In an interview with MTV David Duchovny said he was completely open to a new X-Files movie, in fact he thinks the possible Mayan apocalypse in 2012 almost demands it.

"As far as the X-Files movie I'd like to do next, if we get a chance to do it, would be a return to the heart and soul of the mythology, which is the alien-oriented conspiracy," Duchovny said. "I think it's natural for 'The X-Files' to have another movie in 2012, so we'll see if we get to do it."

I'm all for this — we need to end the series on a preferable alien note. Because I still believe that the truth is out there.

It's difficult to separate an actor from her character, especially when the acting is of high caliber. Of course, actors deserve to have private lives just like all other creative professionals, and if some of them don't read the Lord of the Rings trilogy every year (like Dominic Monaghan), well, that's just who they are. But it's a special gift from actor to fandom when the people who play beloved heroes turn out to be more than a little like the heroes themselves. They might not fight caped evil in their daily lives, but these eight actors possess that crucial bit of understanding that keeps them from phoning in their roles — and convinces their admirers that they're worth every jaw-drop and swoon.

Kristen Bell
After three years as teenaged noir super-sleuth Veronica Mars, Kristen Bell had to move on to something different — and she chose Heroes. Having watched the show since day one, Bell told the minds behind the show that she was a huge fan; the rest, as you know, is history. She's living proof that part of being a great actress is having a deep personal investment in the story you're being paid to tell. Audiences appreciate the hell out of that. And in a fantastic interview with the A.V. Club, Bell further showed her respect for her fans:

The bottom line is, everyone's a loser in their own right. Here's why I like geek culture: People like what they like because they like it. They're not trying to fit into any mainstream likes or dislikes. You want to dress up like a Star Wars character and go to Comic-Con? Do it, if that's what makes you happy. People might look at you as super-weird, but if that's your obsession, go for it.

Damn straight, Kristen! And I expect to see you in our next cosplay round-up.

Wil Wheaton
The man you know as Wesley Crusher just might be the poster boy for actors-in-fandom. Whether or not you like his Star Trek character, you have to admit that his subsequent work as a blogger has made the lives of many geeks, nerds, and fans very happy. He's written extensively and thoughtfully on his experiences in the world of Star Trek and in real life, producing three books: Dancing Barefoot, Just a Geek, and The Happiest Days of Our Lives. He currently blogs at Wil Wheaton dot Net in Exile.

David Tennant
Nobody had to explain Gallifreyan customs to David Tennant when he took the role of the Tenth Doctor on BBC's Doctor Who. He'd already been watching the program for years. In fact, he is a self-described "Doctor Who junkie" and once cherished a Tom Baker action figure. Now an action figure himself, Tennant took us through the production history of the show in a memorable episode of Doctor Who Confidential entitled "Do You Remember the First Time?" — and by the way, it turns out that pretty much everyone on the team these days was a childhood fan.

Felicia Day
You may know her as Dr. Horrible's lost love Penny or a Potential Slayer from Sunnydale, but it turns out that Felicia Day's geekiest — and awesomest — work yet is the creation of the online web series The Guild. Her tribute to gamers is adorable, hilarious, and subtitled in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, French, and German. Yeah, she's one of us.

Nathan Fillion
One of the hallmarks of devoted sci-fi fandom is allowing a fantastic story to become your reality. So Nathan Fillion, who played Captain Malcolm Reynolds on Firefly, endeared himself to me forever when he started making posts to internet fan forums and signing them "The Cap'n." The Serenity star is my kind of man: He devoured comics as a child, holds frequent Halo tournaments as an adult, and has this to say about his experience as the leading man of a sci-fi western (from Firefly: The Official Companion):

I put on my costume in my trailer and took one last look in the mirror. They called me to the set and I remember coming right from my trailer to inside the door of the set. When you walked into the studio, the ship was just to your left with the big open cargo bay door looking at ya. I remember walking up the cargo bay door for the first time in costume. I believe it was David Boyd, our director of photography, who turned and saw me walking up and turned back around to the crew and said, "Captain on deck." Some people clapped and it was kind of neat. It was a reception I will remember always.

David Duchovny
Nothing says commitment like writing two episodes of the show you star in, directing three others, and contributing to the story of five more. He may have left The X-Files a bit too early for some of our tastes, but Duchovny and creator Chris Carter were very much in cahoots as far as this celebration of unexplained phenomena is concerned — and that demands some respect. As Duchovny told the Los Angeles Times, it's an honor to be part of sci-fi culture:

The X-Files was said to be the first Internet show. We had chat rooms and fan sites and all that. Look, I'm usually five or six years behind whatever is hip. So it was around 2000 that I started doing e-mail and finally started understanding what all that was about. ... My initial response — and I still hold this to be true — is that it takes the place of some of the functions of a church in a small town: A place where people come together, ostensibly to worship something. But really what's happening is you’re forming a community. It's less about what you're worshiping and more about, "We have these interests in common." Someone has a sick aunt and suddenly it's about that, raising money to help her or sharing resources to make her life easier. That's what it was about with The X-Files on the Internet.

