The X-Files Australian Conne-X-ion
David Duchovny in Australia:
The Daily Telegraph

By Arts editor MICHAEL BODEY.

AMERICAN actor David Duchovny has gone from being a post-graduate English literature student to baring his bottom in a Hollywood film.

David Duchovny in Sydney.

In some cultures, that would be a regression but in Hollywood Duchovny is a major success.

"I'm not saying that, but I bared my arse in high school so it was more like a nostalgic thing for me," he told The Daily Telegraph in Sydney yesterday.

The former star of the hit TV series The X-Files furthers his transition to the big screen in the sci-fi comedy Evolution, which opens in Australia on July 12.

Duchovny admits the film, directed by Ghostbusters and Animal House director Ivan Reitman, is one requiring base humour.

"The great thing about acting is the performance calls for it," he said. "This is a kids' movie, more or less 12 to 25 [years], and I think it makes sense in that scene.

"I was embarrassed when I saw it up there, I didn't really think it'd be in the film but Ivan said `soon as your arse comes out, everyone comes on board'. What the hell does that mean?"

Duchovny admitted Evolution was "not the kind of movie I rush out to see", even if he did like it.

"My challenges as an actor are different from my challenges as a viewer of films."

But he's unsure his mother will relish the film, which also stars Hannibal's Julianne Moore and Bedazzled's Orlando Jones.

"There's only two things she wants to know about my films: do I get killed and do I get naked," he said. "In either case, she doesn't want to see it, and not necessarily in that order."

The bottom-baring is surprising from a man considered one of the smartest actors in Hollywood.

With degrees from Yale and Princeton universities, Duchovny may have an intellect better served behind the scenes.

He admitted he was keen to begin writing for film, even though, he laughed, "I've got all this unnecessary knowledge.

"The good thing about having read all those books is that you're exposed to the best stuff to steal from," he joked.

"Even the stuff that I wrote on The X Files, the second one, I stole from [William] Blake and I stole from [poet John] Milton," he revealed. "It's good stuff."

"It was kind of depressing because when my mother watched the show she said: I loved what you wrote, that one line where you say `the body is all of the soul that our senses can perceive'.

"It's a classic but it's the one line I didn't write in the script," he said of Blake's line.

Duchovny, who starred for eight years as FBI agent Fox Mulder on The X-Files, admitted he found being asked questions about abandoning such a successful series tiring.

"It's like a sophistry because the fact is it's just hard to make it as an actor, period," said the star of Kalifornia and Return to Me.

"It doesn't matter if you're coming from TV or going from movie to movie. Every movie actor is concerned he's not going to make the leap from his past movie to his next movie."

"There are so many examples of people doing all different kinds of work and people harp on about [NYPD Blue actor] David Caruso or [ER's] Julianne Marguiles, people who turned down a lot of money not because they wanted to become movie stars but because they wanted to do other work."

And at the moment, Duchovny is swamped with other work.

"Yeah, I'm not complaining," the 40-year-old actor smiled. "It's great. It's not an issue for me."