The road between his first acting gig in a beer commercial (in which Duchovny tosses pretzels into the air and catches them as they freefall towards his mouth) and his current role, was paved with film roles in The Rapture, Kalifornia, Chaplin, Working Girl,and Beethoven (the canine, not the composer). Not to mention his ongoing stint as narrator of Showtime's soft-core anthology, the Red Shoe Diaries.
An untypical denouement for a Princeton grad who was once pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at Yale (thesis topic: Magic and Technology in Contemporary Poetry and Prose), and who not only writes poetry and reads it publicly but is also conversant about Proust, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, and Pynchon (in as much as anyone is lucid about Pynchon).
Born in Manhattan in 1960, Duchovny is a hybrid with a Russian Jewish father and Scottish mother, perhaps accounting somewhat for his trademark understated sense of humor (not unlike Mulder's) and Hebraic sense of irony. The only thing that presages his current role is that he used to play baseball in a local church cemetery where the bases were marked with headstones.
Today, Duchovny resides with his wife and daughter in Malibu, California. In May of 1997, Duchovny married T�a Leoni in a private ceremony in New York City.
While mercifully free of new age sensitivity, Duchovny practices yoga and turns himself over to an acupuncturist, just to keep things in balance. And of course, he spends rather a lot of time gazing skyward.