Ben Browder
Ben Browder's starred in the much-loved Australian-American series Farscape and American-Canadian series Stargate SG-1. Other actors in his position might bitch about being pegged as a sci-fi actor, but not Browder; he was heavily invested in both series, and seemed to have as much fun making them as people did watching them. He snagged a story credit for SG-1 and wrote two episodes of Farscape. As you can tell from the panel recording below, Browder learned his stuff while doing it: he says, "when people tell you that some long arc show which is five years in making is planned in every detail from the beginning, they are full of it!"

Simon Pegg
Simon Pegg will be Scotty in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, and is one of the creators and stars of the tongue-in-cheek sitcom Spaced — he plays a sci-fi enthusiast and aspiring comic book writer. He certainly brings a lot of talent to both sides of the screen, and when he guest-starred in Doctor Who, Pegg told the BBC:

Doctor Who was a big part of my childhood ... I'd got into Doctor Who just before Jon Pertwee regenerated into Tom Baker, and as a kid I never remember the special effects being as primitive as they were. It scared the hell out of me but I loved it. I particularly recall monsters like the Sontarans, who had very strange heads; the giant insects in "The Ark in Space" and in one episode, Julian Glover tearing his face off to become this one-eyed creature.

He's speaking, of course, of alien menace Scaroth, who manipulated human history for his own ends in the serial "City of Death." If that brilliantly campy special effect impressed Pegg, he had to have been totally immersed in the story, and that is true sci-fi cred any day.

Salutes all around for these glorious nerdy thespians! Now — who'd I miss?

Thanks to tipsters Heather, Sarah, Ellen, and Lily!

Image from Adventures in Time and Space.

Maybe that pigeonhole is bigger than we thought. Duchovny commented in a recent interview with Sci Fi Wire:

I never thought of The X-Files as science fiction. I always thought of it as playing this character in this world. The world was recognizable to me. It wasn't The Jetsons. It was present time. You couldn't fly. You couldn't transport our bodies over a teleport and all that stuff, so it was the real world, and it didn't feel like sci-fi to me.

Point taken — but, uh, remember your UFO poster? That room full of bug-eyed green fetuses? The computer that developed free will? (Not to mention the abducted sister, the abducted partner, the alien worm virus, the malevolent slime, the supernaturally strong clones ....) That's science fiction, buddy. And there ain't no shame in it.

We've gotten into trouble before playing genre-labeling games, but in the spirit of Michael Chabon, it must be said: Science fiction is, indeed, just good storytelling, with far-out ideas that are backed by what we know of the universe so far — and it spurs us forward to discover more. As Duchovny put it later in the interview, The Dark Knight suffocated theaters this summer (and is now suffocating joyful DVD and Blu-Ray players everywhere); there's a reason for that. Science fiction is for everybody, and it's here to stay.

Duchovny definitely understands that last bit. Though most non-Philes seem to be pooh-poohing the idea of any more Mulder and Scully, he's still into it:

I always talk to [X-Files creator] Chris [Carter] about how fascinating today it would be to take this guy from his early 30s and let's take him into his mid-50s, late 50s. Maybe nobody wants to see 60-year-old Fox Mulder, but we can grow him. We can take him through life's hardships and changes. It doesn't have to be this cartoon where nothing changes. You can actually form the flow of this movie and the expanse of this show to embrace actual passage of time and what that does to a person and relationships. To me, that's interesting as an actor and as a person. As an intellectually based character, you don't give a damn what he looks like.

Well, to a point. As long as Old Fox Mulder doesn't look like the freakishly speed-aged Doctor from "The Last of the Time Lords," I'm on board.

Duchovny Still Believes in X-Files [via Sci Fi Wire]

Image from Scificool.com.

Talking about the shooting of the movie, David Duchovny is happy to explain how not fun it was:

I did a lot of running for this movie,... You know action is pretty boring to do as an actor. Action and sex are silly because it’s all faking. I mean, it’s all fake, but those things are faker than the rest. Chris wanted a scene where I chase someone as fast as I can for five minutes. I will be interested to see how it cuts together, but we sure ran our asses off, for like, five or six nights in a row, in the rain. It was pretty stupid and I hated it.

