"David Duchovny"

26:09Yeah. And so that was my approach. And then at some point I was just like, I liked, I'd played sports my whole life and I liked the team aspect of acting and of making things. I liked the high wire kind of, you know, put up or shut up feeling. Did it ever frustrate you that it didn't hold the same sort of academic rigor? No. that, because it is not, with all respect to our colleagues that are actors, it doesn't have this sort of highbrow, sophisticated reputation that a playwright would. It's just a different game. It's just a different game. It's like baseball and basketball, whatever. It's just, I look at life as a series of games or setups, and this was just another game, and I knew it had different rules, and I knew that I would have to examine different strengths in order to yeah you probably and probably probably less constraints too than writing and it because it is such a different discipline it probably started exercising a different muscle creatively that you're like oh this feels good yes it was the emotional emotional aspect of my life which had been neglected because i was you know i was in academia which doesn't really prize uh you know being volatile right so the emotional side of it and the teamwork side of it is being satisfied, but do you feel like this fucking academic superhero that you have inside of you has been satisfied, has been utilized properly in your life thus far?

27:42Yes. Now, now that I, when I started writing novels about 10 years ago now, and, you know, people, I go on Goodreads and I'll read, I'll read, you know, people's suggestions. Yeah. Oh, you will, you will. Stupidly, yeah. I will be accused of showing off my learning when in fact I don't write with any books around. It's all in my head. If I'm quoting something or if I'm referencing a great work of literature, it's coming from my head. It's coming from my memory. So I'm not doing it just to show off, but it's part of me. And I really feel like I finally joined in the conversation with these people that I grew up reading and loving and feeling like this is the conversation I want to be involved with.

28:33And I'm sure you guys have had this as actors where you're like, okay, now I'm in conversation with the people that I want to be in conversation with. Yeah, that's true, that's true. And then what about, did you, sorry, Shani, did you ever end up writing any plays or any screenplays? Have you kind of married the two? Yeah. Yeah, in fact, the novel writing came out of not being able to make a screenplay. Bucky fucking Dent I wrote as a screenplay probably in 2005 or 2006. And then I couldn't get it made. Usually my soul goes towards more independent kind of stories. And so Bucky I couldn't make.

29:17I got close, I got close, I got close. But then you finally did. And then I was like, I'm going to write it as a novel and then I made it as a movie. So you flipped it. You went the other way. So you wrote a screenplay. Because Will always talks about it. It's IP now. Because now your book is IP. So they love that, right? I don't know if they love that. Reverse engineering. I mean, no, Hollywood loves that. Was it a book first? Then we'll make it. I'll just say that as a director, writing the novel of the screenplay was the best preparation I could have done as a director. Yeah, sure. Because I just knew.

29:48I'm not suggesting that you have to do that next time you direct, guys. No, yeah, yeah. But I'm just saying, for me, that worked. Is there a genre that you like writing more of than not? Oh, I mean, I'm just of the, I guess, you know, I go back to the movies when I started acting, you know, like James Brooks, just these movies that can live in a real, in terms of endearment, you know, sobbing, but also laughing. Yeah, great. David O. Russell stuff. Yeah, yeah. Just like real emotional stuff. Emotional but fucking funny. Yeah. Flips back and forth. Yeah. So that's always the balance that I'm looking for.

30:30As an actor, too, it's always the balance I'm looking for. Yeah, I love that. That's just where I live. So what ended up becoming the first professional acting gig that you had, that you went up for and you got? Professional's a funny word. Well, you know, that you got a paycheck that you had to fill out a W-4 or whatever, you know? well i'll tell you about two one the first one i got paid for and then there's the first one i did which was uh even better but the first one i got paid for i believe was a uh michelo beer commercial wow and uh i uh i got on set and the guy told me okay you're at the bar here the guy the director said you're you're at the bar here guy yeah that guy some guy said you're at the bar okay this guy says i'm at the bar and uh you you run into an old professor of yours and you guys have a conversation and you know you're happy to see him and i was so fucking tight i was so nervous i mean i'm 20 i'm 26 years old i mean i'm not young young you know and and i had kind of staked my life on this path like i wasn't i wasn't gonna get my phd i wasn't gonna be a professor and I just thought, okay, I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to be good at it.

