As part of a series called "My Big Break," All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.
Here's something you probably know about David Duchovny: He played one of the 1990s' most iconic roles, FBI agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files.Here's something you probably don't know about David Duchovny: Only six years before landing that role, he was a Ph.D. student studying literature at Yale University, planning to become a writer.In fact, he'd originally planned to be a poet.
"It's funny," he says. "[As an undergraduate] at Princeton, Walter Kirn — who's a terrific novelist — he was a year younger than me. And he was an actual poet. And I think when I read Walter's stuff, I was like, 'You know what? I'm not a poet.' And that kinda woke me up."
Then Duchovny thought he'd write fiction. But as a 20-something graduate student, he felt like he didn't really have anything to write a novel about. He hadn't really lived yet. So he turned to the theater, thinking he'd give one-act plays a shot.
But he struggled at that, too.I thought, 'Well, if I'm gonna write things that are gonna be performed by actors, then it's probably helpful for me to know something about what that's like,' " he says. " 'What it's like to say words might help me write words.'He spent a summer in New York City, taking acting classes and auditioning for commercials — a friend had told him that a commercial would pay as much as a summer's worth of bartending. Right at the end of summer, he landed a role in a Löwenbräu beer commercial, then headed back to New Haven to keep working on his Ph.D. He continued the acting classes, commuting between Yale and New York City twice a week.
"I would ride my bike to the train station," he remembers, "I'd get on the Metro-North ... and I'd take it to Grand Central. I'd ride over to Marcia Haufrecht's class. Then I'd ride back to the station and be in New Haven later that night."
He worked on acting on the other side of the country, too; short trips to Los Angeles turned into longer trips. After a year or two of fruitless auditions, Duchovny started to land a handful of small parts — a cop in the crime drama Ruby, a sleazy businessman in Beethoven ("the movie not about the composer, but about the dog," he jokes).
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