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David Caruso casts a long shadow. Almost eight years after the infamous splitter infamously split from NYPD Blue, his name is still a punch line -- Hollywood shorthand for biting the hand that feeds you, thinking you're "so big," inadequately appreciating the limits of your career prospects, failing to accept how vastly your reach exceeds your grasp, and so on. When Caruso turned his back on the job that vaulted him from the bittiest of bit character actors to a household name -- to say nothing of making him the kind of craggy, unlikely sex symbol that comes off peculiarly well on episodic TV series (much in the manner of James Gandolfini, a few years later) -- many fan became anti-fans, personally offended that Caruso would dare to aspire. That his film career amounted to exactly nothing and forced him to slink back to TV (first in a single-season dud called Michael Hayes, and now in the C.S.I. spin-off C.S.I., Miami) has only compounded the overwhelming mass of schadenfreude directed at him.
So when David Duchovny decided to quit the show that had made him famous, two seasons before FOX put it out of its misery, the question on everyone's minds was, will Duchovny be another Caruso?
In a word: maybe.
Forgive the equivocation, but it's still awfully soon to tell. Duchovny only missed about a season and a half of The X-Files; furthermore, since the series just ended two days ago, the career prospects of everyone involved in it are still in question. (Except those of series creator Chris Carter: for him, it's over.) And though it's inevitable that Caruso's and Duchovny's situations would be compared, there are actually quite a few dissimilarities between them.
1. Caruso left Blue four episodes into its second season -- long enough for entertainment rags to profile him as the 1993-94 TV season's breakout star, but not so long that audiences identified him so closely with his Blue role that they lost the ability or will to believe him in any other part. (Not that it mattered much once he started appearing in movies no one saw.)
Duchovny departed The X-Files at the end of the seventh of nine seasons (though he returned for a handful of episodes in the eighth season, and the series finale), by which time he was well and fully entrenched in public consciousness as Fox Mulder. (See also: Perry, Matthew.)
2. Blue was an ensemble show.
The X-Files rested entirely on the shapely shoulders of Duchovny and his fictional partner, Gillian Anderson.
3. While he has a certain kind of weather-beaten charisma, David Caruso is not exactly what you'd call handsome in the strictest sense of the word.
David Duchovny is the opposite of that.
So you can see, it's a mixed bag of pros and cons for Duchovny. The cult hit TV series -- and the feature film based on it -- made Duchovny internationally famous. However, like all extremely popular TV series, it also cursed Duchovny, causing him to be identified with his character to the exclusion of any others he might like to play.
Since originating the role of Fox Mulder, Duchovny has starred in only four non-Files movies: Playing God, Return to Me, Evolution, and Zoolander. We grant that it's exhausting to star in a weekly hour-long drama -- particularly one that, like The X-Files, requires that its principals appear in practically every scene -- but damn. Four movies. In eight years. Sure, that's as many as Gillian Anderson has made, except one of hers was The House of Mirth.
Given how much Duchovny whined to the media about what a drag it was to make a sci-fi-themed TV series, and to be typecast as a result, we can understand why he chose to make Playing God: his character, Eugene Sands -- a doctor who loses his medical license after performing surgery while high, and then gets sucked into a criminal underworld ruled by...uh, Timothy Hutton? Okay.... -- is a departure from Fox Mulder; Sands isn't trying to untangle a byzantine government conspiracy, and is a low-life loser. Still, just because the movie represents a departure from The X-Files doesn't mean it's good. Return to Me is also very different from The X-Files -- a charming if slight romantic comedy in which Duchovny stars as a widower who finds love with Minnie Driver; he even gets to smile! We've got no qualms with Return to Me, but it's not like anyone's going around calling it Duchovny's House of Mirth. We figure he must have decided that he wouldn't get past the aliens until he confronted them head-on -- that's the only explanation for last summer's Evolution, a crapulous Ivan Reitman "comedy" in which Duchovny plays a community-college instructor way out of his depth tracking extra-terrestrial invaders. Zoolander is our favourite of Duchovny's non-Mulder movies, but it's scarcely his movie; he was very funny, indeed, as a renegade hand model (just rent it, all right?), but his part was a glorified cameo. Duchovny is well known for his big, juicy, Princeton- and Yale-trained brain, and he's got the celebrity Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire performances to prove it. Our question is, how can a man with a graduate degree in English literature suck so bad when it comes to choosing scripts?
We still like David Duchovny. We know we shouldn't, since he keeps smarting off in interviews with some ridiculous sexist remark or other. God help us, we hate ourselves for it, but -- like Alec Baldwin and Ben Affleck -- Duchovny keeps winning our love back with his adorable appearances on Conan or The Daily Show. Oh, who are we kidding? All it takes is one beam from that rarely seen panty-melting smile to get us back on board with Duchovny. He's got the looks, charm, and charisma of George Clooney; now all he needs is a few of Clooney's rejected movie scripts.
Fortunately for Duchovny (and for his reluctant, slightly sheepish fans...okay, us), one of Clooney's rejected scripts may have landed on Duchovny's doorstep after all: he will co-star in this summer's Full Frontal -- director (and Clooney crony) Steven Soderbergh's super-low-budget follow-up to Ocean's 11. We don't know much about the plot of this movie, but given the unusual circumstances of the production, we hope that it was the setting for Duchovny to learn a little humility, to perform with an ensemble of excellent actors (and Julia Roberts), and to switch off the Fox Mulder autopilot he's had on since 'round about 1996. Since we've thought for some time that David Duchovny could ascend to the A list (or, realistically, to the A- list) of actors of his generation if he just tried, there's a good chance that Full Frontal could start the post-Mulder phase of his career in earnest, and point it in the right direction.
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