After a hiatus of 14 years, FBI Special Agent David Duchovny Fox (William Mulder) unites with his partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) to solve cases in all new The X-Files: Event Series on Star World HD, 9 pm, Saturday. Excerpts of the interview
So what's changed for you and what’s the same with new episodesIJ
I find it a lot harder to work through the night. The hours are harder, the acting is easier. I think we are all better. We have done a lot of work since we started this show. We (Gillian and I) both, I believe, have gotten better. So, that’s kind of fun to bring that to the same characters, bring the ability to access maybe more than we could have back then.
Now that you’re back playing Mulder, and you played him obviously from the first X-Files, how protective have you become of that character nowIJ
Very protective; I feel like I’m his caretaker. So, there are times when you get a script and, I’ll talk to whoever wrote the script, and I’ll say this doesn't sound right, this doesn’t feel right. At this point, it’s really instinctive and intuitive, but every actor is like that, every actor is going to feel that way.
The X-Files is kind of a cult of-a religion-to a lot of people. How hard is it to process as the actorIJ
I don’t process it, I don’t think about it. It doesn’t affect me, it doesn’t occur to me.
How has this show affected your lifeIJ
It doesn’t really. I mean, it’s affected my life in that it started my career. It gave me many opportunities, it gave me a lot of money, all great things. Most of all, it gave me the opportunity to go to work every day and act for fourteen hours a day for eight years. So, I got to create my own acting skill for myself.
Are you happy to start again, or be backIJ
I’m happy. I like working. I think the show is great. I couldn’t be prouder of the entire show, from the first season to what we’ve done now. There’s so much of it that I am grateful for. It’s like if you play a sport. At some point you stop thinking about hitting a tennis ball, you just hit the tennis ball. So, I just do the same with The X-Files.
Is there anything that you find challenging stillIJ
It’s the comeback — I am now-54. He’s not 30-year-old Mulder. And yet, he’s not a different guy. I have got to make changes, but they can’t be that obvious. That’s challenging and interesting to an actor.
What do you feel when you see people dressed like Mulder and Scully and all the excitement from the fansIJ
It’s nice that people love the show. I don’t know how else to put it without sounding like an idiot, or without sounding ungrateful because I am grateful. Without people still being interested, we wouldn’t have got to do these six new episodes. It’s amazing to me that we kind of ended the show right before mobiles and Internet happened, and yet, somehow we’ve kind of created a life in this Internet world.
You hope it continuesIJ
I try not to hope. If the opportunity presents itself and a lot of it depends on Chris Carter. If he thinks there are stories to tell or if we can sit down and figure out ways to go. It’s my impression that the frame of the show is so very flexible that we could tell stories for a long, long time. It’s just a question of Chris wanting to and Gillian wanting to and me wanting to and us all getting together in the same space to do it. But it’s possible that we could all find ourselves in the same city for three months again at some point.