Duchovny answers his latest calling

David Duchovny '82 twists his body sideways, legs crossed, hunching his shoulder up and curling his arm over his head so it creates a space, shielding him from the room and the people in it who are watching him. He is doing radio interviews — live — first for Los Angeles, now New York, back to L.A. in an endless stream of questions and answers during which he will modify the same series of words, shifting tone from the spontaneity of an original thought, to careful, comical retelling, to rushed repetition.

"Bonnie Hunt is the funniest woman — well, she and my wife are the two funniest women in Hollywood," he says to one.

A few minutes later, "Bonnie Hunt and my wife are the funniest women in Hollywood."

Next interview: "Bonnie Hunt and my wife — funniest women in Los Angeles."

His fingers tap restlessly on the glass table where the phone is sitting. His hanging foot twitches. But his voice is calm, and the interviews are hilarious, often cracking up the two publicity agents sitting in the room, who are otherwise busy, frantically reassessing a schedule that has spilled over spectacularly because of a tie-up at the Regis and Kathy Lee show earlier that morning.

It is Wednesday morning, three days before his new film opens, and Duchovny — star of Fox's "The X-Files" — is living in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, publicizing "Return to Me," a charming romantic comedy, co-starring Minnie Driver. The movie opened Friday.

Duchovny plays Bob Rueland, a sweet and successful contractor whose wife dies at the beginning of the film. But her heart is transplanted into an ailing Driver, and the movie is spent bringing the two together in grand romantic fashion. As Duchovny will point out multiple times during the course of a week, a day, an hour, the director and co-writer Bonnie Hunt — who previously acted with Duchovny in "Beethoven" — writes with comic situations, not punch lines, and draws genuine laughs from the sharp scenes between the characters.

"The story was very simple and straightforward and sentimental," Duchovny said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Princetonian. "And I thought Bonnie is a very wry, very funny woman, and I thought if you merge those two strains, you get a very funny, very original film, because most Hollywood romantic comedies are really calculated and cynical in a way, and Bonnie has a kind of freshness and innocence. I thought it would be interesting to try and play in."

"You'll love this film," he continued. "It's hard when you don't like a film and you have to go out there and tell people to see it. I hate doing that. But I just want to scream for people to go see this movie, because it's so good."

Or maybe just scream. But if Duchovny is frustrated by the endless stream of interviews, he does not show it.

He suggests to one radio interviewer that Mulder be turned into a giant brain, located in a wheelchair, who narrates the show and solves mysteries by sitting at home and getting other characters to travel the streets and gather clues for him to piece together. To another, he cheerfully trashes the competition — "Rules of Engagement" ("Why does Tommy Lee Jones always do the same movie? Okay. There's that. What's the other one?") "Erin Brokovich" ("Why does Julia Roberts always do the same movie? Who's next? I'm not making any friends today.") and "The Skulls" ("Is that a porn movie?").

Has he met the woman who wrote the song, "David Duchovny, why won't you love me?"?

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"Haven't met her. In fact, have restraining orders against her. No, I have met her and I like that song. A friend of mine, he told me about this and he gave it to me, way before it ever came out and I played it on my way to work, in my car. And I liked it so much — it was very catchy, and I liked the lyrics — and I started playing it real loud, and then I realized my windows were open, and I was singing along 'why don't I love myself?'

"And then I shut the windows and I turned on the air conditioner and I realized, if I want to listen to that song, I'd better do it in private."

The publicity men cover their mouths so as not to be heard on the radio.

During one phone interview, there is a silence, and Duchovny finally hangs up the phone.

"Let me go right to a commercial in your ear," he says, smiling wryly, eyebrows raised. "You know you're off the air when you start hearing the commercials. They didn't even say goodbye. Was that live?"

"That was live."

"Eeh."

"Were you supposed to hang up?"

"I hope so."

This kind of experience — sitting in an elegant room in a ritzy hotel, monitored by publicity people and reporters, shuttled in limousines from ABC studios to MTV to NBC — is a far cry from Princeton University and his childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he played stickball on gravestones.

Duchovny's sophomore year, his roommate was an aspiring actor. Duchovny saw him scurrying to auditions, scanning scripts instead of schoolbooks, and shook his head. "Go to Princeton and then study acting?" he teased. "What are you thinking?"

Duchovny did not study acting at Princeton, focusing instead on various academic opportunities. He enjoyed his experience, though college, he said, is more about the personal development of young people than the merits of any individual institution.

