David Duchovny on Ryan Coogler’s ‘The X-Files’ Reboot, and Why He Doubts UFO Stories

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It’s refreshing, when you see him on Zoom that — despite the years — David Duchovny still looks, sounds and overall feels just like David Duchovny. The man’s still handsome, laid back, intellectual and gives a sly smile here and there. The somehow-now-65-year-old actor, who became a sensation starring as one half of the paranormal investigating team on Fox’s 1990s hit The X-Files, is here to promote the second season of his History Channel docuseries Secrets Declassified, which details dark government programs, policies and weapons from across the decades.

But naturally, we also asked his thoughts about Ryan Coogler‘s upcoming reboot of The X-Files for Hulu, all the hubbub surrounding UFOs/UAPs and what he’s up to next.

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So what excites you about season two of Secrets Declassified?

It goes back to truth being stranger than fiction. You listen to these stories and you’re like, “Oh my God, I don’t have the imagination to make this stuff up. This really happened.” So it goes from the ridiculous to the sublime, and it all comes down to human imagination and frailty and people doing the wrong things for the right reasons. It’s really what all drama is about.

What examples of things particularly surprised you when you approached the material this season?

How close we have come to nuclear Armageddon, and how many times. It’s like the Kathryn Bigelow film [A House of Dynamite] from last year, where you have what appears to be a missile heading toward you, and what is your reaction? Do you annihilate the enemy, or do you just try to continue life as we know it? There have been multiple examples of that throughout our history that we were not aware of. It makes you realize how reliant we’ve been on [somebody having] decent judgment at the very top.

Yikes.

It makes you fear for our position right now.

Did your years making The X-Files make you more skeptical or more open-minded when it comes to these sorts of topics?

I didn’t really bring it home with me. It was never my interest going into The X-Files. My dissertation was called “Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry.” My interest, going back to when I was in my early 20s, was how magic — or knowledge, which is really technology — was a field that had positive and negative morality to it. But once we get to Oppenheimer and the nuclear capability of destroying the world, you really see the necessity of addressing technology in a moral way. And, of course, now we have AI, where we’re questioning how we encode what we think of as human morality in something that is going to be way more powerful than us.

We’ve just gotten lucky with nuclear weapons — that we haven’t used them amorally since World War II. The brute fact is that any weapon that’s ever been created in human history has been used.

Well, at least, among the weapons that we know about. I thought of your show yesterday after reports claimed the existence of the government’s Ghost Murmur technology that was apparently used to help track the downed Air Force officer in Iran. It’s one of those things where it sounds like sci-fi — being able to track a heartbeat (and some are skeptical it’s real).

It’s in the old Star Trek — there’s an episode where they have all the heartbeats of the people on the ship. Even in this show, Secrets Declassified, we have a Luddite, pre-technological version of that, where there was a guy stranded behind enemy lines, and they used his knowledge of a golf course to get him to where they needed him to go. I prefer that kind of just using nuts and bolts [cleverness], rather than the newest technology.

We’re living in this strange moment where the entire notion of UFOs or UAPs are getting such a new and serious look. Having been through the legacy of The X-Files, what’s been your reaction over the last few years as that’s ramped up with congressional hearings?

I am not privy to any information. But my opinion is based on my consideration of human nature, which is: I don’t believe that those conspiracies exist, because I’ve never really seen two people keep a secret, let alone thousands of people in a government throughout generations. My sense of human nature is if there was something as world-shaking as contact with another civilization — alien or whatever — there’s no way it stays secret. I could be wrong, but that’s my sense.

Do you have a theory as to what is going on with these sightings? There are all sorts of theories — from top-secret programs, foreign technology, to deliberate government misinformation.

That’s what puts us in the bad position of believing in conspiracies. We want to know, right? And the best story is there’s a bad guy, or there’s a bad alien. If there’s one simple we can grasp that. But the more likely — and I go to Occam’s razor all the time — simpler explanation is usually the best one. The more likely explanation is just: the world is mysterious, and there are things we don’t know. We’re just hairless apes doing the best we can to try to figure it out.

Of course, I have to ask your reaction to hearing about Ryan Coogler’s X-Files reboot.

I wish them luck. It’s a great frame that Chris Carter came up with all those years ago — a believer and a nonbeliever tackling these mysteries. I always thought it was endlessly generative. It really comes down to the writers’ room for me. Because we had great writers. We had Vince Gilligan, the Morgan brothers, Howard Gordon, Darin Morgan and others. We were blessed to have a writers’ room that could generate 20 to 25 movie ideas. I’m not going to insult something like The Pitt, because that’s great television. But The X-Files was a movie idea every week.

So I hope Ryan doesn’t have to do 25 [episodes] and only has to do 10 or 12. And I hope he’s got great writers, because that’s really the key to making that show work.

Gillian Anderson suggested in an interview that she read the pilot script. Have you?

No, I haven’t. I’ve spoken to Ryan, and I have a general sense of what it is, but I haven’t read the script.

Have they asked you to appear?

There have been talks about certain things, but there’s nothing concrete at this point.

Hypothetically, what would be your feeling about stepping into that character again should the opportunity present itself?

I don’t know what the world of his show is. I don’t know if my character exists in that show. It’s all hypothetical to me, so I can’t really address it.

You have a few projects coming up. Is there one you’d like to tease that you’re especially excited about?

Yeah, I just wrapped shooting Soapbox, which is a script that I wrote with Max Barbakow. I got to work in it with my daughter [West Duchovny], along with Laverne Cox, Randall Park and Jennifer Grey, and I really think we made something special. We just wrapped, we’re just getting into post, so it’s a ways away from getting out there. But I’m weirdly excited about it. Usually after I finish something, it’s like The Old Man and the Sea: you had the biggest fish you ever caught, and by the time you get it back to land, the sharks have taken most of it. This one, I feel like the sharks got very little of it. That’s my feeling at this point. I feel like I got the big fish and I’m just about to get it up on the dock.