“I hate that they showed my ass in the first scene!” David Duchovny on poems, podcasts – and his TV comeback | television

HIn the middle of our hour-long conversation, David Duchovny slumps back in his seat a little and then gently rebukes me. “I’m tired while you’re talking,” he said with a groan. Honestly, I’ve been talking a lot, but only because I’ve been trying to list everything he’s been able to do in the past year.

There’s his podcast, Fail Better, in which he conducts incredibly candid interviews with conservative stars like Alec Baldwin and Robert Downey Jr., more on that later. There is his book of poetry, About Time, which was published last month. There’s his show on the History Channel, “Declassified Secrets with David Duchovny.” As we speak, he’s just finished an eight-day tour, performing songs from the three folk-rock albums he’s released over the past decade. We’re ostensibly here to discuss Malice, the new Prime Video series. If we talked a few weeks later, God knows how many new projects he would have come up with himself. In other words, no wonder he’s tired.

But spite is a good place to start. A six-part psychological thriller partly set in Greece, it’s a series in which Duchovny’s brusque, wealthy venture capitalist and his family are terrorized by a deranged nanny played by, of all people, Jack Whitehall. I have to admit that, at first glance, the film looked a bit like one of those made-for-TV movies that Channel 5 airs on weekday afternoons. However, Malice was written by James Wood – the man who created the great sitcom Rev – so its tone is pleasantly sharp and mature. And anyone with a desperate need to see David Duchovny’s buttocks will be completely satisfied within the first five minutes.

“I hate for this to be an introduction to the character,” he frowns when he remembers it. “That’s not the way it works. That’s not who this guy is going to be. But I think that’s a good thing.”

He died what he would have been – and this is not a spoiler, because that’s explained in the first scene of the series. It seems fairly certain who did it. Call her Chekhov’s deranged nanny if you like.

“This is not murder,” Duchovny smiles, “because you know who did it immediately.” “And I was scared about that at first. Like, who’s going to keep watching if we give him up? For me, balancing the two things was, how can it make sense that my character doesn’t find out that this guy is trying to kill him? How can he not be stupid?”

Duchovny is quick to praise Whitehall, who makes a dramatic debut here. “If comedians stick to the acting part, they’re the best actors,” he says of Whitehall’s bizarre horror. “Doing stand-up is the scariest situation, standing with a group of people and having to make them laugh. They can be very brave people.”

You could say that Duchovny is no less brave. The bulk of his work outside of acting revolves around a form of intensely personal bloodletting, allowing him to investigate his own demons in a way that his acting career does not allow. Part of the reason he’s able to get his guests on Fail Better to open up so freely is because he wants to go there first. He convinced Downey Jr. to talk about his period of addiction and incarceration — a topic that had previously prompted him to withdraw from interviews — by mentioning his own experiences with AA.

His interview with Gillian Anderson, with whom he had a strained relationship while filming The X-Files, is revealing. An hour in which two characters discuss things that have been intentionally left unsaid for decades, from Duchovny’s unwillingness to support Anderson’s request for equal pay to their failure to inform each other of their desire to leave the series.

Moreover, his poetry is sometimes so intimate that it is almost uncomfortable to read. One poem, Seven Dead People, concerns the death of his father. Another describes the moment he had to reckon with the sight of a dead mouse while walking with his three-year-old daughter (“It is my father who cannot face so much death,” he writes).

The book’s introduction states, “Poetry is not useful. This is exactly why we need it.” More than anything else, this feeling seems to guide Duchovny’s entire worldview; That the meandering search for personal fulfillment will always trump the relentless career. “I have young children entering the workforce, and it seems a lot bleaker than it did when I was their age,” he says. “When they were in school, it was all about, ‘How is this useful? How will it be used?” Everything is used. Everything is effective. And it’s ethical. Like, if you can’t use it, there must be something wrong with it. Imagine not having to worry about whether we can make money from this thing, which is the thing we’re playing at.

As such, he says his writing, music and podcasting represent a form of play. “I like to play different games,” he says. “I take gaming seriously, but I don’t want to be a pretentious idiot either.”

Duchovny describes Malice as a “tacky thing”, with all six episodes available at the same time. It’s a far cry from the role that made him famous, as Fox Mulder in The X-Files, which he worked on for 10 months a year for seven years. As soon as I bring this up, I feel a little guilty; Certainly, every time Duchovny sits down with anyone, he must feel in the pit of his stomach that the topic is bound to come up.

“It’s not the pit of my stomach, but it’s like I don’t have anything to say about it,” he shrugs. I marvel at the fact that The X-Files was a product of the old network days, where seasons would run for 25 episodes, and then have another 25 episodes ready for the same time next year. He nodded, “It’s unimaginable now.” “You’re looking at something as wonderful as Game of Thrones or even The Sopranos. We’ve done over 200 episodes, and they’ve done 60 or 70. That’s not to distort them at all. I mean, this is an incredible work of art, but the sheer scale is something that’s impressive as well.”

What’s even more impressive to him is the fact that each X-Files episode gets to stand on its own. “It’s really a testament to the writers room and to Stuart Heritage Chris Carter,” he says. “We’re not even talking about 25 episodes of Law & Order, where you need a case every week. We’re talking about 25 episodes, each of which could serve as a movie. I’m glad I just had to memorize the damn lines.

The fact that the show has been running for so long and maintaining such high standards seems to be the thing that gives him the greatest sense of pride. “Nobody gives awards for that,” he says. “No one gives awards by comparing quantity to quality. But I think they should. In my mind, I give Chris Carter and the Writers’ Room awards, and I give Gillian and I awards for how much work it took to do 25 episodes in 10 months. No one gives awards for how hard it was to do this show. But I know that.”

Duchovny left The X-Files after seven seasons. Although this was partly due to fatigue, he also began to feel trapped by the phenomenon that the show had become. “When I first came off The

It was arguably the best move he could have made. Although he’s starred in another long-running show (Californication, which was popular enough to win a Golden Globe), stepping away from a show like The X-Files at the height of its global success gave him the space and courage to show us who he really is.

He admits that he is still torn between the security of the television set, with its schedules, routines and money, and the more adventurous paths of his career where he is willing to give more of himself to a smaller potential audience. “I treat the smaller things like mom and pop things, because I have control over everything,” he says. “Then compare that to something like The X-Files or a big show from Amazon and it’s… no Mom and pop.

“For me, at this point, it’s always about trying to find that thing that speaks to me,” he continues. “And some of the projects I talk about don’t speak to me out loud, but they’re interesting in terms of life. You know, I think saying yes takes you further than saying no.”

Considering everything he’s done, not just in the past year but over the past three decades, it seems like this might be Duchovny’s motto. “Saying no might give you a solid career, but saying yes gives you an adventure,” he smiles.

Malice is available on Prime Video from November 14.