David Duchovny: An Actor and a Poet

Q: So what's your take on entertainment journalism?

A: It seems to me that the tone of entertainment journalism is pretty glib and snide at this point. On the one hand, I agree: we are people who don't deserve the kind of scrutiny that we're getting. And we don't have that much to say. So to take us famous people down is right. It's a good point. But that's not why the point is being made. It's being made because there's a general mocking tone out there which is counterproductive to good work. The level of discourse is like high school. It's no fun. The pleasure that these magazines now display in seeing people fail... it's really great reading, to be honest. But it hurts individuals.

Q: You've said that people love you for the wrong reasons--because you're on a TV show. Does that make you feel resentful?

A: I'm married now and have someone who loves me for what I perceive to be the right reasons, so I don't have the need to find right love. Hearing those words of mine come back to me reminds me of an advisor in graduate school who said, "You're lucky if anyone loves you for any reason at all. Don't make them have to be the right reasons. Love is love."

Q: How long have you been married?

A: A year in May.

Q: Is marriage liberating?

A: Yeah, I find it to be. And challenging, because it makes you deal with yourself. You can't run off to a cave and be wounded alone, and you can't hide your pain with drugs or with women. You really have to deal with yourself with this person. It brings up all those trust issues and all those other therapized catch words.

Q: Do you feel you've completely bonded with your wife, Tea?

A: I feel we're bonding. The bond changes. Once you fall in love, that's not the end of it. There are all these walls--and when you hit one you can either go, "That's it, it's over," or you can bust through it and go, "Oh my God, this is better." And then you hit another wall. We have cycles like the planets. We come from these planets, these waves and cycles, why wouldn't we? I read this article that said men have periods as well as women. When I'm in a bad mood, sometimes I'll tell Tea, "I'm on my moon."

Q: Do you have a temper? Get angry?

A: Um-hmm. I'll yell, but I don't get violent.

Q: Ever throw anything?

A: Oh yeah, I've thrown things. I've never thrown a person. I once threw something near a person. [Laughs]

Q: In the past year, you've used adjectives like smart, funny, loyal, honest, kind, gentle--to describe Tea. When do you suppose words like nagging, demanding, possessive enter the relationship vocabulary?

A: The only negative adjective I would associate with Tea is "speculative." She has a very rich, speculative imagination. It's part of what makes her a really good actress. She will go off on these tangents that, by the time she's done, have very little to do with reality. It's kind of fun to watch. It's like free association, and if you're not paying attention you forget where it started. We both laugh at that. But no nagging, and she's not possessive.

Q: Biography magazine published a series of pictures of you and Tea at a basketball game soon after your wedding and analyzed your body language, concluding that the two of you were not getting along. You were touching her, she was leaning away. Did they get it right?

A: [Looks at the pictures] Absolutely not.

Q: Is it disturbing to see that?

A: No, it's very funny.

Q: Are you going to ask Tea to act differently in public?

A: Yeah, how about putting an arm around me? The funny thing is you could do that with anything. [Looks at some of the other couples shown] Without reading what they say, just from looking at this photograph, I'm predicting that they're saying there's trouble between Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields. [Reads it] Oh no, they like them. Oh wait, there's a great photo--look at Woody and Soon-Yi. Not too hard to read. [Woody stands apart from Soon-Yi, covering his face with one hand, as she looks the other way] Oh, they like them, too. Are we the only ones who get thumbs down? They should have a picture of Tommy Lee slugging Pamela ... "Well in this one we see that Tommy and Pamela are having a difficult time."

Q: Have you ever read any self-help books?

A: Oh yeah. One that I read that helped my self was called Healing the Shame That Binds You. Terrible title. It's by John Bradshaw, who's a famous family dynamics guru.

Q: How long ago did you read it?

A: Ten or twelve years ago. It was good for me.

Q: What were you ashamed of?

A: Everything. Of being a failure. Sex. Money. Anybody knowing my feelings. I was just very afraid to have anybody know what I really wanted or who I was.

Q: How spiritual is your spiritual side?

A: I don't know. I wouldn't know how to quantify the spirituality of it.

Q: Do you believe in an afterlife?

A: Not in the sense that I'm gonna be there. My feeling of who we are is tied to things like where we're born, how we're raised, what we look like, education. All these things mold a particular soul. I would hope that whenever you shed all of those things, the temporality of this life, you also get to go beyond that personality. My idea of hell would be, you go to heaven and you're yourself up there.

Q: Are you easily intimidated?

A: No.

Q: Do you believe in revenge?

A: I get little vendettas going, but I don't have any all-consuming need That takes a lot of energy.

Q: How competitive are you?

A: I was before I had some of my own. I'm less so now.

Q: Have you ever been conned?

A: Yeah. I'm fairly trusting, so I get conned. I've had long-term cons, like with friendship that was a con. Part of a con is that you have to be involved in it--they play on the lies that you tell yourself. A lie that I might have told myself in the past is that other people have my best interests at heart, when in fact other people always have their own best interests at heart. But not anymore.

Q: Your parents split up when you were 11, which had to have affected you. Is it possible to have a happy childhood?

A: It's not anybody's fault when we have an unhappy childhood. That's the nature of life--it's difficult and we get hurt. If we live to be this age we've been hurt many, many times. I used to have this therapist, and whenever I was depressed I'd say, "God, it's not ever going to end. I'm going to be sad forever." And he'd say, "Well, have you ever been happy?" And I'd go, "Yeah, from time to time." "Were you scared that that wasn't going to end?" "No." And he'd go, "Well, sad ends, happy ends, it's just a cycle."

Q: What kind of a kid were you?

A: I had to go to a psychologist, and he put me in a room to play by myself--I found out later they watched to see if I was beating things or whatever.

Q: What was the reason for that?

A: I was hyperactive and they didn't know what that was. I was hard to handle. My mother, bless her, stood up and said, "Just because you can't handle my son doesn't mean that he has a problem." That was strong of her to do then. She stood up for me.

Q: Who thought you should be tested?

A: The school. And the school was extremely progressive--Downtown Community School, which was founded by Pete Seeger. It was one big classroom and we all learned at our own pace. I was smarter then than I am now. I wrote a novel in second grade and I chose as my protagonist a penny called Abe, which meant he had many experiences, because a penny gets spent and goes from pocket to pocket.

Q: What happened to the penny at the end?

A: Abe ended up on a railroad track flattened.

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