David Duchovny

In life you always have to wait for that providential moment that can change your luck. This is what David Duchovny must have said to himself when he was cast as the laconic FBI agent Fox Mulder on the X-Files series . What he surely never imagined is that the change in his career could be so sudden. In less than he sings a rooster he went from playing middling roles, in movies like Bad Influence (1990) or Chaplin(1992), to become a star on the small screen. Today, after seven seasons uncovering alien conspiracies under the rug, she wants to focus on the Seventh Art. She can count on the public’s acceptance – women dedicate pages to her everywhere on the Internet. She also avails herself of a well furnished head that knows exactly what she wants. Not in vain, she did not hesitate to put an end to her Doctorate in Letters from Yale University and pour all her energies into her interpretation: “I met her and accepted my destiny.” And it is that if something seems to be left over, it is courage.

The truth is that the first steps of this forty-year-old New Yorker were not exactly to launch rockets. Since his anecdotal presence in his first film, Armas de mujer (1988), it took some time for critics to take an interest in his work. It was with Baby Snatcher (1992) and, above all, with Kalifornia (1993). In this road movie with hints of a psycothriller, he is the tortured traveling companion of a couple of dangerous “hookers”. Although timidly, the cinema seemed to open the doors for him. But that same year he had to make a lot of noise in the cathodic medium with the start of The X Files . He previously attracted attention playing a transvestite agent in the well-known Twin Peaks series.; and equally in another, Red Shoes Diaries , as a narrator of erotic fantasies.

For four years, Duchovny devoted himself body and soul to television. A period apart “from what is called a normal life.” That situation began to change when he felt the need to have family close, accelerated from his first daughter with the bubbly actress Téa Leoni . Also, with the leading role in a thriller, Playing with Death (1997), he launched a stand-by film career . Despite being accompanied by the most tempting fruit for sin, Angelina Jolie , a particular doctor’s involvement with the mob was a commercial flop. Quite the opposite of what happened with File X: the movie (1998), a translation to the cinema of what could have been any chapter of the series. Little chicha, although enough for the blockbuster thanks to a legion of incombustible admirers. In view of the possible vein to be exploited with this formula, Duchovny, very loose-boned, did not miss the opportunity to express his desire to continue wearing Agent Mulder’s suit, although only on the big screen. It remains to be seen if Fox swallows, especially after the actor himself obtained 30 million dollars for the settlement of a judgment against the company for having undersold reruns of the series to a cable channel.

Those who know him say that he is one of those guys who never bites his tongue. Also that he is an intellectual – he devours books and writes poetry – and that behind his exquisite upbringing there is a clown soul that emerges with enormous spark when he is relaxed. Possibly for this reason, he feels fresh as a salad in Spell of the Heart (2000), directed by Bonnie Hunt friend and companion in Beethoven. One more of the family  (1992). In Spell of… he brings smiles and more than one tear, as a widower who falls in love with the woman to whom the heart of his deceased wife has been transplanted. A romantic comedy that so far is the best interpretation of him.

Duchovny is currently shooting Evolution under the direction of Ivan Reitman , a comedy in which he plays a university professor in charge of saving the world from, of course, an extraterrestrial organism. Who knows if his return to science fiction humorously serves to exorcise the label of eternal agent Mulder attached to his skin, lately more stigma than that manna that brought him fame.