Gillian Anderson is equally ready to complain about the difficulty:

It’s been a long time since I’ve done such a long shoot - I’ve chosen things between three and six weeks, and this has been the first time for ages that I’ve done two-and-a-half months. David has a lot of physical stuff to do in the film, and I feel like on the one hand I’ve gotten off easy and on the other hand I’m still exhausted. I just feel old.

Whatever happened to interviews where the actors sound excited and enthused about whatever it is that they're supposed to be promoting?

Here's the blurb for the movie novelization, which is written by Max Allen Collins (creator of Miss Tree, the greatest comic book character ever):

When a group of women are abducted in the wintry hills of rural Virginia, the only clues to their disappearance are the grotesque human remains that begin to turn up in snow banks along the highway. With officials desperate for any lead, a disgraced priest's questionable "visions" send local police on a wild goose chase and straight to a bizarre secret medical experiment that may or may not be connected to the women's disappearance. It's a case right out of The X-Files. But the FBI closed down its investigations into the paranormal years ago. And the best team for the job is ex-agents Fox Mulder and Dr. Dana Scully, who have no desire to revisit their dark past. Still, the truth of these horrific crimes is out there somewhere...and it will take Mulder and Scully to find it!

• Show creator Chris Carter hadn't had much success in television writing, having written mostly comedies and worked for The Disney Channel, before he was offered a chance to create shows for Fox.
• Carter was inspired to delve into the mysterious world of The X-Files by both the Watergate scandal, the old television show Kolchack: The Night Stalker, and a report that was circulating around 1992 that said 3.7 Americans "may have been abducted by aliens."
• Originally, Fox executives wanted someone blonder with big boobs instead of Gillian Anderson. Thankfully they didn't win that fight.
• The company Carter formed to run the production was called Ten Thirteen Productions, after his October 13th birthday. Sound Designer Thierry Couturier's son says the "I made this" over the company logo.
• Fox left Carter and his production team alone for the most part during the first season because they were putting a lot of time and effort into The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Now, as a Bruce Campbell fan, I have to say I loved that show, and I'm glad it was able to take some heat off of The X-Files.
• The writing staff didn't want to follow Carter's all-alien abduction storylines, especially since the UFO show Sightings was airing on Fox. As a result, the show "Squeeze" with the creepy guy who ate livers, hibernated for 30 years and had Plastic Man like stretching abilities became a template for the "freak of the week" style the show eventually adopted.
• Besides the pilot episode, Carter also wrote "Space" during the first season, which was about a ghost in the Space Shuttle program. It was extremely expensive to make, and Carter calls it "one of the worst hours ever produced for the show."
• The show often fought for its life during the first season, having low ratings and a Friday night timeslot. Despite finishing 102nd out of the 118 programs in the Nielsens that year, it was picked up for a second season. This is why the season one finale "The Erlenmeyer Flask" has the X-Files being shut down, and Mulder and Scully being reassigned.
• The X-Files' opening sequence was nominated for an Emmy, and the theme song was remixed and became a hit in dance clubs in the UK, Australia, and France.
• The legendary writing team of Morgan and Wong, who were also co-executive producers, wrote many of the best episodes in the first season, although they left in season two to produce their own show Space: Above and Beyond. Sadly it tanked after one season, although Morgan and Wong didn't return to The X-Files until season four.
• The show didn't actually show an alien until the "Little Green Men" episode in season two.
• Gillian Anderson was pregnant throughout season two, and the producers decided to hide the fact by having her behind a desk or a medical exam table most of the time. It helped that she'd been transferred to Quantico to teach.
• By the end of season two, the show had climbed to 64th out of 141, although it was gaining cult status and spreading fast by word of mouth. The show had also spread beyond the U.S. borders, and was one of the most popular TV shows in the world, outside of the country.
• The show was also named the best show on TV by Entertainment Weekly that year, and also won a Golden Globe for best drama.
• However, the show was still so budget strapped that they couldn't afford location filming, and in the episode "Ascension," a rock quarry had to be painted to look like the desert of the American Southwest.
• Season three brought on a cavalcade of comedy, and a slew of guest stars including Alex Trebek, Jesse Ventura, Giovanni Ribisi, J.T. Charles Nelson Reilly, Walsh, R. Lee Ermey and Jack Black.
• Guest star Peter Boyle won an Emmy for his portrayal of a man who could predict death in the episode Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, and the show also won for best writing.
• The show went on to win five Emmys that year, and Gillian Anderson won a Screen Actors Guild Award. By now The X-Files was here to stay.
• Season four premiered to their highest ratings ever, and Carter's new show Millenium (set in the X-Files universe) was put on Friday nights, so they moved The X-Files to Sunday night.
• By the fall of 1996, it was the most popular show on Fox, and Fox got the rights to broadcast the Superbowl. So, they decided to feature an episode right after the game, and "Leonard Betts" (about the guy who could regrow his body) received the highest ratings ever for an X-Files episode. More awards and kudos followed.
• Season Five opened to even bigger ratings, and the show was supposed to end there and become a series of feature films. However, Fox desperately wanted to keep the show, and worked out a new contract with Carter.
• Carter had been planning a feature film versin of the show ever since season two, and security was so tight that they were sending the script around on red paper, which would make it unable to be photocopied.
• They filmed the X-Files movie, X-Files: Fight the Future, inbetween seasons four and five, although it ended up pushing the start date for season five back, and as a result that season was two episode shorter, with only 20 instead of 22. It was code named "Blackwood" after Algernon Blackwood, a British writer of ghost stories.
• By season five, the two main stars were also becoming popular, and as a result many episodes featured either Scully or Mulder, and not usually both of them together. This was to allow them time to concentrate on other projects.
• Season five also featured episodes written by guest writers, including Stephen King and William Gibson.
• By the end of season five, both Anderson and Duchovny wanted the show to move from Vancouver to Los Angeles (where it was originally supposed to be shot), and so the sets were struck and production moved at the end of the season.
• X-Files: Fight the Future opened in 1998, although it wasn't a smash success. The movie grossed around $189 million worldwide, which recouped their reported $126 million dollar budget (with advertising figured in), but not by much.
• The movie takes place right inbetween seasons five and six, and season six picks up right where the movie left off.
• At the end of season five, the X-Files were once again closed, but then reopened in season six. However, new agents Spender and Fowley were assigned to them, and Mulder and Scully were given a new boss.
• Season six was seen as the "beginning of the end" for several reasons. There were several episodes which hardcore fans considered too comedic, like the gated community episode "Arcadia" or the two-part body hopping episode starring Michael McKean as Morris Fletcher. Also the move from Vancouver to L.A. seemed to alienate fans as well.
• However, the show was Fox's most popular again that year, and pulled in more awards. But, the wheels had been set in motion.
• David Duchovny left the show after season in part due to contract problems and feeling the need to "move on." Scully's role was dialed back as a result, and new agents John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) were introduced.
• Doggett and Reyes had some good episodes, but the show had lost a lot of it's hardcore fans and was turning into a sinking stone.
• For the season nine episode "The Truth," most of the cast returned and ended the season, and the show, on a cliffhanger. Sadly, they finished third in their timeslot, pulling in less viewers than their original pilot episode.
• In 2001 Fox introduced The Lone Gunmen spinoff show (which I must admit I am a huge fan of), although it only ran one season. The first episode had the unfortunate plot of hijackers trying to fly planes into the World Trade Centers, although it was filmed before 9/11. They were eventually (supposedly, I hope) killed off in season nine of The X-Files.
• The X-Files has a long-lasting legacy, having inspired shows like Smallville, Torchwood, and even Alias. You can buy the entire mammoth nine season set with the Fight the Future movie (but sadly, no Lone Gunmen disc) for just about $150 bucks right now. As a fan, I'll tell you up front that the packaging sucks on this set, but the contents are more than worth it.

