The actor talks to Taffy Brodesser-Akner about steamy “X-Files” fan fiction and his new novel, not suitable for Disney.

You have a novel coming out, “Holy Cow,” about a traumatized cow, a sassy turkey and a pig converting to Judaism. What was the impetus to write a book like this? Ten years ago I had this idea come to me: If I were a cow, why wouldn’t I try to get to India? So I wrote up a treatment, and I pitched it to the only places you can pitch it, Disney and Pixar. Obviously they were wise to stay away from a story that has a pig getting circumcised in it. And then one day last year, I just thought, Well, why don’t I write out that idea?

It’s a very Jewish story. The pig in the book, Shalom, fixes the Israel-Palestine conflict. Your father was Jewish and your mother is Lutheran. How were you raised? I was raised in New York City. I was raised on the streets. I went to a Presbyterian school. I wasn’t raised to believe in any particular god. My father was a kind of cultural Jew, I’d say. So if I have a Jewish sensibility, I think it’s more in the cultural sense.

Your character on “Californication” is a novelist. How would he blurb “Holy Cow”? He would’ve said, “I don’t blurb, and I don’t like using blurb as a verb.”