X-Files Star David Duchovny Reveals He Almost Passed on the Series

During a conversation with actor Rob Lowe on Literally!...With Rob Lowe, a podcast on Conan O'Brien's Team Coco network, The X-Files star David Duchovny revealed that he had almost passed on the iconic role of Fox Mulder, his conspiracy-obsessed FBI agent, because of another opportunity that he had at the time. He was ultimately turned around on it by his management team, but against his better judgment. After all, convention wisdom at the time held that a show about aliens likely would not have a long shelf life. Years (and a life-changing role) later, he's acutely aware of how lucky he got.

Without specifying what project he was originally going to hang onto, Duchovny revealed that he had to quit the previous project in order to shoot the pilot for The X-Files. Let's hope that the director in question eventually at least got to direct a couple of episodes of the sci-fi series down the line.

"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 said in the interview, released yesterday. "I said to my agents, 'I don't want to do that. She's a friend, and I don't want to pull out.'"

What's funny is that Duchovny, who said he wasn't interested in conspiracy theories, didn't see the science fiction element as the dead-end for the show, but rather the mythology.

"X-Files, this is about extraterrestrials. How long can it go?" Duchovny recalls saying. "It's a good pilot but you're either going to see the aliens or you won't."

Would Duchovny be an unkown if he hadn't taken on the role of Fox Mulder? Well...probably not. Besides a regular gig on The Red Shoe Diaries, which was a much bigger deal in the '90s than a lot of our younger readers might recognize from the pop culture punchline it became, Duchovny had already played the role of Denise Bryson in Twin Peaks two or three years before The X-Files shot its pilot. He had appeared in a number of feature film roles, including Beethoven and Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, the biopic starring Robert Downey, Jr. in the title role. So it's likely that even without The X-Files, Duchovny would have found his way into the pop culture bloodstream -- but there's always the distinct possibility that we could be saying "David Duchovny, that guy from Twin Peaks and The TV Set, could have been Fox Mulder in The X-Files!" stories.

"It's scary to think back on, if you didn't open this door, or you took that left instead of that right," Duchovny said. "It's like, none of it had to happen. You talk about actors being dumb…well, that was me."

In terms of a potential return to the world of The X-Files, either for him or just for the studio, Duchovny said that was a Fox question, with the decision made above his pay grade. He admitted that he didn't know why such a big property wasn't being exploited more often.