31:46Now I get on set and I'm like, I'm just tight. Because you feel like you needed to do so much? I just didn't know. I didn't know it was going to be so fucking tight. I know exactly what you mean, man. You needed that joint. It wasn't like, oh, I'm in the right place. It was like, no, I'm in the wrong place. Cameras pointed at you. What? That boom guy comes in. I can't do, I can't go on, I can't lie on the ground and go, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Right. So there's pretzels there. And I start, I toss one up, you know, catch it in my mouth. And the director's like, that's, I love that. I love that. Oh, no.

32:29And I just remember, again, that was my lifeline. And I was like, so I did it for like 10 minutes. And then I just remember the director going, okay with the pretzels. We got the pretzels. I thought you were going to say you could never get it in your mouth again. No, that I could do. So that was the first paying job was Michelob. The first job that I remember was my acting class went and my acting class put on a night of one acts and I decided to adapt this Charles Bukowski short story called The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California. Sure. Sure. Sure. As one does. Sean's always referencing that.

33:10Yeah. It's a painting Sean has. I just call it mermaid. Yeah. Yeah. So in this story, these two guys, kind of unemployed guys, watch the hearse unload at the Venice Morgue. This is not a true kind of geographical thing, but they can see it from the beach. And they know the timing of it. They know when the guys are going to come around. They know when the body's going to be unattended, and they're going to steal a body. So they do. They steal a body. and here's where it's Bukowski and the logic kind of fails you. But they open it up and it's a beautiful woman and I decide I'm going to have sex with her and then I'm so ashamed of myself that I force my buddy to have sex with her.

33:52Jeez. Are you sure you have this on your wall, Sean? I'm not sure. No, no, no. You should see the poster. It's bizarre. So then we go, what are we going to do to the body? I don't know. I swim her out. to the ocean to get rid of the body and then I come back and I say she wasn't dead she turned into a mermaid she was beautiful she swam away and so it's this like beautiful not beautiful after this it's this gross horrible necrophilia and then coupled with this high romantic it's just Bukowski right yeah so we decide we're going to do it and I ask the class you know which which which of the women in the class is going to be the corpse and everybody's like yeah it'll be me it'll be me but then when the time comes to do it nobody shows to be the corpse and we're stuck and we had been the place where we were making these plays was a a uh it was an s &m dungeon sure well you know of course they're not they're not used during the day and so they're not used during the day and and uh we got to use it for two nights by cleaning up we had to clean up and that was a whole other different story yeah but um there was the the uh madam there was named magda and she heard that we didn't have a body so she said why don't you use one of my blow-up dolls oh my god this is how things happen so they're at yale so oh she yeah right and i'm thinking maybe I should have stayed at you.

35:24So I had always put up like a bulwark on front of the stage to lay a body down so nobody could see the body. They couldn't see what was going on when I was supposedly making love to this body. And so I had this blow-up doll and I hadn't been able to rehearse with her. She wasn't available. She didn't know her lines or anything. As I was copulating with her, Her arms and legs started flying out because she's only made of air. So the audience sees this. Like a used car lot. I'm trying to do this most intense scene. Young actor, like I'm really like, I'm fucking edgy. And the audience is laughing and laughing.

36:15And so in between performances, I went to Paragon. I hope you know it. It's a sporting goods store. Very well. And I got four ankle weights, and I weighed down her wrists and her ankles. So the next time, she didn't have as much mood on it. But you still had the squeaky. The other part of it was when I walked through the audience, and I put a pail of water offstage where I was going to go, because I swim around, and I've got to be wet. And so I walked through the audience, and I'm sure the audience is like, oh my god this is the worst thing i've ever seen and i'm thinking yeah that's right i'm an i'm an edgy motherfucker and uh i go i go around the corner to uh and i realize it's totally quiet there's no door they can just hear me sponging myself down they could just hear me oh my god so that was that was my first play how long did it last uh it was two nights okay great those two Two full nights.

