The actor talks to Taffy Brodesser-Akner from New York Times about steamy “X-Files” fan fiction and his new novel, not suitable for Disney.
You
have a novel coming out, “Holy Cow,” about a traumatized cow, a sassy
turkey and a pig converting to Judaism. What was the impetus to write a
book like this? Ten years ago I had this idea come to me: If I
were a cow, why wouldn’t I try to get to India? So I wrote up a
treatment, and I pitched it to the only places you can pitch it, Disney
and Pixar. Obviously they were wise to stay away from a story that has a
pig getting circumcised in it. And then one day last year, I just
thought, Well, why don’t I write out that idea?
It’s
a very Jewish story. The pig in the book, Shalom, fixes the
Israel-Palestine conflict. Your father was Jewish and your mother is
Lutheran. How were you raised? I was raised in New York City. I
was raised on the streets. I went to a Presbyterian school. I wasn’t
raised to believe in any particular god. My father was a kind of
cultural Jew, I’d say. So if I have a Jewish sensibility, I think it’s
more in the cultural sense.
Your character on “Californication” is a novelist. How would he blurb “Holy Cow”? He would’ve said, “I don’t blurb, and I don’t like using blurb as a verb.”
You
majored in English at Princeton, and your thesis was called “The
Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett’s Early Novels.” What? You know what the alternative title for that is? “David Duchovny Is an Arrogant Idiot.”
What is it about? Exactly.
Let me try to remember. I think I was under the sway of some French
Lacanian literary critics, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. To put it
as simply as I can, the paper posed the question: Why is everybody
striving to be a Freudian neurotic when that, actually, could be the
biggest sickness of all?
Your novel also critiques industrial agriculture. Are you still a vegetarian? I’m
a very lazy vegetarian, which means I will look for the vegetarian
meal, but I will also give up. I don’t think I eat red meat anymore.
Let’s say no, I don’t. I’ll eat fish. I hear insects are going to be the
next source of protein, and I look forward to that. I’m O.K. with
killing insects.
I’m O.K. with killing them, too. I’m less sure about eating them. What
I like about insects is they enjoy horrible living conditions and
filth, unlike mammals. They do. That’s what they live in. I have no
problem with them living in teeming, overcrowded feces-filled
environments. That’s where they want to be.
Your
former “X-Files” co-star, Gillian Anderson, recently published her
first novel, too. So, in a sense, did Agents Scully and Mulder end up
together after all? No. I think it’s very rare to have two
writers in the household. Isn’t it? There was a rumor a couple of years
ago that we were living together.
There is a lot of Mulder-Scully fan fiction, and some of it is pretty “Red Shoe Diaries,” if you know what I mean. You’re
using all my work against me. When “X-Files” was kind of in its heyday,
that was the beginning of the Internet. I was very skeptical and
thought, This thing will never last. My favorite was the fan fiction
that had Alex Krycek, my nemesis, and me as lovers. It was beautiful.
Do you think of your work as being in the tradition of Samuel Beckett or are you more of a Gillian Anderson? I
didn’t read Gillian’s book. We just had breakfast a few days ago, and
she didn’t even mention that she had one. I didn’t know. But no, I still
like language a little too much to call myself Beckettian. He is very
austere, and I like fooling around with words. I guess I’m more Joycean,
although that’ll sound really pretentious.
Do conspiracy theorists still seek you out? It’s
been a while since somebody tried to get me information that just had
to get out. I have received some letters about abductions in my day that
were sad and interesting.
Are there any episodes of “The X-Files” that haunt you in particular? Oh, no, no, just my acting in some of the early ones affects me to this day. I wish that they would be destroyed.
