David Duchovny

After portraying FBI agent Fox Mulder in the hit series The X-Files, David Duchovny traded investigating paranormal activities for the pursuit of beautiful women on Californication. As Hank Moody, he plays a troubled novelist who is trying to keep his family together. Unfortunately his libido and penchant for recreational drugs always get in the way. The result is hilarious chaos.

 

WS: When you came off the huge success of The X-Files, what appealed to you about Californication and about doing comedy?

DUCHOVNY: I hadn’t really planned on going back into television, but the premium cable season is 12 episodes instead of, say, 24, and it was a much more workable schedule for me, since I have other pro­jects. So it was a three-month season, and when I started thinking of it that way, I started looking around for stuff. I had wanted to do comedy and this was a show that wasn’t so much a reflection of the kind of comedy that was done in movies or certainly on TV at that point, which seemed boring to me. This was more a comedy like the movies from the ’70s, like Shampoo, comedies about grown-up people rather than chronologically grown-up people who act like children.

 

WS: There is a lot of sex in Californication, but isn’t the show a lot about relationships, between man and woman, between father and daughter?

DUCHOVNY: Yes. People react to the sex and that becomes all that they can really see. But in fact the show is about this struggling little family and the romance of the show is trying to keep this family together and how this man raises his daughter.

 

WS: Can comedy be more difficult for an actor than drama?

DUCHOVNY: I’d compare comedy to music: it’s either going to sound good or not. There are many ways to judge a drama, but in comedy, if you are not amused or laughing, it’s not working. It doesn’t matter how true to the moment you are or what a greater character you’ve come up with, if it’s not funny and it’s a comedy you will still fail. So the criteria by which you succeed or fail in comedy is much starker and there can be more pressure. Sometimes when you’re working you’re just thinking, This shit isn’t funny. But I always go back to a friend of mine who is a stand-up comic who asked another famous stand-up comic who was older, What can I do that’s funny? The old stand-up comic said, You’ll know when you’re funny—you’re funny when you feel funny. I always go back to that—if I felt funny then I think it was funny, as stupid as that sounds.

 

WS: When shooting a scene, to get that very funny moment, is it a mix of what happens on the set and what happens in the editing room? Or sometimes do you know you have it when you are acting it?

DUCHOVNY: You know moments when you are doing it; you can’t tell an entire scene until you go in and edit. Certainly you’re right in saying that a lot of comedy is timing and a lot of timing comes from editing. You can be helped or you can be hurt by an editor, for sure. A good comedy editor is a real commodity. I would think that the guys who are making comedy movies, there are only a few editors that they go to. The final rewrite of the script is the edit.

 

WS: There are some pretty crazy scenes in Californication. There must be a sense of safety on the set for the actors to do what they do.

DUCHOVNY: The safety for performers is very important to me. It’s something that I always want when I’m working as a director and as a producer of this show. I try to give that to the actors, to everybody on the set to come in and be able to do their best work. They can’t just be trying to do it correctly, they’ve got to be able to fail. Only when you’re doing something that you might fail at are you going to get the stuff that is really good. You have to feel safe enough to fail. Beyond that, if you’re doing scenes, a sex scene or a love scene, whatever you want to call it, and people are coming in and they’ve never done one, it’s very vulnerable, obviously, literally to have your shirt off or to show your ass or whatever. It’s work to us and it’s just about making that person feel safe and not doing anything gratuitous and making sure everything you’re doing services the scene or the comedy. I try to make sex funny. I think people take sex way too seriously. The actual physical act of sex is kind of ridiculous looking and funny. I really don’t like it in movies when they try to make it look so smooth and graceful. We try to always get back to the absurd, funny nature of sex, and we’re rarely trying to make it look gorgeous.