37:16Two full nights. So you do the Bukowski where you're, as you described, making love to an inflatable doll in an S &M dungeon. You do the Michelin. You threw away a PhD at Yale for this. That's what I hear my mother saying. Yeah, your parents must have been at this point. They're beaming with pride. But then what's the sort of the first one? Because I'm leading up to X-Files. I want to get into X-Files a little bit. We'd be remiss if we didn't get into X-Files because I was a fan of Xbox and I watched it. Yeah, huge. Yeah, same thing. So you get that and that leads to what? Because what was the first film you did?

37:56An old girlfriend of mine whose name is Maggie Wheeler. That's her married name. She's a terrific actress. She was on Friends quite a lot. Want to give an address or a phone number? Friends quite a lot. First and last, okay. She was on Friends. She was Janice on Friends. Oh, yeah. Chandler's girlfriend. Yeah, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Maggie was doing this film with Henry Jaglum, who just passed last week. And Henry's this maverick independent filmmaker. Yeah. And Maggie was going to be one of the three stars of this film called New Year's Day. And she asked Henry, you know, can you, David's acting now, can you see if you can put him in?

38:33So Henry did. And I had a couple scenes in the movie and they were good. They were kind of notable enough to kind of get me going here in L.A. and get an agent. and, you know, at that point it was like, it wasn't like get your SAG card. It was like, how do I get film on myself? Yeah, right. How do I show people that I'm not a vampire and I don't disappear when I'm on film? Well, people didn't have, they didn't have phones and you couldn't put shit on YouTube the way kids can now and create their own stuff. Right. So it was really this one, it was one long scene in New Year's Day that really kind of opened it up for me in L.A.

39:06And then I, you know, I auditioned forever here and didn't get tons of stuff and would get, you know. So you moved to L.A. Feedback. You moved to L.A. to do it, to go all in. Exactly. What were you doing to pay the bills while you were swinging and missing? I was doing commercials. I would get commercials. So no waiting tables, no bartending? I bartended. I catered. Where did you live when you were here in L.A.? I lived on 4th Street in Santa Monica. I got a subway there. I had an efficiency apartment, which means it didn't have a kitchen, which means I did my dishes in the shower. when I shower.

39:43David. Yeah. Wow. I mean, dishwashing liquid is pretty good. Wait, fourth and what? I lived on Ocean Park in second for years. Fourth between California and Washington. Yeah. Right by the stairs. That was my gym. I'd go to the stairs. I catered too. I catered for a wedding at Anthony Edwards' house when I just moved here. And I was like, oh my God, it's the guy from ER. And I'm in his kitchen. Yeah. It was so wild. and then you were shooting pretty much next door to him when you guys were doing Will and Grace that's right, it was crazy and you did a lot of commercials too tons, yeah, it's the only way to pay the bills we talked about, remember you had those commercials that you were doing, like when Will and Grace was on some of them came out yeah, I know that was wild I had two commercials two on the Super Bowl in 1998 one was a Bud Light commercial?

40:42I did a Bud Light commercial. Oh, really? When? 87, 88, 89. Wow, you did Miller Light and Bud Light. Yeah. Michelob. Look at you. No, Michelob. I did Michelob and Bud Light. I was all over the beers. I was king of beers. Wait, so David, so when did you, I mean, because I'm a big sci-fi nerd person. So X, yeah, so X-Files, that's what you're getting to, right, Johnny? Yeah. How did X-Files come about? I know you're sick of talking about it, I'm sure, but. And forgive us, Just forgive us. We're just fans. I didn't ask. But I'm ready to listen. Jason read the books. Yeah. It was just an audition.

41:23And I remember at that point, I was not wanting to do television. You know, at that point, there was a real divide between television actors and movie actors, which has been erased in the past few years or the past 20 years. So it was really, you know, I'm not a TV actor. That was my sense. Who was your North Star in film? Who did you want to be? Well, I mean, I didn't want to be Brando, but he was my North Star. Gotcha. Right. Did you ever write any of the X-Files? Yeah, I did. You did? I wrote and directed two or three of them, yeah. That's cool. One of them was a baseball one, Jason. I can't believe we haven't made this.

42:07I know. We'll be right back.

