David Duchovny

Info

Full Name: David Duchovny
Date of birth: August 7, 1960 (66 years old)
Location: New York, New York
Country: USA

David Duchovny has been active for 35 years, participating in 16 movies that average a 5.8/10 score.

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Biography

On 8 October 2026, a 66 year old man with a guitar and a four album back catalogue played Union Chapel in Islington, the night after a show in Glasgow. Most of the room knew him as Fox Mulder, the FBI agent who spent the best part of a decade looking for his abducted sister. David Duchovny has spent three decades adding jobs to that one: a second career as a novelist, a third as a songwriter, two Golden Globes and an English PhD he never finished.

A New York childhood and an unfinished thesis

He was born in New York on 7 August 1960, the middle of three children. His father, Amram Ducovny, was a writer and publicist for the American Jewish Committee who had dropped the "h" from the family name because nobody could pronounce it. His mother, Margaret Miller, was a Scottish born teacher and school administrator. His parents split up when he was eleven. He read English at Princeton, graduating in 1982 with a thesis on Beckett's early novels, then went to Yale for a master's.

He was most of the way through a doctoral thesis on magic and technology in contemporary American writing when he left for Los Angeles in 1988 and never went back. His first parts were tiny: a party guest in 'Working Girl', with Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford; an insufferable yuppie in 'Beethoven', opposite Charles Grodin; and the cameraman Rollie Totheroh in Richard Attenborough's 'Chaplin', alongside Robert Downey Jr.

Television gave him something stranger. He played DEA agent Denise Bryson in 'Twin Peaks', a trans woman written with a matter of factness that was rare on American network television in the early 1990s. From 1992 to 1997 he was also the face of 'Red Shoe Diaries', Zalman King's erotic anthology for Showtime, playing Jake Winters and introducing every episode.

His first film role with any weight came in 1993: the writer driving across America with a killer while researching a book about serial murder in 'Kalifornia', directed by Dominic Sena, with Brad Pitt, Juliette Lewis and Michelle Forbes.

Fox Mulder, nine seasons and a lawsuit

That September, Fox launched 'The X-Files'. Duchovny was Mulder, the believer; Gillian Anderson was Dana Scully, the pathologist sent to keep an eye on him. What Chris Carter had pitched as a Friday night oddity ran for nine seasons, produced two feature films and built an unresolved romance that fans picked over for years while almost nothing happened.

He won the Golden Globe for best actor in a television drama in January 1997 and collected two Emmy nominations he never turned into a win. He also got fed up. In 1999 he sued 20th Century Fox, claiming the studio had sold the show's broadcast rights to companies inside its own group at below market rates, shrinking the profits it had to share. The case settled out of court in 2000.

He had already persuaded the production to move from Vancouver to Los Angeles in 1998, and it was not enough. He cut back his appearances in season eight, vanished for season nine and came back only for the finale. The first feature, 'The X Files', arrived in the summer of 1998, between the fifth and sixth seasons. He returned to Mulder for 'The X Files: I Want to Believe' in 2008 and, grey haired by then, for the two revival seasons Fox aired in 2016 and 2018.

The films around the file

While Mulder paid for everything, Duchovny went looking for parts that were nothing like him. He was a disgraced surgeon patching up gangsters in 'Playing God' (1997), with Timothy Hutton and Angelina Jolie, and a widower who falls for the woman carrying his wife's donated heart in 'Return to Me' (2000), directed by Bonnie Hunt with Minnie Driver.

Comedy suited him better than anyone expected. He was the biology lecturer in 'Evolution' (2001), for Ivan Reitman, with Julianne Moore, Orlando Jones and Seann William Scott, and the retired hand model who explains the conspiracy in Ben Stiller's 'Zoolander'. With Steven Soderbergh he made the digital video experiment 'Full Frontal' (2002).

In 2004 he wrote and directed 'House of D', a memory piece set in 1970s Greenwich Village with Robin Williams, Anton Yelchin and his then wife, Téa Leoni. Reviewers were brutal about it, and he didn't direct again for twenty years.

After that came the New York comedy 'Trust the Man' (2005), for Bart Freundlich, with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Billy Crudup; the bereavement drama 'Things We Lost in the Fire' (2007), in which Susanne Bier kills him off in the first act to leave Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro facing each other; the Soviet submarine thriller 'Phantom' (2013), with Ed Harris and William Fichtner; and 'Louder Than Bombs' (2015), the first English language film by Joachim Trier, with Jesse Eisenberg, Isabelle Huppert and Gabriel Byrne.

