When “X-Files” guy David Duchovny comes to mind, you don’t necessarily think of comedy.
Never mind that he won an American Comedy Award for his guest spot on “The Larry Sanders Show” last year. And his knack for lacing his comments with funny one-liners? Yeah, throw that out the window, too.
Yes, believe it or not, this is the same David Duchovny seen each week on TV opposite Gillian Anderson we’re talking about. Guess playing a stone-face FBI agent will do that to your career. But Duchovny‘s learning to live with it.
“I’ve realized that until I die, people are going to go, ‘I didn’t know you were funny,’ ” he says. “That’ll be the last thing I hear before I expire. It’s just something they don’t want to believe.”
Luckily for him, seeing is believing, and fans of agent Fox Mulder might be in for a surprise. In his latest role, as Minnie Driver‘s love interest in “Return to Me,” Duchovny manages to pull off some pretty funny scenes on the big screen. But this time, he’s not trying to make people laugh. He left that up to first-time director Bonnie Hunt.
“The acting is deceptively simple,” Duchovny explains. “Minnie and I had a discussion where we were like, ‘This can be really embarrassing if this movie is bad. And if this movie is not told with a sense of humor, we’re going to look just horrible.
“But what you really have to do as an actor is you really have to believe in (the film’s) fairy-tale world or else it’s not going to work. We decided to believe it and play it straight and trust in Bonnie to bring the humor out of the interplay of the characters.”
There are no government conspiracy theories, tales of alien abductions or dead bodies in this one. Well, OK, there is one stiff in “Return to Me.” Joely Richardson plays Duchovny‘s wife, Elizabeth Rueland, who’s killed off early in the film in a car accident.
Meanwhile, Driver’s character — Grace Briggs — is sick in the hospital and in desperate need of a heart transplant. And as luck would have it, Elizabeth doesn’t need hers anymore. See where this story is going?
Sounds like a simple story line? It is.
“I think it’s deceptively simple,” Duchovny says. “I think she’s (Hunt) done an amazing job with making something seem so seamless and easy. When you think about it, she’s actually created a genre that is just screwed up completely all the time. She’s made a movie that you can cry and laugh at and it’s not a Hollywood computer program movie … and Julia Roberts isn’t even in it.”
Duchovny first heard about the film when Hunt was still working on the script. He and Hunt had remained acquaintances since working together on the 1992 comedy “Beethoven.” Knowing her knack for comedy, he said he was interested in giving the script a read. A call to his manager got the ball rolling.
“She sent it to me and I read it and I thought, ‘OK, this is a real straight-ahead, sentimental love story,” Duchovny says. “If Bonnie Hunt directs it, it’s going to be a sentimental love story with this great sense of humor, and that just doesn’t exist in Hollywood pictures as I see it.
“As soon as I read it, I said that’s a movie I want to do. We called Bonnie and she said ‘I’d love you to do it.’ It was that simple.”
As simple as the script and the characters sound, that was exactly what attracted Duchovny to play Bob Rueland, a hard-working architect who loses his spouse, then falls in love with the women who received his wife’s heart a year later.
“I liked the innocence of the entire movie and the innocence of the character,” he says. “I thought it would be fun as a person and as an actor to try to go back in time in my own psyche of life to a time where I believed in love as being that fated and simple.”
“Return to Me” also brings together the veteran acting talents of Robert Loggia and Carroll O’Connor, his return to the big screen in nearly 20 years. He may not have learned how to be funnier, but Duchovny says he admired their style on the set.
“What I liked most about working with actors of that experience is that they just don’t care … and I love that,” he says. “It’s such a difficult and amazing place to see somebody get to in their life, where they’re actually doing something for some other reason than, ‘I want to please somebody else.’
“To watch Carroll and Robert not give a f— about anything was such a great, great experience, and I mean that as the highest compliment.”
Loggia and Carroll‘s characters provide lots of laughs in all their scenes, not to mention giving “Return to Me” a familial feel only warm, grandpa-like characters can offer.
“When I sat in that theater and the movie was ending, I was sad because I wanted this world to go on,” Duchovny says. “I really enjoyed the experience of being in this world. It was like ‘Moonstruck.’ That was the last movie I can compare that family to.
“It was like, ‘Hey, I really appreciate the world that you created. I feel like I was with those people for two hours and I kind of wish that the lights weren’t going to come up in two minutes because I want to stay there.’ “