42:13And now back to the show. So wait, so you get this gig and you sign the five-year or seven-year standard thing before you go in and you test. So you know that if you get this, you're stuck with something that you're not really kind of excited about. Then you get it. Yeah, are you excited when you get it because of that? Yeah. Well, you know, you're not excited to think it's going to go forever, which is a blessing when it does. But you get competitive, you know. You're just like, if I'm going to do it, I want it to win. I want it to go. You do the pilot. You want it to get picked up. Yeah, sure.

42:54Every step of the way. Then it gets well received and you're like, well, all right. Now I'm a fucking TV star. Can I just stop for Tracy? Can I just say, so the testing process, so you don't know, Jason just alluded to and David knows. We all know. you it used to be i don't know if it still is the way but what what would happen is you'd go in for a show whether it's x files or will and grace or whatever it is and you get the audition and you'd go through and then they'd get a call back and you'd read for producers then what they do is they sort of take for any given role they might have three or four people who they decide that they're going to as they call it bring to the network yeah and that means that they're they're they're kind of their their select pick three or four people for each each role and before you go and do this final audition, usually like in a conference room or something in an office building, the most uninspiring place you can imagine.

43:41Before you do that, for a day or two before, your agents and the show negotiate your contract, a five-year contract, and you sign it before you go in for the final audition. In the lobby. Right before you walk in. So they got you. So you're broke, and then your agent goes like, here's your contract. We've agreed you're going to get $25 ,000 an episode for the next five years. It's a lottery ticket. Yeah, and you're like, oh my God, I'm so broke and I'm going to get$25 ,000 an episode for the next five years and you're doing the math and you're like, and then I'm going to buy it, I'm going to buy a new car.

44:12And if you weren't nervous before, you're petrified now. And you sign it and then you go, once you sign it, they take the signed, executed contract. So that you have no leverage if they give you the job. You go in and you then audition for all the execs at the network and then you're waiting and they decide whether or not you got the part. So nervous. They have you so over the barrel, you never realize, you're never not over the barrel in that process. And it's really uninspiring. And it's a very specific thing to get good at that, to be able to block that part of it out, to then go and deliver at the final moment.

44:50You're kind of... Torture. Yeah, you're fighting out of a hole, right? What if after that, David was like, it was an offer? But anyway... It wasn't an offer. So, David, your process is you're a little conflicted about doing a TV series, but you want to do it. And it's a great paycheck. So you go in, you sign the contract, you do the test, and then you do the pilot, right? And so now they've got the executed thing. And then the network, sorry, again for Tracy, then they decide from all their pilots what shows are going to make it on the air next year. So you're waiting for a month or two for that.

45:24And then they go, great, your show is happening, you're in it, and we've got you for five years. and then what happens a lot is you go, oh my God, this is so great. I'm going to make 20 or$25 ,000 an episode. And then two years in, if you're lucky enough that it's going, you're like, hey man, I deserve way more than 20. I got to get out of here. I got to stay available for all the feature opportunities I think are out there waiting. David, so you know that process, right? Like, so you're there and you're doing X-Files and you guys come out of the gate pretty hot. It's kind of a hit. Am I right or wrong?

45:56Well, it's a hit on Fox. And if you can remember that far back, Fox was really, like, not a real network at that point. It just started. It was, like, 93 when you guys? 93. They didn't have programming, you know, across the board all day long, really. And, you know, they had married with children. And I can't remember. You know, they had made 90210. Tracy Ullman. Yeah. That's right. But they were really the upstart network. They didn't have a big drama kind of like you guys. No, not at all. and we didn't need to get like huge numbers to be a hit for Fox, which was nice because Fox wasn't even in all the homes.

46:33Who was running Fox at the time when you guys were there? Do you remember? Who was running it? Garth Ansiar. Who? Was it Garth Ansiar? He was at NBC, I think. Yeah, he was one of the starters of Fox. Yeah, I can't believe you remember that name, Jay. Or was it WB? He didn't want me for a gig and I had to re-audition. You ready for this? For my buddy Mike O'Malley's show. We did the pilot. I get the pilot. We do it. We shoot it. it gets picked up to series and then he didn't want me and I had to go back Sandy Grouchel two months later it might have been Sandy I had to go back two months later and re-audition for a part and do a scene in a conference room a scene holding up pages that I had already filmed terrible that existed on film to get my job terrible that's crazy in a conference room in Burbank that's crazy and I'm like wait you don't need to see me do this in the room do you remember what year that was Will?

