'X-Files' star talks Fox's eagerly awaited revival—and says he's up for a second season

The X-Files type TV Show network Fox genre Mystery

David Duchovny says the first page of The X-Files revivial script made him cry—and it’s fantastic.

“I got the first script this morning,” the actor told EW during a recent interview. “I just read it about an hour ago and I started crying reading the first page. It was just so strange to see the names on the page. It had nothing to do with the script itself. It was just like, I’d been talking about this for a long time. We’d been planning it for a long time. It took a long time to get all the people in the same place and get the deal with Fox. So let’s say two years we’ve been talking about doing it. Now it’s the fun part. Now we actually get to do it. That was nice and strangely emotional for me, and I’ll have to figure out how to use that [in the performance].”

But what about the script itself? “I can tell you absolutely nothing—and it’s fantastic,” Duchovny said.

We actually did managed to get a little more out of the actor, who’s reuinting his former co-star Gillian Anderson as they tackle new paranormal mysteries in the return of their iconic series next January. Fox has ordered six episodes, which have been shrouded in mystery. So we asked Duchovny whether he could reveal if the new episodes would feature stand-alone mysteries or have a mythology that weaves through the mini-season. “Even though there’s only six, there will be a mix,” he said. “It’s not really The X-Files without the mythology.”

Other former co-stars, such as Mitch Pileggi (Walter Skinner) and William B. Davis (Cigarette Smoking Man) are back too. On the writing side, series creator Chris Carter is back, along with original writers Glen Morgan and James Wong (Vince Gilligan is not involved, sadly).

That Fox only ordered six episodes have led some to assume X-Files will only be a limited-series return, or a miniseries. Yet Duchovny revealed that he’s interested in more.

“I would be open to doing another cycle,” Duchovny said. “I don’t know that I could do a 20-episode version of this show at this point in my life, and I don’t know that Gillian could. But I think everybody is open ended on what happens after this. Certainly, we didn’t bring it back with the idea of ending it.”

Is there anything about becoming Fox Mulder again that he’s not happy about? “Probably running through the forest at four in the morning.”