Carter kicked things off by saying the film was worth the wait,"Because it will scare the pants off you. You'll see Mulder and Scully again in a whole new way."

Suddenly a bunch of adolescent girls behind us started yelling at Duchovny, "Can you give us your pants?" Sadly he did not oblige. A fan asked asked about the X-Files and 9/11 controversy. (For those who don't know, the pilot episode of X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen is about a plot to crash a hijacked plane into the WTC.) Carter passed the question to Spotnitz, who said:

We were really upset, and worried that somehow we had inspired the plot. But we were relieved to discover that the plot pre-dated The Lone Gunmen, and that 9/11 had nothing to do with our work. And then once we realized that, my next thought was how the government hadn't known about this plot. There have been a lot of conspiracy theories about the connection between 9/11 and The Lone Gunman, but none of them are true.

There was lots more we could have done but we ended at the right time. Things had changed after 9/11... and now the mood is right once more.

Anderson said it was hard to get back into character. "I had a really bad couple of days. I thought it would be really easy to step into it and I actually sucked for 48 hours."

Carter said, "I've always thought the series was a search for God."

Anderson said:

One of my favorite episodes is Bad Blood. Probably because it's one of the only episodes I remember. It was each of our ideas of what took place in an event, and we both got to play the other person's perception of ourselves. So I was moody and bitchy and David was going on and on and on [with the talking].