David Duchovny on Whether He'll Appear in 'The X-Files' Reboot
Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny
Ramona Rosales/A+E Networks
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It’s refreshing, when you see him on Zoom that — despite the years — David Duchovny still looks, sounds and overall feels just like David Duchovny. The man’s still handsome, laid back, intellectual and gives a sly smile here and there. The somehow-now-65-year-old actor, who became a sensation starring as one half of the paranormal investigating team on Fox’s 1990s hit The X-Files, is here to promote the second season of his History Channel docuseries Secrets Declassified, which details dark government programs, policies and weapons from across the decades.
But naturally, we also asked his thoughts about Ryan Coogler‘s upcoming reboot of The X-Files for Hulu, all the hubbub surrounding UFOs/UAPs and what he’s up to next.
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So what excites you about season two of Secrets Declassified?
It goes back to truth being stranger than fiction. You listen to these stories and you’re like, “Oh my God, I don’t have the imagination to make this stuff up. This really happened.” So it goes from the ridiculous to the sublime, and it all comes down to human imagination and frailty and people doing the wrong things for the right reasons. It’s really what all drama is about.
What examples of things particularly surprised you when you approached the material this season?
How close we have come to nuclear Armageddon, and how many times. It’s like the Kathryn Bigelow film [A House of Dynamite] from last year, where you have what appears to be a missile heading toward you, and what is your reaction? Do you annihilate the enemy, or do you just try to continue life as we know it? There have been multiple examples of that throughout our history that we were not aware of. It makes you realize how reliant we’ve been on [somebody having] decent judgment at the very top.
Yikes.
It makes you fear for our position right now.
Did your years making The X-Files make you more skeptical or more open-minded when it comes to these sorts of topics?
I didn’t really bring it home with me. It was never my interest going into The X-Files. My dissertation was called “Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry.” My interest, going back to when I was in my early 20s, was how magic — or knowledge, which is really technology — was a field that had positive and negative morality to it. But once we get to Oppenheimer and the nuclear capability of destroying the world, you really see the necessity of addressing technology in a moral way. And, of course, now we have AI, where we’re questioning how we encode what we think of as human morality in something that is going to be way more powerful than us.
We’ve just gotten lucky with nuclear weapons — that we haven’t used them amorally since World War II. The brute fact is that any weapon that’s ever been created in human history has been used.
Well, at least, among the weapons that we know about. I thought of your show yesterday after reports claimed the existence of the government’s Ghost Murmur technology that was apparently used to help track the downed Air Force officer in Iran. It’s one of those things where it sounds like sci-fi — being able to track a heartbeat (and some are skeptical it’s real).
It’s in the old Star Trek — there’s an episode where they have all the heartbeats of the people on the ship. Even in this show, Secrets Declassified, we have a Luddite, pre-technological version of that, where there was a guy stranded behind enemy lines, and they used his knowledge of a golf course to get him to where they needed him to go. I prefer that kind of just using nuts and bolts [cleverness], rather than the newest technology.
We’re living in this strange moment where the entire notion of UFOs or UAPs are getting such a new and serious look. Having been through the legacy of The X-Files, what’s been your reaction over the last few years as that’s ramped up with congressional hearings?
I am not privy to any information. But my opinion is based on my consideration of human nature, which is: I don’t believe that those conspiracies exist, because I’ve never really seen two people keep a secret, let alone thousands of people in a government throughout generations. My sense of human nature is if t