David Duchovny is a skeptic, which almost caused him to turn down “The X-Files” pilot:
“I was thinking, this is about aliens, there’s no way that, you know, how long can this be? He’s a…good pilot, but either you’re going to see the aliens , or you’re going to wait that long to see them. And I wasn’t interested in conspiracy theories…and I was quite willing to just say, ‘You know, I’m going to have to pass that pilot on.'”
The actor’s agents convinced him that passing on the role was a bad idea, so Duchovny agreed to the gig, and the lifelong skeptic turned into everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist, Fox Mulder.
From the start, the actor was determined to play the character in a way that avoided the weird or the mundane. In 1994, Duchovny told Weekly entertainment it would have been “an obvious choice…to make him an eccentric, mad professor”, but the actor had no interest in portraying the character that way.
The actor’s portrayal of Mulder has given us a witty, charming and sensitive man who makes us all want to believe his theories, no matter how crazy, and who approaches the strange with childlike amazement. .
Series creator Chris Carter told Entertainment Weekly that Duchovny’s version of Mulder was the most interesting:
“It was David who rightly pointed out that if he was a nerd with pocket mechanical pencil protectors, you wouldn’t be interested. But a smart, educated, perfectly sane guy can make you believe outrageous things.”