David Duchovny said he was the “curator” of FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder, his character on the hit sci-fi series The X-Files, and he even had to tell creator Chris Carter about a continuity error on the Fox drama.
In a new episode of his Fail Better podcast, Duchovny and Bones star Emily Deschanel discussed how they sometimes knew their characters better than the writers of the shows.
And Duchovny related an anecdote from filming “Fire,” a first-season X-Files episode in which Mulder confronts a debilitating fear of fire while pursuing a serial arsonist.
“I remember, like, in the middle of the episode, I had this thought,” the actor said. “I think I went up to Chris Carter — who wrote that episode, I believe — and I said, ‘Didn’t Mulder and Scully [Gillian Anderson] watch a building burn down in the pilot? And I think Mulder was fairly cool with it. You know, it didn’t bother him.’”
Duchovny also said that it was a “pet peeve” of his when TV directors with little X-Files expertise would try to tell him about his character.
“Sometimes the directors would come on, and they’d know they had a great script. On The X-Files, this could happen, you know? Like, ‘Holy s***, this is a great script,’ and they really wanted to kill it. They were dangerous. Those guys were dangerous. So, often they would say, ‘We’ve never seen Mulder like this before,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, about 10 other times. Ten other times we’ve seen Mulder like this before.’”
Deschanel shared a similar story from her time filming Bones and filming an episode in which her character, Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan, is afraid of snakes — even though Bones handled snakes just fine in Season 1.
“Little me was like, ‘Well, [the writers] know that I was near a snake [before],” Deschanel said. “In my mind, I made it that [Bones] was scared of small snakes because the other ones are small snakes.”
These days, Deschanel said, she would go to the showrunner to point out the incongruity. And Duchovny observed that TV actors have to be “kind of the curator” of their characters. “And sometimes you have to go, ‘I can’t actually do that,’” he added.