Whatever happened to David Duchovny

These days the aliens are leaving David Duchovny in peace.

The breakthrough:

David Duchovny made his name playing the perma-perplexed Agent Fox Mulder in alien abduction and other spooky cover-ups telly drama The X-Files.

The background:

David Duchovny has never been shy of a bit of sauce. Before The X-Files, Duchovny made ends meet by taking roles in soft-core sex cable TV shows such as Red Shoe Diaries (which screened here on TV4).

Duchovny is of Jewish-Scottish extraction. Other intriguing facts: he's allergic to metal. His school nickname was "Doggie". In his 20s, he posed for a magazine with a china teacup nestling snugly over his genitals. (His idea, apparently.)

His parents separated when he was 11. Duchovny was at Yale with Jennifer Beals, who, in 1993, turned down the part of Agent Dana Scully because she remembered his tiresome campaign to get her into bed. After gaining a good degree from Princeton, he transferred to Yale to work on a PhD in magic and technology but managed only a chapter.

He lies back in his armchair in the suite at London's Dorchester Hotel where this interview takes place: "I haven't talked about any of this stuff for years. I think the brain is like the bottom of the ocean; there are these layers of rock, some fossilised. But sometimes they get drilled and it releases a noxious substance that sometimes hurts the sea life, and sometimes enriches it."

Ah, now, I saw that episode of The X-Files.

Duchovny's life has been free from little grey aliens, fag-toting CIA spooks and mutant hillbillies for four years. Plenty of time to get a global phenomenon in perspective.

"Every year had its own hurdle," he recalls. "The first year it was just survival. I'd never worked that hard before. Fifteen hours a day.

"In The X-Files there was always something new to memorise, but once you'd got the character there wasn't really anything new to act.

"The second year it was a matter of working out how to have fun while I did it.

"The third year was, 'Well, okay, I've survived - so how can I start to be creative again?' It was only at that point that I had any energy left to do anything other than go home and prepare for the next day's work."

The fifth year was the one in which he threatened to leave the show unless it shifted its production base from Vancouver to Los Angeles. (His bosses agreed.)

The seventh was the one in which he sued the Fox network for fees they owed him for the sale of the show's syndication rights. (They settled.)

The eighth was the one in which he appeared in only a handful of episodes. And the ninth year was the one in which he returned to wrap up the series with a two-hour special.

The X-Files, he concedes, not only made his face one of the most disseminated images on the planet, but allowed him to test his aptitude for directing and screenwriting.

He suspects that those old themes he intended to consider in his doctoral thesis might make some kind of return in his next screenplay.

"You have a fantasy when you're young, that you're going to be Nietzsche," he drawls, "that you have access to the profoundest truths.

"But screenwriting doesn't sustain a great deal of critical thought. You have to be careful of pedantry and cant and preaching. I don't really have anything profound to say. If I had, I imagine I would have been a philosopher. But I don't, really. On the other hand, I'm not an idiot, either."

Last seen and heard:

As the voice of Agent Mulder in Playstation2 game The X-Files: Resist or Serve. In Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal he played a Hollywood executive who dies with a smile on his face while lying face up on a massage table.

And in Connie and Carla, he plays Jeff, a regular kind of guy who falls for one of his brother's work colleagues - which would be fine if she wasn't a drag queen.

This year, Duchovny made The House of D, an independent movie of which he is the writer, and he is working on My Dark Places, a script based on James Ellroy's account of his participation in the police investigation of his mother's murder.