The X-Files Costars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reflect on their long friendship and working relationship — and the mistakes they’ve made over the years.
Anderson joins Duchovny for an intimate chat about the upcoming November 12 episode of his Lemonada Media podcast Fail Better. Actress and writer, 56, whose book Want was released in September, has been a fan of Duchovny’s show for some time. In July, she posted a video message for Duchovny on her social media channels, praising him Fail Better and describing his interviews with the likes of Sean Penn and Gabor Maté as “intimate, vulnerable and very smart”.
“When I first started listening and reached out to you, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it in terms of myself or talking to you about the book,” Anderson told Duchovny in the new episode. “It was just more than just really enjoying and hearing the depth of your conversations with people that you went into and appreciated that I felt like I was learning more about you than I knew or ever knew.”
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in ‘The X-Files’ in 1994.
Everett
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“We know each other very deeply, and yet we don’t know each other in some weird way,” Duchovny, 64, said.
Over the past 30-plus years, the duo has starred together in a total of 11 seasons The X-Files as well as the two spin-off films, Duchovny said, “I don’t know that we ever sat down and said, ‘Hey, what was your childhood like?’ ”
“We didn’t. And why should we? We’ve been busy,” Anderson agreed. “We have a closeness that we don’t have with probably a lot of other people and we’ve been through something that we haven’t been through with other people. I mean, yes, there was a crew and so on, but in terms of our experience as actors. And so I thought it would be a strange investigation.”
Duchovny admitted he thought the “trickiest” part of their conversation would be dealing with what he called his “friendship failure.”
The actor and podcast host told PEOPLE in June that he and Anderson felt a connection back in the audition process for The X-Files.
“I think right away, when we read together on the steps to go to the audition, we knew we could work together,” he said. “There was an instant connection through the work we could do, and it lasted for a long, long time.”
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Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny in Fox’s 2016 ‘X-Files’ 2018 revival
FOX Image Collection via Getty
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But as he remarked to Anderson at Fail Betterat some point during the show’s original nine seasons from 1993 to 2002, the costars split up.
“It was a long time, working on the show, where we just didn’t deal with each other off camera,” Duchovny recalled. “And there was a lot of tension. Which obviously didn’t matter because of work because we’re both freaking crazy I guess. We could just go out there and do what we needed to do.”
“It’s kind of crazy,” Anderson agreed. “I mean, it’s crazy that we were able to present on camera, you know, different feelings and emotions and attraction and all that stuff, but then not talk to each other for weeks.”
Duchovny suggested it may have been a smart choice. “Because we, like, save. I don’t know,” he said. “But I could have done better, you know? And as you know, we went through a crazy creation process with this thing. We started from — I mean, I was pretty inexperienced. You were really untested. And suddenly… It was like a global phenomenon before the Internet. And we’re just chasing, trying to figure out who we are.”
Noting that both actors were young at the time, Duchovny said that experiencing the show’s success completely turned their worlds upside down.
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David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson in 2016.
David Buchan/Variety/Penske Media via Getty
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Despite these tensions, the two have remained friends over the past three decades. A photo Anderson posted of the two with their dog in 2021 went viral, and earlier this year Duchovny told PEOPLE that the two are like “family.”
“When you share a pivotal experience in your life — this huge success with the show that we’ve had — only we know what it’s like to be at the center of that,” he said. “It’s almost like you’re in the same family. We know what it was like to grow up at that time. There is a certain kind of shared experience, knowledge and past that never goes away.”
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Source: HIS Education