The show begins when Duchovny’s police detective character first
hears about Manson, who has been arrested for pimping. “Charlie Manson
was nothing, until he became Charlie Manson,” Duchovny told reporters
during his show’s allotted 15 minutes of speed dating with reporters at
NBCU Summer Press Day. The show, he added, is a ” ’60s procedural,”
which he found interesting because the police force “doesn’t have access
to all this bullshit CSI to solve cases. You have to use your brains
and do police work and …we get to crack some heads too. Then we’ve got
this guy named Charlie Manson turning into something over here while
we’re looking away too much.”
Duchovny, who was the oldest cast member onstage and therefore the
only one alive at the time of the Manson Family murders, said the man
“has come to represent a look back at the ’60s, as if looking for
something – trying to figure out something from the ’60s that we haven’t
figured out yet.” The actor theorized Manson pushed the country to the
“Reagan… and Bush” right, because the headline-grabbing murder of
actress Sharon Tate and others represented to many “what happens when
hippies take over — mayhem, madness. As a country we keep coming back to
this point,” Duchovny added.
Asked if working on the series had creeped him out, Duchovny responded, “I did The X-Files — nothing creeps me out.”
“Speaking thereof– ” the reporter continued.
“No, no — we’ll do that later, but not now,” Duchovny interrupted, anticipating a question about Fox’s recently announced The X Files reboot as a six episode event series. “I should have said, ‘I did Californication – nothing creeps me out’.”
Video - David Duchovny on "The X-Files" & Fox Mulder: "He's A Little Older"