David Duchovny Talks Secrets Declassified Season 2 & X-Files Reboots Potential

David Duchovny has continued to shine a light on some of the darkest government secrets in modern history on Secrets Declassified. It’s indeed a real-life X-Files for the Golden Globe winner known for his iconic role as FBI agent Fox Mulder. New episodes of the History Channel series for Season 2 so far have centered on escaping Armageddon, top secret sites, buried secrets, and Black Ops.

From a 1916 Black Tom explosion to most recent Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb drone attack, the show goes through some of the most shocking and devastating occurrences. For Duchovny, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and master’s from Yale, the project is a chance to lean into his academic roots and natural curiosity. We caught up with the actor to talk about what he has taken from hosting the show. Plus, Duchovny gives his take on the X-Files reboot and tells us why his latest movie project Soapbox (in which he plays an aging soap star opposite Laverne Cox) means so much to him.

Being such a history buff, what has it been like digging into these cases?

David Duchovny: You know it’s always interesting to see the gamut that is run between the sublime and the ridiculous of these stories. To watch how small psychological human frailties get enlarged historically in these individual people tasked with whatever the government is trying to do at a certain time. To realize like any kind of Shakespeare or storytelling, it comes down to individual psychology and not a groupthink or monolithic historical perspective.

What did you take from season 1 going into season 2?

I think what we have been trying to do is find the tone between the horrific. The , “Oh my God, the world almost came to an end and nobody knew about it.” What is the appropriate reaction to that and then it’s kind of comedic, which is kind of like, “Oh no, the world almost came to an end and these bozos, what did they think they were doing.” It depends in many ways on the perspective and mood when you come to these stories because they are both horrific and comedic, which is a really weird place to land.

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And maybe a little horrifically comedic?

That too. What do you do? The only way you are inoculated from outrage or horror is knowing these are dead stories. They no longer reverberate for anyone, which is why they are declassified. It was the past, but if you put yourself in the mindset of back in the day and see how nuclear Armageddon happened so many different times, it’s almost numbing. You’re like, “How did it not happen?”

The ones that really struck me are the ones happening stateside. The experiments done without us even knowing right in the New York subway. It’s still pretty scary hearing about this stuff.

It is. I’m not one, despite my history as an actor, I’m not one who jumps at conspiratorial thinking. But when you see something like that it is something that we would have tackled on the X-Files at some point. The government is conducting these experiments, and I’m like, “No, bullsh*t. That’s not really happening.” Then it’s, “Okay, it did happen. Oh well.”

How many of these instances made you think would have been good to be included in a script for X-Files back in the day?

Always. We did talk about the events that led to the movie Argo. There is a lot of story material here that would make interesting fictionalization. That’s the place we find ourselves as storytellers right now. This proliferation of documentaries and nonfiction and almost immediate history is being written. We have things coming out a year after something is happening. We’re kind of in this weird place as consumers of the story. The idea of history is changing because there is no perspective anymore. History books are coming out a year after the thing happens. How many books on Donald Trump’s first 100 days are coming out already? How do you approach history anymore?

I was thinking about one of the more recent stories talked about in the show regarding Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb. Many other stories may have taken decades to come out. Now it’s almost real-time. So that’s an interesting takeaway.

Yeah, there was just in the New York Times today where [Volodymyr} Zelenskyy came out and said Trump is being played by [Vladimir] Putin again and that he wouldn’t have said this a few months ago, but the fact of Ukraine winning the drone war. These are just issues we don’t take into account. It’s also an issue that you would probably have to make until 10 years after the war was over and someone with a very sober perspective addressing it. Everything seems to happen, just a lot more quickly now. The need for interpretation is so great and still sort of democratic that you would think in a good way over the internet. But I think the effect is just confusion. There are just so many different takes.

And you don’t know what’s real or not because of AI.

We’re just entering into that world. None of us know what is going to happen with that. It was always believing your eyes and what you see. That doesn’t work anymore sadly. Who knows?

We’re about four episodes in with the next one coming up being on Weapons. What can you say about that one?

It’s controlling the weather, which seems to be an enduring human fantasy from Doctor Faustus on. That’s what I always come back to. Technology and magic, which were around the Ph.D piece I never wrote. Clearly, I’ve been interested in this stuff for quite a while. It’s interesting it keeps coming back to these ideas if you go back to Faustus and deal with the devil. Your soul for this power, and the power is some magical power. In modern times, its technological power. You don’t need magic anymore because it’s technological power. My thesis was about how magic was a moral field that there was good and bad magic.

Usually, when you exercise magic, you pay for it with your soul. Through my thesis I was trying to figure out a way to address technology in a moral way or how writers were doing that. I think we’re still in that world when you look at Sam Altman and OpenAI and hear about how we code our sense of human morality into this powerful machine we are creating. Again, that’s always the question. When you look at weapons, if you look at The Manhattan Project and things like that. Do we have the moral authority to create something this powerful?…Controlling the weather. Controlling the satellites. Who gets to? Where does morality come from? Today it may be a good guy doing it and tomorrow we don’t know

If anything, this show also gets you thinking and asking questions.

Yeah, but I think penetrating always is how human it always ends up being. It always ends up being someone who has an idea. What if we did this or tried to do this? That is endearing to me. I’m not condoning a lot of what these people were trying to do. But I do appreciate the human imagination.

You’ve been working on Soapbox. What has it been like?

We just wrapped last week. It was one of the best times I’ve ever had. I got to work with my daughter [West]. It’s a script I wrote with Max Barbakow. I really believe in the relevance of the script for our day. I hope it can come out as soon as we’re ready. I have high hopes for it. I feel we’ve made something funny and dark and hopeful and honest.

It’s great when you can find things you’re still passionate about.

Yeah, I feel very lucky to be able to write something I can be in. I’ve done that before, but I feel very grateful when I realize not only was I able to act in a movie I wrote, but I got to act with my daughter [West]. That pushed me to be creative in certain ways I never thought would push me in that way. It’s hard work to generate your own stuff, but it’s worthwhile.

THE X-FILES, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Season 5, 1997-1998. TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.

What are your thoughts on this new X-Files reboot’s potential?

I haven’t read it. I don’t know what it’s about. Obviously, [Ryan] Coogler is super talented. I’ve always thought the original frame Chris Carter created all those years ago was endless. It’s as endless as these stories. You have a believer and nonbeliever and the way they push each other and that’s the frame of the show. It’s kind of eternal. I hope they can do it. Much of it depends on the writer’s room with the stories. What you forget is if we did 25 episodes, honestly, they were about 22 or 23 movie ideas within those episodes. That’s a hell of a burden on a writer’s room. Usually, people make movies every five years or so. We were really making like 23 a year. I wish them well, but it’s a hard job. Hopefully, they don’t have to be 25 where in this day and age they are 10 or 12.

Do you think there are any nonbelievers when it comes to some of the Secrets Declassified episodes?

This stuff is well-documented. That’s what I find interesting about this show is that even though I know there will be debates, they are not open to debate. This is a factual record, whatever fact means anymore. That’s the weird place we find ourselves in that what is fact has been debased, but I don’t feel you can argue whether or not these things took place. It’s interesting from a human perspective. There is no grand plan going on here. It’s really just flawed people trying to do the best they can. I’m not letting them off the hook if they’ve done sh*tty things or hurt a lot of people, but mostly it’s people trying to do what they can with limited means.

Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny, Tuesdays, 10/9c, History Channel