X-Files: David Duchovny Isn’t Crazy About Conspiracy Theories

David Duchovny has spent a significant part of his professional career chasing conspiracies on The X-Files. As it turns out, Duchovny doesn’t seem to care about that kind of stuff — at least, not as much as his character Fox Mulder. Speaking on an episode of Literally! With Rob Lowe last week, Duchovny revealed he believes conspiracies can be dangerous and damaging. The actor’s comments came quickly after Lowe mentioned that he loves “a good conspiracy theory.”

The actor said “conspiracies are great drama, yeah, but mostly conspiracies in real life, they’re looking for simple answers to complicated questions. And a conspiracy conspiracy finds a bad man, or a couple bad men, who have decided to perpetrate some evil upon the world and I don’t think that’s how it happens usually.”

Duchovny then went on to admit he didn’t necessarily have the same vantage point before playing Mulder on the hit show. In fact, the actor says his time on The X-Files likely helped shape his current thoughts.

“Have you heard about, like, the lizard people? Have you heard about that thing? There were a couple years there where people were asking me about lizard people and I had no clue that it was a big thing,” he added. “And I would just kind of scoff at them, like, I’d be signing somebody’s thing and they’d say, ‘Oh so-and-so’s a reptilian or a lizard.’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, uh, all right. Why is he calling that guy a lizard or a reptile? I don’t get it.’”

In the same interview, Duchovny also revealed he nearly passed on appearing in the beloved show before his agents convinced him otherwise.

“I had gotten a couple of scenes in this movie of the week, and it was a director who I was friendly with, and I was going to have to pull out of that part to do the X-Files pilot,” Duchovny told Lowe. “I said to my agents, ‘I don’t want to do that. She’s a friend, and I don’t want to pull out.’”

The entire X-Files library is now streaming on Hulu.

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