Recent years have been a mix. He played the mother's boyfriend in 'The Craft: Legacy' (2020), directed by Zoe Lister-Jones with Cailee Spaeny; one of the actors locked in a hotel through the pandemic in 'The Bubble' (2022), Judd Apatow's farce with Karen Gillan; the black comedy 'The Estate' (2023), with Toni Collette and Anna Faris; and the snowed in airport reunion of 'What Happens Later' (2023), which Meg Ryan directed and shared with him.

His return to directing was 'Bucky F*cking Dent', adapted from his own novel and premiered at Tribeca in 2023: a dying father obsessed with the Red Sox and a son who lies to him about the scores to keep him alive, played by Logan Marshall-Green. Cinemas wouldn't put that title on a marquee, so it reached screens in June 2024 as 'Reverse the Curse'.

Hank Moody and a second life on television

'Californication' began in 2007 and handed him the role he is identified with after Mulder: Hank Moody, a blocked novelist, charming and usually drunk, incapable of not wrecking what he had with Karen (Natascha McElhone) and their daughter. It ran seven seasons on Showtime, until 2014, with Pamela Adlon, Evan Handler and Madeline Zima in the cast. It brought him a second Golden Globe, this time for best actor in a comedy, in January 2008.

The timing did him no favours. That August, a few months after the award, he checked into a clinic to be treated for what his representative described as sex addiction, and came out in October. The Daily Mail then ran an allegation about an affair that it retracted in November after a legal threat.

He stayed on television with 'Aquarius' (2015-2016), as a Los Angeles police sergeant whose path keeps crossing a still unknown Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony). NBC put the whole first season online on launch day, which no American network was doing then.

In 2017 he brought back Denise Bryson, by then an FBI chief of staff, for the Twin Peaks revival, in a scene alone with David Lynch's Gordon Cole. He played himself in 'The Chair' (2021), the Netflix series about an English department at war, and since 2025 he has fronted 'Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny' on History, which returned for a second series in March 2026.

Books, records and a tour in progress

The writing career started in 2015 with 'Holy Cow', a fable narrated by a cow heading for India. Then came 'Bucky F*cking Dent' (2016), 'Miss Subways' (2018), 'Truly Like Lightning' (2021) and the novella 'The Reservoir'. The music arrived at much the same time: 'Hell or Highwater' (2015), 'Every Third Thought' (2018), 'Gestureland' (2021) and 'Prince of Pieces', his fourth album, released in August 2026. The European tour behind it runs from those Glasgow and London dates on 7 and 8 October to Zurich on the 21st.

He married Téa Leoni on 13 May 1997, a few months after they started seeing each other. They have two children: Madelaine West, born in April 1999, and Kyd Miller, born in June 2002. The couple separated in 2008, reconciled in 2009 and split for good in 2011, with the divorce settled in the summer of 2014.

In February 2025 he married the florist Monique Pendleberry, his partner since 2017, although he said nothing about it publicly for another seven months. 'Stay on the Train', one of the songs on the new record, was written more than a decade ago for his daughter, during a rough patch at home.

That daughter acts too, and in 2026 they worked together for the first time on 'Soapbox', a satire Duchovny co-wrote with Max Barbakow and Andrew Jay Cohen directs, about a soap opera veteran caught in the culture wars, with Laverne Cox, Jennifer Grey, Randall Park and Jimmi Simpson.

On 4 July he collected the CineMerit Award at the Munich Film Festival, which closed its programme with 'See You When I See You', Jay Duplass's drama about a comedy writer who can't process his sister's death, with Hope Davis, Kaitlyn Dever, Lucy Boynton and Ariela Barer. In June he joined 'Monsanto', the courtroom drama John Lee Hancock is shooting for Netflix about the groundskeeper who took the weedkiller giant to court, with Laura Dern, Jonathan Bailey, LaKeith Stanfield and Greg Kinnear.

One question is still open. Hulu ordered a pilot for a new X-Files in February 2026 from Ryan Coogler, with Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel leading it as new characters. In April, Duchovny said he had talked to Coogler but that there was nothing concrete; in August, Chris Carter said that he and Anderson would turn up somehow. Will Mulder be back? Nobody has confirmed it yet.