they thought I was a no-good bum. That was in 1988. Eventually I got better and things turned around. I did a movie called JULIA HAS TWO LOVERS. We did it in a week and it cost $25,000 to make. I never thought anything would come of it. When we got worldwide distribution it gave me more confidence that maybe I could do this. Then I got a little part in DON'T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER'S DEAD, which allowed me to pay my bills for a little while. It was just a matter of keeping my head above water until I could start moving. THE RAPTURE and a part in TWIN PEAKS followed. It has been a steady incline, which I'm happy with. I feel a little more confident that I know what I'm doing now. During my first few jobs I felt, 'let me get through this experience without embarassing myself. Let me not fail.' As I got more comfortable, my goals changed to: 'Let me do something interesting, let me create something of import, let me do something positive rather than avoid something negative.' When you die, you don't want to say about yourself, ""Well, I maintained a certain level of adequacy over a shocking amount of years."" Then of course the danger is, when you aspire you can also fall. What are my dreams now? I think everybody has something to express in their lives. I want to find the thing that I'm great at. I live on the beach in Santa Monica. I am a morning person. A normal day when I'm not working is getting up at around 7 a.m.. I read for a while. I'll write or I'll do a crossword puzzle. I sound like an old man. Then I'll do something physical for a couple of hours. I'll play basketball or I'll swim or run. I just have to do that for my sanity. In the afternoons I'll read or write poetry or I'll go to an acting class. I cook well enough for me, but I wouldn't subject anyone else to what I make. In the evenings I go to movies and plays in town or I visit my friends. I do yoga. I got my ears pierced at this wild place in West Hollywood called the Gauntlet. I decided to go for two holes instead of one. I think it is possible to value yourself enough to say, ""Myself is unique. There's never been anybody like me. Therefore, it is my duty on this earth to manifest that self in that unique way."" I'm not infallible and I think you can live your life developing yourself, while spiritually you also realize that yourself is the biggest piece of shit. It's a joke, it's a cartoon, it's a creation, it doesn't exist. But the fact that it's a cartoon doesn't make it any less lovable or any less beautiful. In fact it gives it a kind of sadness.

Where do I see myself 10 years from now? I don't know. Ten years ago, I never would have imagined myself sitting here now.

David Duchovny, September 1992"