47:241999 That's when I first met you. Yeah. I met you at the Upfronts. Yeah, that year. That's right. All the Upfronts. Did you get it, Will? I did, actually, yeah. Oh, again. Well done. I got it again. You imitated yourself and got it down. What a fucking victory. Do you think I had, I think I counted, I think I had a thousand beers that night. That's not enough. That's not enough for that. Wait, David, were you a sci-fi fan when you got it? No. And are you now? Not at all. No. Wow, how about that? No, not really. So you get X-Files, you go up to Vancouver, you guys start doing it. It's a hit for Fox.

47:56And then it really starts to, when's the moment you can feel that it's kind of pushed through to the general? Probably like the third year, just globally. It felt just huge. I mean, it was a global hit. Yeah, massive. How did you like relocating up into Vancouver for so long? Well, I loved it at first. Yeah. Because I didn't really have any roots in Los Angeles. You know, I just, I had come here to try to get work. and you weren't going to, the blow-up doll wasn't going to start crying. I mean, they can perform a lot of duties, but tears are not one. I'm not going to speak for her. She, yeah. Jesus Christ.

48:40But I will tell you before I hear. This is what I hear. Yeah. Oh, my God. So, you know, I don't know how you guys feel about Vancouver, but it's a beautiful part of the world. Beautiful. I've never been. You've never been? I've never been. I want to go so bad. How is that possible? It's the greatest. It's gorgeous. It's so beautiful. So I loved it. And yeah, I didn't mind being out of L.A. at all. Yeah. I just loved being up there. And in a way, we got to just focus on doing the work. There wasn't any kind of L.A. around us. There wasn't any kind of whatever heat that was happening. We were kind of cut off from in a really good way.

49:18And in many ways, it was my education as an actor, having to go to work every damn day for 14 hours. I mean, these were really long days. And I really taught myself how to act. How soon into the run of it and the success of it did you start thinking, all right, good here, ready to move on and maybe parlay some of this into, you know, what did you have your eyes on? Was it still features? Yeah, I mean, that was really, you know, I had that kind of bias that was kind of baked in from a young age. The TV shows that I watched when I was a kid, it was quantitatively different, the acting in it. It's not the way now.

50:03But I just remember that you had very much a movie style of acting. In other words, you were very subtle. Well, that's how I would not get. That's why I would audition and not get any roles in television. I would say, he's a movie star. And I was like, well, fuck, I don't have a pot to piss in either. Good that you didn't change. Can I please play Puppet Man? Can I get that part? Puppet Man. David, I want to ask you about time management because you're a musician. You literally write novels, which is amazing. You act, you do some other stuff. I'm sure you haven't mentioned. I do some other stuff.

50:46How do you manage all of that on a daily basis or weekly or monthly or whatever? Do you pick a priority that you focus on or do you splice it? Whatever's like in front of me is what I'll do. Songwriting can happen at any time, pick up a guitar. But with writing a novel, everything has to stop and I have to work on that for a few months. I write really fast, but it's an intense experience of like eight-hour days doing that. And then, of course, I can't write when I'm acting. I can't write when I'm directing. Do you have a goal in your mind that is louder than all the other goals and that then informs how you allocate your time?

51:30That's probably the problem that I have is I don't really have a goal except to satisfy some kind of itch. And that's a daily itch, not a weekly or a monthly? No, it's a lifelong kind of a thing. It's just, for instance, like I want to make a series out of one of the novels that I've written. And that's really my greatest ambition at this point. But there's also a movie I'm shooting in February that I wrote, but I'm not directing. I'm just acting. And so... You've got a new series airing now. I think we're in November. Yeah. Oh, really? Hey, thanks for not having me on the live show. I mean...