For Duchovny, it was time spent dealing with the bitterness of confronting his athletic limitations. A baseball and basketball star in high school, he could not perform at the same level in college.

After a year on the baseball and basketball teams, he left.

"Those were great, great disappointments to me, not excelling in those sports the way I wanted to," he said. "But obviously it forced me into other areas that have become important to me as well. So there was a lot of pain involved in that for me."

He threw himself willfully into academics, chose English as his major — "I guess it was between philosophy, history and English and English seemed to me to be a way to do all three at once" — and redefined himself as a directed student bent on a writing career, a Ph.D. and academia.

He particularly remembered taking professor John Fleming's Chaucer class and a "weird philosophy course" titled "Meaning and Knowledge in the Arts."

"It was one of those courses where you're flipping through the course guide and you're like, 'Well, if I take this class then I'll understand meaning and knowledge in the arts — yeah, I should take that,' " he said, grinning.

He was a member of the Whig-Cliosophic society and joined Charter Club — though he would have chosen Campus if he had realized how far down the 'Street' Charter was.

"The eating clubs didn't appeal to me in any way, either Bicker or non-Bicker, and I had to eat," he said, shrugging. "So, if I had known that Charter was, like, at the end of the block then I probably would have chosen Campus because I hated walking there in the winter."

He laughed, shaking his head. "It's way down there. Yeah. God, I still remember. But Charter was good. The food was good. It was an eating club."

Duchovny did not want to bicker. "There were certainly people who bickered clubs who I liked, but I guess I just felt that the process to get into Princeton was so competitive, why do you have to go through another selection process?" he said. "It was weird."

Though he has not returned to Princeton since graduation, he was considering returning to screen and discuss an "X-Files" episode — "Hollywood A.D." — which he wrote and directed. The episode will air April 30, but Duchovny will probably not have time to visit campus.

Though Duchovny praised Princeton, he said he questions the educational system that got him there, and its exposure of the most brilliant artistic and intellectual achievements to its young, brightest students.

"The great works of literature are works about being an adult," he said. "Why is a 16-year-old going to understand that? How is a 16-year-old going to understand that? The question is when do you expose them and I don't know.

"But it always stuck in my mind that [poet W.H.] Auden had said he was lucky that his favorite poet growing up was Hardy, because he was a good poet, not a great poet. If you read the best stuff you can get very intimidated. You can be inspired, but also very intimidated and never create yourself. Shakespeare could just squash you forever. Why try to write after reading Shakespeare at the age of 17?"

With the poet John Berryman as his hero — "I guess I was sort of lucky because I think he was a good poet, not a great one," he said — Duchovny did try to write, completing a novel at Princeton and pursuing his dissertation in English at Yale University.

But slowly he began easing into an acting career after making friends at Yale drama school. He moved to New York, then to L.A. increasingly entranced with the new freedom of emotional expression acting allowed, even as his guilt over disappointing his mother's expectations and pain over repeated rejections grew.

He did not tell Yale he was leaving, so that he could return if his acting career failed. He did not tell his family. He wondered if he was throwing something away for nothing. He was ashamed of what he had done.

"It was a dirty secret," he said. "It was painful because you go from having a certain amount of success in academia — not professional success, but certainly on the way to that — and then that doesn't translate when you first try to become an actor."

Even today, Duchovny has not officially left Yale.

"I never got up and said, 'I'm not coming back here, I'm not going to write my dissertation,' " he said. "They very well may be expecting me there to teach tomorrow, I don't know."

That would make his mother happy, he quips frequently on talk shows and magazine articles.

"You know, I make a joke of that," he said, quietly. "She had a certain amount of disappointment. You know, my dad wasn't really involved in my upbringing. So he was pretty much, 'whatever David wants to do is fine.' My brother and sister — they're my brother and sister. They're not going to put pressure on me to do anything."

His older brother Danny, and younger sister Laurie are proud, he said, though maybe not in the way some would expect.

"I think they're just proud that I have created a life for myself," he said. "I think that's what I'm most proud of when I look at my brother and sister. They've created jobs for themselves, they've created an identity — a creative identity — and they're successfully living their lives. That's to me what makes a successful person — not fame or any of that, but that someone actually has the courage to strike out on their own and try to create an identity."

On the radio again, L.A., live, body uncurled for a photo shoot crammed in at the last minute, concentrating on the camera, publicity cues on time and the phone call — all at once. He is in the process of creating a new identity, the leading man, that includes time for his wife and daughter, who turns one year old April 24.

And he smiles. Duchovny has certainly done that.