10 things you didn't know about David Duchovny - Los Angeles Times
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10 things you didn’t know about David Duchovny

The star of "Californication" still loves "The Twilight Zone," but gets creeped out by Googling himself.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
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Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

David Duchovny, currently starring on Showtime’s “Californication” but best known for his portrayal of smoldering Fox Mulder on “The X-Files,” has so much to promote right now!

We spoke to him in honor of the DVD release of the film “The TV Set,” in which he stars, but he also has a film coming out with Halle Berry on Oct. 19 called “Things We Lost in the Fire.”

We knew a few things about Duchovny before the interview. He’s married to Tea Leoni, he went to Princeton, he has a master’s degree in English from Yale, and he wrote a very academic-sounding thesis called “The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett’s Early Novels.”

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So we knew he was smart enough to get into all those places and marry a cool lady, but here are 10 other things we learned.

1. He does not have an iPhone and doesn’t want one. “I’m very happy with my Cingular Blackberry. I don’t need a camera. I don’t want a camera. I don’t need my phone to play me music. I need it to be a phone and an e-mail thing.... Sorry.”2. He doesn’t Google himself, but he has Googled projects he’s been in and doesn’t think it’s a good idea. “That always leads me to see things I should never have seen. Googling yourself is like seeing your parents having sex. You’re never supposed to see it, and once you see it you can’t get it out of your head.”3. He recently watched “The Twilight Zone.” “I still like ‘The Twilight Zone.’ It scares me. I think it’s the black and white. My TiVo gives you descriptions of the show, and I just read that the first airdate for that show was 1959. So I’m watching it almost 50 years later. It’s crazy. That to me is the creepiest -- that 50 years later I’m watching it.”4. He’s reading “Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson. “I think it’s really good, but I’m only in the first 30 to 40 pages, so I’m just kind of entering into the whole consciousness. He’s a great writer.”5. His last vacation was to the Cape Cod area. “I love it there. I’m from the Northeast, and it was summertime. I had a great trip with the family.”6. If he didn’t become an actor he would have liked to be a professional athlete. “But I guess I would have been some kind of prose writer and teacher. That’s what I thought I was going to do. But I would have wanted to be a basketball player or baseball player. I was good, but it wasn’t a possibility.”7. He memorizes lines by himself.8. On a health scale of 1 to 10, he puts his diet at a 9. “As I finish my coffee … I do think about it. I think about it from different perspectives -- from my own health and what animals I’m going to think about eating and how they were treated before they were harvested.”9. He doesn’t play video games. “I have made video games, so I’m a hypocrite.”10. He’s just as happy behind the camera as he is in front of it. “They are both a lot of fun. I enjoy them both immensely. I would say I have more of a hunger to be behind it because I’ve done that less. But I love being in front of it too.”

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