‘I did squeeze the cans’: David Duchovny recalls strange Scientology recruiting effort, slams its tax-exempt status
- Duchovny, who reprised his famous X-Files Speedos scene in his recent cameo in The Chair, encountered Scientologists at the height of his fame
- He attended a Scientology auditing session, but the personal questions put him off and he never went back
It’s not surprising that the Church of Scientology once tried to recruit David Duchovny into its ranks, but the actor says the controversial organisation’s efforts “didn’t go well.”
Duchovny’s interview with the Daily Beast comes as he’s back in the limelight for his cameo role in The Chair, the Netflix dark-comedy series about academia.
The 61-year-old actor plays a version of his once-aspiring English doctorate self, but it was his recreation of a famous The X-Files scene that set Twitter abuzz. Duchovny is introduced into the Netflix series when he, like his FBI agent character, Fox Mulder, had done, climbed out of a swimming pool wearing small red Speedos.
It was during the height of Duchovny’s X-Files fame in the late 1990s and early 2000s that he said he had his strange encounters with Scientology. The church is well known for wanting celebrities such as Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Elisabeth Moss to be its public faces, but there’s probably symmetry in the fact Duchovny’s X-Files had its own cultlike following and otherworldly mythology – not unlike Scientology, as critics say.
Scientology, moreover, had a friendly connection to Duchovny, as the actor recounts in the new interview with writer Marlow Stern. Duchovny’s close childhood friend, Chicago P.D. actor Jason Beghe, was an avid member of the church.