DD article

Nice article about DD, isn't he great...hehe

David Duchovny gets real life on Californication | Entertainment | Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - For former "The X-Files" star David Duchovny, the television show's slogan "The Truth Is Out There" had extra meaning during his final year on the Fox network playing an FBI agent tracking space aliens on Earth.

"The truth" meant finding an opportunity to portray a character grounded in real life, while "out there" meant the realm of cable television, where Duchovny's new program, "Californication," airs on Showtime.

This Sunday "Californication" will compete for a Golden Globe award for best television comedy or musical after just one season on the air, and Duchovny is up for best actor in a comedy or musical.

"I was really happy for the show and everyone involved," Duchovny, 47, told Reuters. "The thing about any award show is it's about exposure bringing new people to our program."

"Californication" tells of the everyday life of novelist Hank Moody (Duchovny), who lives in Los Angeles and is divorced from his wife. Yet, Moody remains in love with her and they share duties raising a teen-age daughter.

In its first season, Moody was in a writer's funk because his best-selling book had been turned into a silly Hollywood movie that became a hit. He finally produces a new novel only to have it stolen by a young girl who seduced him.

Not surprisingly, "Californication" covers sexual material, shows nudity and uses obscenities, all of which can be done on cable networks but not broadcasters like Fox that are held to stricter content standards on public airwaves.

Duchovny said that toward the end of the ninth and final season of "X-Files" in 2002, he had grown tired of hearing critics laud cable shows such as "The Sopranos" because of their use of street language and real-life situations.

"SOPRANOS" CHEATED

"I used to kind of bemoan the fact they were cheating. They had the richness of the English language and we did not. Now that I get to, it's fun," Duchovny said.

Duchovny shot to stardom in the early 1990s as Fox Mulder, the plain-spoken FBI agent who probed strange cases of aliens visiting Earth. It was a huge hit, earning many awards and nominations for the show and Duchovny.

When it ended, Duchovny kept working but not on network television, as might have been expected from an A-list star.

He took a small role in HBO's "Sex and the City," worked in some low-budget and art movies such as Steven Soderbergh's "Full Frontal" and wrote and directed "House of D," a coming-of-age story about a boy living in New York City.

"The fact that I was in a very mainstream (television) hit was never by design in any way," he said.

Before "X-Files," he won acclaim for offbeat roles such as a transvestite on the television series "Twin Peaks." He also was the narrator for erotic series, "Red Shoes Diaries," and in two decades as an actor, he has shown his talent in a variety of dramas and comedies.

He said Moody appealed to him because the character has a dual nature as a deeply flawed man who also is charming, likable and armed with a sharp wit.

"I've been saying for years, 'I'm funny,'" Duchovny said.

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X-Files Improv with Dean Haglund

I've always liked him....I wish he was in the new movie....

X-Files Improv with Dean Haglund - Times Online

The Canadian comedian Dean Haglund is the nerd’s nerd: a man who makes other nerds look like fresh-air-loving fraudsters. Playing a computer wizard called Langley, he helped agents Mulder and Scully to battle alien and government conspiracies in The X-Files. He even took his Wayne’s World dress sense to his own spin-off series, The Lone Gunmen. After The X-Files, he went on to invent – and I’m not making this up – the Chill Pak, a freezable cooler unit that keeps your laptop working in hot conditions. And, oh yes, he performs hour-long improvised comedy shows, creating imaginary episodes of X-Files from audience suggestions.

Thankfully, the end result is a happy, inclusive affair that is not just for those who know their Smoking Man from their, er – can anyone actually remember anything else about The X-Files other than the Smoking Man? Anyway, the point is that Haglund’s show is improv first, parody second. You’ll recognise more games from Whose Line is it Anyway? than you will characters from The X-Files.

Short-haired and Viking-featured, Haglund fleshes out each of his four scenes with a volunteer from the crowd. He gets an IT man to provide some hilariously hesitant sound effects as Haglund acts out his morning routine – which ends, as an X-Files opening scene must, in his mysterious death. A lippy geoscience student provides Haglund’s hand gestures while he plays a government scientist trying to poo-poo press concerns over the death. Moment by moment, this is quick-witted, gregarious improvising. He’s so relaxed on stage that he gets big laughs from rolling with whatever comes his way. But this also means that his humour tends to come from debunking his own scenarios rather than letting them build. A scene between Langley and Mulder (played by another volunteer) goes on way too long when there’s no narrative function to underpin it.

We’ve been set up for a mock alien-fighting adventure, so it’s disappointing when the pastiche plot turns out to be quite so beside the point. There are no in-jokes that will lose anyone, but there’s no real story that anyone will get lost in either. I’m a nerd, I admit it. But I long for a bit more babbled pseudoscience and a bit more pouting scepticism to make X-Files Improv do exactly what it says on the tin.

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The X-Files jokes are out there ...

Wow never knew this...

The X-Files jokes are out there ... | Comedy | This is London

It might be nearly six years since Mulder and Scully were last in action but the sci-fi phenomenon that was The X-Files will not die. A new movie is due for release this summer, and for fans who cannot wait - and have a sense of humour - this live, improvised solo comic version starring cast member Dean Haglund plugs the gap.

In the long-running series the lean, blond actor played straggly-haired, bespectacled computer hacker Langly. These days he looks less like Garth from Wayne's World and more like a new-age Kirk Douglas, yet he is still very much the king of the nerds, devising nightly fresh episodes out of thin air, based on nothing more than his quickfire wit and audience suggestions. "My mind is completely blank," he says, which is no drawback when there is no script to learn.

Last night - and probably every night in different ways - the emphasis was on pure silliness. A giraffe-badger-monkey mutant was on a killing spree and had to be tracked down. Haglund enlisted the help of various fans to play his supporting cast and provide sound effects. IT expert Leon from Canary Wharf was a particularly effective creaky door.

Anyone who remembers Channel 4's pioneering Whose Line Is It Anyway? will immediately recognise the beautiful unpredictability of the format. Random lines scribbled on paper and handed over, such as: "Do you know you are not a cockroach?" and "the cat keeps being sick", slotted neatly into a freewheeling plot that was often more potty than paranormal. Somehow I cannot imagine Gillian Anderson's Scully coming out with: "We exhumed your potato."

This is the kind of comedy that demands full commitment from everyone, and all those involved gave 100 per cent even if they had turned up expecting a quiet night in the stalls rather than a busy one in the limelight. The besuited volunteer enlisted to play Mulder at a moment's notice very nearly upstaged Haglund with his deadpan delivery, despite looking more like David Brent than David Duchovny.

The experienced star's slick professionalism held things together throughout, keeping spirits up with a combination of high-energy humour and gung-ho enthusiasm. This is a man who could talk for his country, although he was briefly flummoxed by a rather scary devotee whose references to a character called Manhammer and a talking monkey suggested he knew more about the cult series than was healthy.

Haglund left everyone wanting more. If there was a quibble it was that proceedings ended abruptly. Asking the crowd if they were "all laughed out" the audience shouted "no", expecting an encore that did not come. X-Files-type conspiracy theorists might suspect the star had been using a script all along. The answer is simpler. Improvising for an hour is extremely demanding. He probably needed a rest.

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