I think the brain is like the bottom of the ocean; there are these layers of rock, some fossilised. But sometimes they get drilled and it releases a noxious substance that sometimes hurts the sea life, and sometimes enriches it.” Ah, now, I saw that episode of The X-Files.Duchovny’s life has been free from little grey aliens, fag-toting CIA spooks and mutant hillbillies for four years Plenty of time to get a global phenomenon in perspective “Every year had its own hurdle,” he recalls “The first year it was just survival I’d never worked that hard before Fifteen hours a day It was enervating. I suppose I could be David Duchovny ABD – which is a slightly shady designation which means ‘All But Dissertation’ – but it sounds a bit too much like ADD, as in Attention Deficit Disorder.”He lies back in his armchair “I haven’t talked about any of this stuff for years. “But if I ever got mine I would definitely want to be credited on a movie as Dr David Duchovny. So how long did he spend sitting on the grass pretending to do his preliminary reading? “Not long Maybe I wrote a chapter. But it was on an old Apple Mac and I’d never get it out of the hard drive. It’s at my mother’s house now.”Does he think that any of his Hollywood contemporaries have half-finished doctoral theses idling in their parents’ attic? Might Tommy Lee Jones have 100,000 unpublished words on The Faerie Queen lurking in his bottom drawer? “Maybe they just don’t talk about it,” he speculates.

With Gravity’s Rainbow it would have worked best.”How diligent a student was he? “I didn’t do a damn bit of work on it,” he sighs. His mother, Meg, a schoolteacher, was left behind in Manhattan to raise three little Duchovnys. He was at Yale with Jennifer Beals, who, in 1993, turned down the part of Agent Dana Scully because she remembered his tiresome campaign to get her into bed. (“He used to follow me around and ask for dates,” she recalled in a recent interview.)Duchovny did not attend Yale simply to wait by the Coke machine for Beals to shimmy by. After gaining a good degree from Princeton – his senior thesis was entitled “The Schizophrenic Critique of Pure Reason in Beckett’s Early Novels” – he transferred to Yale to work on a PhD.

I ask him to give me the pitch.”I have no idea whether it makes any sense or not,” he ventures, “but it was about magic as a form of technology – a way to get things done and move things around in an efficient way – and technology as magic, as a way of performing great feats that 300 years ago would have been considered magical A blender Things that we take for granted. And I was going to discuss this in relation to contemporary writers who were trying to put technology within certain moral strictures Norman Mailer, Ishmael Reed, Thomas Pynchon. Fire.”Magic is a field of knowledge that has moral boundaries There’s good magic and bad magic There are good witches and bad witches. And technology is a field of knowledge without moral boundaries.

Looking back, we try to read a morality into something like the Manhattan Project, when the fact is that if we can figure out how to do something, we’ll generally do it. (One weighed in at five pounds, the other at four, and both are doing just fine.) His parents separated when he was 11. His father, Amram, was PR executive for the American Jewish Committee – until he decided to pack in work and move to Paris to write novels. “So this bear,” he reflects, quietly appalled, “who’s going to be baited by mastiffs the next day, has to suffer the embarrassment of chasing a woman dressed as a man? And that’s supposed to be evidence of the maturing of Shakespeare’s comic vision? Sending his characters out to be viciously mauled by bears? Maybe he never wrote it.