'Holy Cow'! David Duchovny writes a novel

Jocelyn McClurg | USA TODAY

Actor David Duchovny, 54, is trying on a new role with the publication of his first novel, Holy Cow, about a talking cow, pig and turkey that go on the lam when they discover they're destined for the dinner table. The star of Californication,The X-Files (who says he's on board for a limited-series return) and the upcoming Aquarius on NBC spoke with USA TODAY's Jocelyn McClurg from his apartment on Central Park West. "Wow, I just saw a hawk fly by," he reports.

Q: You're a literary guy. You have a master's in literature from Yale and were working on a Ph.D. when you instead became an actor. Is this a dream come true, to write a novel?

A: I'd say if you would have asked me when I was 19 or 20 what are you, what do you want to be, I would have said a writer. The way I got into acting, I thought let me try my hand at playwriting, and if I'm going to do that I should learn something about acting. I've always thought of myself as a writer. I got to write some of the X-Files (episodes), I've written (the 2004 film) House of D, I've written a couple other screenplays that I may or may not now turn into novels since it's so hard to get an independent film made. This feels more natural than what's happened in the last 20 years for me.

Q: Is it weird to be dipping your toe into Hank Moody's chosen profession on Californication?

A: (Laughs.) No, it doesn't even occur to me. There were a couple novels referred to as being Hank Moody's and I don't know who wrote them but it wasn't me.

Q: What would Hank think of your book?

A: I don't think Hank would like it would so much. I think Hank thinks of himself as a very dark, dangerous individual. He would have scoffed at my talking animals and told me to grow up and write a real novel.

Q: Do you have any jitters about how people will respond to your book?

A: Yes and no. Fundamentally I'm lucky because I can say it's not my day job, so my kids are still going to be able to eat if everybody hates my (expletive) book. That's OK, so it's not life and death for me, it doesn't have to succeed so I can write another one and all those terrible things that actual writers have to deal with. So in that sense no I'm not so concerned with any kind of critical or public reaction to it. I think anytime you put yourself out there as a creative individual and say, 'Hey, this came from me and this is part of me, what do you think?' 'Well, I (expletive) hate it,' that never feels good. So yeah, there are some jitters about that. But generally I feel like the whole enterprise came from such a good and almost innocent place, that I feel almost immune to that kind of criticism.

Q: Your main character, a cow, is named Elsie Bovary. Are you a big Flaubert fan?

A: No, but I'm aware of it. I know he's out there, I know he wrote that book (Madame Bovary). I'm not sure that I've ever read it. It's really terrible for me to say. I was an English literature major, so if I read it, it would have been in translation. But they were just kind of thoughts and ideas that were floating around in my head, and you just kind of snatch at them sometimes. Aside from the cow on the milk carton, to me the most depicted cow of my childhood was the drawing on the Elmer's Glue bottle. So if it had been a bull it probably would have been Elmer.

Q: This is a book that is not going to make meat lovers feel great. It's about a cow who discovers that she and her friends are going to the slaughterhouse. But it's funny. Why was humor important?

A: Humor is just part of whatever I do. It's just my world view, which is the most unfunny thing in the world to say or to talk about. I'm not able to not be funny, to my detriment, so anything I approach is going at some point to be exposed as either tragically or absurdly funny. I think. That's life.

Q: You like puns. One of my favorite is that you are Elsie's cow-writer (co-writer, nudge nudge).

A: Well, I guess I do love puns in this book. I kind of have a love-hate relationship with puns. I appreciate them but I don't think they're that funny. To me the humor is in the character, the humor is in the situation. What I thought gave me liberty in this sense was it's a cow punning. I thought that's kind of funny. I've got a cow, it's speaking, it's speaking English, it's talking about books, it's making puns, it all kind of made sense to me.

Q: Tell us about your writing process. Did you write on set? By the pool?

A: By the pool (laughs). I wrote it by the reservoir up here in New York, not outside, but near the reservoir, that's the nearest body of water. My writing process is that I had this idea years ago as an animated feature because that's the world that I've been living in. I'm sure I pitched it to Disney, I probably pitched it to Pixar, and I really didn't believe that anybody was going to bite because animated films have to reach such a wide audience, they don't want to alienate anybody. It didn't happen so I kind of shelved it, and I never wrote it out, it was just a germ of an idea. And then last year I was kind of beating myself up for not being a writer, and I had some time and I thought about that old idea and I fleshed it out.