52:08Dude, that's for movie stars, bro. I'm pretty good on my feet. Yeah. Yeah, Malice. It's Amazon. Comes out, I'm not sure, November 3rd or something like that. What's it called again? Malice. Malice. Yeah, it's coming in November on Amazon. And by the way, David, we'll get you a seat in one of the, we have these new stage seats that we're going to do on the live show. I was listening. I was listening. But, you know, I've always wondered this. We've had people on who have been part of something that sort of really struck a chord, you know, culturally, the pieces, as Sean would say, IP. but part of, and X-Files, obviously, over a number of years, you know, has this intense following and had a, and I was one of the followers.

52:49I used to watch it religiously back in the 90s. When I saw the film, I saw the first film, I didn't see the second film. The first film was a big hit. Do you, is there that thing when you run into people who are big fans of it, do you ever feel a response, weirdly, I'm just at, like a responsibility as the sort of the, as the caretaker of that thing of X-Files? Does that... I don't want to say there's a burden, but you're the guy, you're the front-facing face person of the X-Files. You feel that, yeah. Well, of course there was a time when I wanted to leave it behind and reinvent myself. But then over the years, you begin to respect the kind of power of the show and the size of the show.

53:36And the meaning the meaning that it has for people you know at first when you're younger you think oh it's it's not because of me but it's it's personal and then you realize it's not personal it's just that this thing has a place in people's lives and i represent that to them yeah and i'm an asshole if i don't respect that i say that all the time i said about you no i do say it a lot i know i I do say that all the time. I said it before on here where you become famous for playing a certain role or in a movie or whatever it is and then you spend several years trying to distance yourself that because you want to be able to play all these things and in doing so, you alienate the fans that made you, kind of, because they are in love with you because of the thing that you just said that you made them feel.

54:28And you're doing a disservice. And I always say that. I'm an asshole if I don't embrace the character Jack from Will and Grace and what it did for so many people. I'm sorry, what character is that? Exactly. And you're also depriving yourself the treat that you deserve, which is like how lucky, how rare it is to be a part of something that holds a spot for people. That's exactly right. Yeah, it is rare. And you get old enough to appreciate that you got to do something that was great, that did strike a chord with people. And when you're young, you don't think like that. It takes a few years to go, oh, I need to appreciate that more.

55:07No, it's funny. I read somebody, I made the mistake, David, of reading a comment a while ago with somebody saying like, he thinks that he doesn't, that he should have had more of a thing or whatever about me. And I was like, motherfucker, I'm so grateful for any time that I was able to do anything that even anybody liked for a moment. What a joke. Yeah, right, yeah. And I don't even have my high school diploma. I deserve, I don't think I deserve, the world doesn't owe me a living. We're so lucky that we've been able to do this at all. It's so not the way I think about it. Now, I'd like to ask a question that Sean's too shy to ask.

55:44Did you ever learn anything doing the X-Files that gives you any sort of confidence that we are not alone? And Sean promises not to tell anybody if you could just tell them. It's just us four talking. I never learned anything, no. But I have the same kind of sense as when I went into it, which is it seems to me that the impossibility would be that we are the only sentient life. I mean, there's just too many galaxies, too many planets, too many Goldilocks planets. Right. So the odds to me are slanted way in favor of the existence of extraterrestrials. whether or not, you know, we haven't advanced technologically enough to reach out to them.

56:27Yeah. And they might be all around us, and we just don't have the technology to see it. Right. Well, they don't want us to. I always look at it, you know, when you see all these things, these congressional hearings and stuff about pilots who run into these shapes or things that are moving in ways that we can't understand, I always think, I always think, oh, we're so dumb. We think that they want to, that we need to connect. And they're like, no, no, no. You guys, you guys. We're good. We're good. Yeah, we're good. we're watching you you know we're just watching you guys we don't want to have anything to do over yourselves like a bunch of ding-dongs didn't didn't we have we had a guy on once that uh and and yeah i'm i'm i'm paraphrasing here um but he said something that was really sort of interesting that it makes a lot of sense to me that that perhaps they are all around us in a way that we can't see just like our cell phone service or radio waves you know from like television with It's just flying all around.

