Greg Bruce talks to the star of The X-Files, Californication - and The Auckland Writers Festival.
Much of what you need to know about David Duchovny can be found in his single-episode cameo In last year's hit Netflix comedy The Chair, in which he plays himself. When the show's central character, played by Sandra Oh, arrives at his mansion, he's swimming laps in his indoor pool. He gets out and stands there, dripping wet, wearing only a red Speedo, a nod to one of the most notorious scenes in The X-Files' history, where he was dressed identically. The camera takes in his full length, acknowledging that he's still in astonishingly good shape and has retained a very large proportion of the visual appeal that in the 1990s made him one of the world's two sexiest fictional paranormal investigators.
Oh's character has arrived at his house to try to convince him not to take the distinguished lectureship role he's been offered at Pembroke University, where she's chair of the English department, but he's not giving up without a fight. Once he's dressed - jeans and a T-shirt featuring his own name and the words "Every Third Thought" - he tells her he was considering presenting the students his dissertation: The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett's Early Novels. He says he hopes to become Dr David Duchovny, although he wonders aloud if that's too much alliteration.
"When's the last time you picked up an academic journal?" she asks him.
"I've been on tour with my band," he replies.
She says: "The fact you're using this honour from Pembroke to dust off your dissertation and go back and get your PhD, it's self-serving."
"Woah," he says, "Is this hostility because Pembroke is like this lower-tier Ivy and I went to Princeton … "
"No!" she says.
" ... and Yale?"
This is funny because it's ridiculous but also because it's true. He did go to Princeton and Yale, did write a dissertation called The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett's Early Novels, and does regularly go on tour with his band, with whom he's recorded several albums, including one called Every Third Thought.
Later, when she tells him the students have already bought their textbooks, he says "I'll reimburse them. I'm a grossly overpaid actor slash musician slash novelist and they're students burdened with student debt."
It's a great cameo because big-name dramatic actors rarely make fun of themselves and because he's a very good comic actor and because the truth is so bizarre. "David Duchovny? From The X-Files? Has written four novels and a dissertation on Beckett?" It's such an obvious joke it hardly needs the red Speedo and faux self-regard.
But his books are not jokes. They have been increasingly well-reviewed since the publication of his first novel, Holy Cow, seven years ago, culminating in his latest, Truly Like Lightning being published last year to wide acclaim. It was described as "an emotionally captivating tour de force from start to finish" by the San Francisco Book Review and as making "a solid case for him as a real-deal novelist" by the Washington Post, which also said, "He's not playacting at fiction."
Although he made a conscious decision years ago not to read reviews of his acting work, he says he does read his book reviews, because he feels he can be held responsible for the book in a way he can't be for his acting work, which is dependent on so many other people.
"Also, people are nastier. I think there are so few decent movie and TV critics, and the discourse to me is so kind of catty and gossipy and weird, frankly. It's hard to get it out of your head when you read weird s*** about yourself.
"If somebody doesn't like the book, I'll just go, 'Okay that's fine, can you give me a good reason and I'll go, 'Okay'. Or I don't even need a reason. It's like music - you like some music, you don't like other music."
He has always been interested in writing. When he was young, he wanted to be a poet and when he was in his 20s, he wanted to write fiction but concluded he hadn't lived enough. He tried writing for the theatre, took acting classes to help with that, started to make money from that and ended up on The X-Files, which made him enough money to never have to work again.
What that money bought him was time, and what he's done with that time now, in late middle age, is address the urge to write. He says writing suits him, in part, because he's always felt like he's outside the world looking in.
"Even when I wasn't writing, I was watching. And that's what a writer does. You're at the party, certainly. I went to the party, because I became a famous actor and I was at parties, but in my soul, I was always against the wall watching everybody else."
He started writing, he says, because he had an inkling he had something to say, something that would be pleasing to him and that could be aptly described as his own. He liked that he would be autonomous, that he didn't have to rely on others.
He says you need a certain level of ego or narcissism to write a book, to believe you have something worthwhile to say to the world: "I don't say that as a negative at all. It's just a prerequisite for what it takes to be an artist in the marketplace, and that goes for not just writing, it goes for acting, it goes for painting, I suppose, it goes for music, it goes for anything that you take to the market and show other people. You have to believe that you have a unique slant, you have something in you that's not been here before, that's not going to come back again."
With Truly Like Lightning, though, his ambitions were even greater. He says: "I wanted to write a great American novel."
The book tells the story of a family of Mormons who've grown up in the desert, entirely isolated from American society, until they're accidentally discovered one night by a drug-addled property developer and thrown into the churn of the modern nightmare that is America.
"There's a reason everyone's fascinated with America," he says. "It's fascinating. It's this gross, hideous, beautiful human experiment. There's nothing like it on the planet. There has never ever been anything like it in human history. So here we are. I don't judge it either way, but I just look at it as the miracle that it is - I guess the hideous miracle that it is. I'm not putting down any other country, because there are loads of countries I love. It's just America is - what's the word? Sui generis? - it's of itself. It's just so mixed up, so large and so energetic."
He says the story at the heart of Truly Like Lightning felt sufficiently epic in scale, with "the requisite amount of love and death and tragedy and ridiculousness that America is".
His feelings about the country, in which he was born and brought up and still lives, are mixed, but because he lives mostly in his head and in his work, he says, he's not even sure he does live there.
"I'm just alive somewhere, in a home, in a house. It could be anywhere."
He has described himself as depressive, although he says he's never felt the darkest darkness, has never, for instance, been unable to get out of bed.
"I think a lot and I think people who think a lot tend to depression. That's where thoughts normally go. I think it's temperamental. I subscribe to the theory of humours - let's go back to the Middle Ages - and some of us tend toward melancholy and some of us don't. I come by it honestly through my parents. I don't fake it. Sometimes I'm down, but the things that work for me are creating through those phases. That's what I've found is the healthiest thing I can do. I'm down because something in me is wanting to be expressed and I'm not doing it. I guess I've learned that and I try to honour it. I try to stay creative."
He says that when you first achieve massive global fame, you think it's going to cure everything: "And maybe it does, for a minute, and you can relax or stop fighting or stop trying or just be. But I guess for a certain temperament, it's not that way. It's not that way for me.
"People say it's like a drug and it is. So you have to realise, when you first get famous, you're high. You are high but you don't feel high.
"You're receiving a certain amount of adulation without giving it back, and that's probably not a really good position for anybody to be in. Also, you feel all-powerful and yet you're completely powerless because you're dependent on other people and they can take it away. So I guess you're always terrified in some way."
These are the bad things about fame. He says there are also lots of good things: a wider audience for his books, access to better projects and the ability to work with people he admires. "And it sure does feel good when somebody says, 'I like the way you do your job'."
But, he says, when you learn that it doesn't fix anything, that's a gift.
"So I've been given that gift of, 'Oh, well that didn't work. I don't have to have that illusion anymore.' But I wouldn't trade it for anything, because it was a wild kind of thing to go from not even thinking about acting until I was about 25, 26, to five or six years later being that famous. It's like a weird dream."
He's about to turn 62, although he says he's never placed much store in the numbers: Of reaching his 60s, he says: "It's just really an embarrassment. One thing about being an actor is that it's almost like you made this tacit promise not to age, and then when you do, people look at you like, 'You lied to us!'
"Your face and body are what you use as an actor so, yeah, I'm definitely watching, I'm looking, I'm seeing things change. But on my best days I think, 'Well, now other parts are open to me. Now I can go do some other stuff.'"
David Duchovny appears via livestream at the Auckland Writers Festival on August 27, in discussion with writer and broadcaster Sonya Wilson.