Q: And then did you get an agent?

A: A friend of mine, Eleanor Chai, who's a poet, she's friends with Jonathan Galassi at FSG (publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and said Jonathan would like to read anything you've written. I said I've got this thing and I sent it to him. He was great, he was a great editor, very gentle. It's coming out from FSG. I'm sure most writers will hate me that it sounds easy, but I'm sorry.

Q: You're a vegetarian?

A: I'm a lazy vegetarian, I'm a situational vegetarian. I've been a vegetarian, I've not been a vegetarian. Now I'm mostly a vegetarian. I will never order meat but if I go to your house and you served meat my feeling is the animal's already been killed, it's better that I eat it than it be thrown in the garbage. That's kind of my morality. The worst thing you can do is waste anything. I'm a waste-etarian, whatever that is. I read a book called Diet for a New America back in college, it outlined the living conditions of livestock, cows, pigs and chickens in this country and I was horrified by that in terms of the animal cruelty. And what compounds that is the wastefulness of it as a conveyor of protein. It's very inefficient. We have so many of these animals that are draining so many resources and creating so much pollution and taking up so much land and polluting the water tables with excrement. There are so many cascading problems that come from the overeating of meat. But I'm not a preacher and it's not a polemic. As the cow says in the book, nature obviously is not vegetarian, so it's not a black-and-white issue.

Q: You have a lot of fun with pop-culture references in the book, including selfies and Twitter. I see you're on Twitter, but are you a fan of social media?

A: I am supposed to be a fan, I think people that I work with would get mad at me if I said I wasn't a fan. I don't understand it, personally, it's not my world, I didn't grow up in it. I look at my daughter, she's perfectly comfortable in it, it's part of her life, it's totally natural. It's never going to be that way for me. I'm kind of a private person. I don't understand the sharing of it all, I do understand this is where we're at now. I'm going to try and hope I don't (mess) it up and disgrace myself. But I'm very afraid of the idea that you can just spout off and say something tongue-in-cheek and then for the next year you're having to go on Ellen and apologize.

Q: Who are your favorite writers? Do you sit around on set reading? Print or digital?

A: In a perfect world I'm a print guy. I love having a book in my hands. But I travel and to have an electronic library with me at all times is truly amazing. I'm still stunned by it, and what it does to me is it paralyzes me so I don't read anything. When I used to have a print book it was all I could read, it was right there in front of me, I'd have to pick it up, gotta read it. Now I've got a whole library. I just don't know what to do, so I watch The Office.

Q: When you do read, do you have favorite authors?

A: I read just recently Dept. of Speculation (by Jenny Offill), which I thought was fantastic. I loved it. It was very sad and beautiful and very unique. You know when you read a book and the author just has a voice you haven't heard before? It's like that. I hadn't heard that voice before.

Q: Your next show, for NBC, is called Aquarius (it's planned for airing this summer) and you play a cop in 1967 stalking a young Charles Manson.

A: I'm a homicide detective the late '60s in L.A. What I loved about the piece, it's big, it's kind of an epic with many characters. It's a sprawling portrait of America at the time. It's a time in this country's history that we constantly come back to, it seems. There was a real fork in the road. There was peace, love and stop the war going this way, and there was the road that led to George Bush (laughs) going the other. Manson is Woodstock and Altamont in himself. Manson is a greaser from the '50s masquerading as a peace-love hippie, but he actually turns out to be a very dark figure. All these things were to me were really interesting to dig into. My character's in his mid- to late 40s. He's a man of another century, another time, and he's looking out at his Los Angeles and he's seeing these kids with long hair and pot and everything. I found that a really interesting character to play, a guy who's watching his world view get destroyed.

Q: Would you ever give up TV and acting to write?

A: I don't want to have to give up anything, but if you told me that I had to make a choice, I would consider giving it up. I hope I don't have to make a choice. I like doing both. I like directing, as well. I like collaborating and I like sitting alone and doing it my own way too, so it kind of satisfies two different creative aspects of one's life because movies and television are hugely collaborative. Writing a novel is not.

Q: Are you working on a new book?

A: I have a couple of screenplays that I've written over the years that I haven't been able to do, they're kind of independent, story-driven. Story-driven to me sounds like novels. So it's possible I may sit down and try to turn one or two of these into a novel, and then to turn it into a movie. It could also be the most elaborate directorial notes you've ever seen in your life.