57:22You don't see any of that, the ones and zeros or whatever the hell it is that fly around that make our phones. They could be all in that stuff. Yeah, they live in the space between the space. Yeah. The dark matter. I used to say this thing with, are you aware of the phenomenon of a ship of fools? Do you remember that from the Middle Ages? I think it was a great Robert Plant song. Is that a razor song? It could be. But the idea was that they would take their deviants and criminals, their incorrigible criminals, and they'd put them on a ship. They didn't have space for them. They just put them on a ship out to sea.

57:59Floating Australia. Well, sometimes you'd encounter a ship of fools and it wasn't a fun thing, right? Right. Well, they weren't armed. They shouldn't be armed. No, no, they made sure they were armed. But my theory about because so much of alien abduction testimony has to do with being probed anally and having their teeth drilled, my theory was that alien civilizations were putting their deviants and dentists on a ship. Oh, I see. Okay, very good. Sending it out into the galaxy and somehow they've come in. Good title. We can cut this. We can cut this. But why are aliens so obsessed with anal? Okay, so...

58:44Why would you want to cut that? You don't want to get any comments from it. David, what do you do? So if you're not reading and you're not writing and you're not writing music and writing screenplays and doing all this stuff, what is, this is sort of the Sean question, what are you doing? Is there anything you do in your downtime that you're like, what's your guilty pleasure? We'd be surprised to learn. What do you do in the space between the space? Is it gardening? Nice. Anything dumb that you do, you go like, oh man, I'd be embarrassed if people knew I did this stupid thing. I don't really. No.

59:15I'm so bad with hobbies. I really should have a hobby. Not one. It's really a problem. Well, you have, you do 25 ,000 things. It's really a problem. Are you playing basketball? Are you playing golf? I wish. Are you cross-country skiing? I wish I was playing basketball. Yeah. No, now I feel bad. I do have a hobby. And when people like me, when dummies like me are watching television, you're reading, so you're not watching any like... No, no, I watch TV. I'm watching Black Rabbit. Come on. Oh, yeah. Black Rabbit. Black Rabbit airing now on Netflix starring Jason and Jude Law. Production from Aggregate Films brings you Black Rabbit.

59:52Two brothers. So it's not like you're not watching Below Deck or anything like that. No, but I do watch... I watch A Love Island. Sure. Oh, you do. But then I realize 45 hours. Yeah. I mean, it's not like a 15-hour season. No. Somehow they make 45 fucking hours out of that nonsense. You get stuck in there. But so you watch baseball. Is there another, is that your number one sport to watch? Basketball is probably not my number one. Basketball. I hear the Lakers are going to be good this year. It could be. Okay. Who's your team? Knicks? The Knicks. Yeah. Now, you're not in New York now. Where do you live?

1:00:30I live in L.A. Okay. Why the Knicks? Because I grew up in New York. Were you not awake when we started the podcast? Well, there was some doll fucking and stuff like that there that just puts you in kind of a state that is not even here. That was just like an hourly thing that you were doing in New York. That blow-up doll really stayed with you, huh? How are we going to cut this show? This is terrible. I'm just glad he's not live. What if the next time we watch Jason on TV at the Dodgers game, he's sitting next to a blow-up doll? Oh, my God. He was the other day. With an X-Files t-shirt up. Oh, hey.

1:01:06Wait, David, I have an idea for you. Okay. Come on. So because you write novels and you're not a sci-fi thing, you want to sell a lot of copies of something, do like, you know, Bucky fucking Dent was baseball adjacent. Do whatever you do brilliantly and just make a little sci-fi adjacent thing. Just a little bit. Right? Well, that episode of the X-Files that I wrote and directed that I want Jason to watch, because it's called The Unnatural, and it's a baseball. Oh, I like that. Oh, all right. So you'll have to, I did that. Wilford Brimley do a cameo in that at all? No, but... Wilford Brimley. M.M.

1:01:43at Walsh. Wow. Wow. That's pretty... That's Wilford Brimley adjacent. Yeah. I love M.M. at Walsh, by the way, just as a quick aside. Yeah, he was fantastic. And he... Did he give you a$2 bill? He didn't. No. He does that with a lot of... Or did. I had one and then... Then we just made David feel bad again. Yeah. This is before$2 bills were being made. It's not hard to make you feel bad. But he replaced an actor who got ill. So he had short notice, and there was a lot of dialogue. His character was really the exposition man in this episode. And at one point he turned to me, because I only think he had a couple days with the script, and he said, this isn't writing, it's typing.

