Many fans of Fox’s The X-Files were thrilled beyond measure when it was revealed that the network was reviving the beloved sci-fi mystery drama for a six-episode limited series, and star David Duchovny tells Entertainment Weekly that he’s also pretty over the moon about the show’s unexpected resurrection – so much so that he actually broke down in tears when he started reading the first new script (which he assures fans is “fantastic”).
“I got the first script this morning,” the actor said to the magazine:
“I just read it about an hour ago and I started crying reading the first page. It was just so strange to see the names on the page. It had nothing to do with the script itself. It was just like, I’d been talking about this for a long time. We’d been planning it for a long time. It took a long time to get all the people in the same place and get the deal with Fox. So let’s say two years we’ve been talking about doing it. Now it’s the fun part. Now we actually get to do it. That was nice and strangely emotional for me, and I’ll have to figure out how to use that [in the performance].”
Though Duchovny’s lips were mostly sealed about the stories series creator Chris Carter and writers Glen Morgan and James Wong have come up with, he did reveal that “there will be a mix” of a stand-alone plots and overarching threads, in typical X-Files fashion. “It’s not really The X-Files without the mythology,” he said.
Gillian Anderson will reprise the role of Dana Scully, partner to Duchovny’s Fox Mulder, and they’ll be joined by familiar faces like Mitch Pileggi, playing Walter Skinner, and William B. Davis as the enigmatic Cigarette Smoking Man. Though those actors are only signed on for the six episodes, Duchovny also told Entertainment Weekly that there’s the possibility of more X-Files past Fox’s initial order, depending on how the new batch is received.
“I would be open to doing another cycle,” Duchovny explained, adding:
“I don’t know that I could do a 20-episode version of this show at this point in my life, and I don’t know that Gillian could. But I think everybody is open ended on what happens after this. Certainly, we didn’t bring it back with the idea of ending it.”
That’s got to be music to fans’ ears, especially because the movie continuations of The X-Files have been somewhat lacking when compared to the original series. Reuniting Mulder and Scully on the small screen seems like the best way to recapture the series’ magic, and if the new episodes do that, it would be terrific to have both characters back on the television in a regular capacity.