1:02:35I was like, well, I did the typing. so thanks a lot and at one point he fucked up it was so great instead of calling me Agent Mulder he called me Agent MacGyver and I kept it in there you go did you really? oh yeah it was too good that's great that guy was so good I just remember what was the one he did with Michael Keaton no you know the great Cleaning Sober and he was also in Fletch he was the doctor in Fletch He's fantastic. He's a fantastic actor. David, you're fantastic. You're fantastic, David. We've gone over. We rarely go over. We've gone over with you because we love talking to you. So Malice is out, Amazon Prime.

1:03:20We would be remiss if we didn't mention that again. Mm-hmm. Yes. Can I plug Black Rabbit again? Should I do that? Please. Please. What service is that on? Where do we find that? Very, very nice of you to share some of your time with us, sir. Yeah, we did this. I'm so glad. Thank you for coming on. I love your show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You guys are great. Thank you for coming on. Thank you, David. Actor, writer, screenwriter, novelist, academic, musician, Smarty pants. An all-around great guy, David Duchovny. Thank you so much, David, for your time. Thank you. It's been a joy having you.

1:03:56Thank you. Thank you, David. Thanks, David. All right, bye. Bye-bye. Double D. Double D comes to the Smartless studio, I guess is what this is. Yeah. Welcome to the Smartless studio. Yeah. Smartless is shot in front of a live studio audience. He's real slick and cool. He's just, well, he's confident. Always has been. He's smart. When you're smart, you're confident. He's very confident. Yeah. I didn't know half that stuff. That's amazing. Because you're not smart. You're not smart. This is true. I look how uncool you are. I mean, it is true. I mean, think about it. He graduated like head of his class in high school and then he goes to Princeton, then he goes to Yale and he gets a master's in English literature and then he starts to work on his PhD and while he's working on his PhD, he's like, I'm going to go there.

1:04:44I'm going to go and start doing some acting lessons just to sort of see how that is. Yeah, I mean, could you imagine being his parents and you're like, oh boy, baby, we hit the lotto. Look at this kid. We can't wait to brag about this with our friend, blah, blah, blah. And then they go see his first job and he's becoming an activist. and he's fucking this goddamn inflatable. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's nothing more disappointing than just going, I want to be an actor. And you're like, oh, Christ. All right. Maybe he's good. Hopefully he's good. And then they go see he's banging this doll. I know.

1:05:12No. But he landed on his feet. He did. You know? Boy, did he ever. He landed on his feet a few times. Yeah, he's such a, we didn't even get into Californication. He's just done so much. God dang it. He did some movies too. He did a bunch of movies and he's just. He's got this new show. New show called Malice. Malice. What do you think it's about?

1:05:36What do I think? What do you think Malice is about? Is it about a guy's girlfriend and her name is Alice? And it's M apostrophe Alice? Oh, Alice? Yeah. No, this is Malice. This is Malice. This is Malice. Yeah. maybe it's about that it could be just to throw everybody off yeah well Bennett suggests this is I'm calling Jason you said he landed on his feet maybe on his bipartite sesamoids sesamoids which is what is it the symptoms and treatment options are it's from the Melbourne podiatrist no No. You're not going to take bipartite? No. No, no. Have you, by the way, have you seen the new show? Have you seen the new show?

1:06:40By chance? By? No, we're not saying that. How are you doing that? How are you overruling with that? With just like a... I tried to tee you guys up with, you know, what do you think Malice is about? I thought maybe one of you ding-dongs had a bio already. Oh, you know what? Well, I thought you maybe said, is it a biopic? About a guy's girlfriend named Alice.

1:07:07Whose whistle was that? Who did the whistle? That's great. That's really good. Oh, we got to start adding the whistle. Yeah. Smart. Yes.

1:07:21Smart. Yes. Smartless is 100 % organic and artisanally handcrafted by Rob Armjarf, Bennett Barbaco, and Michael Grantary.

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