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David Duchovny has a decades-spanning IMDB page, so, quite naturally, he's many things to many people. Still, chances are most know the gruff actor in one of two ways: either as Fox Mulder, the incorrigible conspiracy theorist on Fox's nineties sci-fi behemoth The X-Files, or as the womanizing, forever-haphazard-living novelist Hank Moody on Showtime's long-running comedy Californication. Prepare to add another role to the list: Beginning tonight, Duchovny stars as Sergeant Sam Hodiac, a no-nonsense, flattop-sporting, Charles Manson-hunting detective on NBC's new sixties-era drama Aquarius. For the 54-year-old actor, Hodiac was the perfect character to inhabit at this point in his career. "He really encompasses all the things that made both Mulder and Moody and other characters I've done interesting," Duchovny says. "He's a man out of time." Duchovny was affable and forthcoming when Details spoke with him about Aquarius, revisiting The X-Files next month, and his surprise debut as a singer-songwriter.
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DETAILS: You're no stranger to playing a detective—cough: Mulder—but with Aquarius being something of a period piece, that must have changed the role's dynamic. Not to mention the fact that Hodiac is a bit of a badass.
David Duchovny: It was fun because, in a way, there are some liberties with the character. It was a little like the Wild West in terms of how the policing got done at that point. I'm a bit of a rogue cop, a bit of an ends-justifies-the-means type of guy. I'm not above sticking my foot on somebody's neck who really doesn't deserve it. So all that is certainly more fun than doing paperwork, if you're going to play a cop. What I liked also was the fact that even though it's the 1960s, my guy is really a man of another time. He's really a man of the twenties and thirties. And he's looking at the sixties like he can't believe what the fuck is going on. The music, the hippies, the hair, the whole thing—he's not a fan. So I kind of like that the audience is going for a ride with this guy who is not sympathetic at all to what's going down around him. And his world is dead: He doesn't know that. He thinks his world is alive. The journey of the show and the character is that this guy is going to have to realize that he's a dinosaur. And to me, that's always kind of emotionally satisfying when somebody doesn't know they're dead yet. It's like all those movies where people don't know you're dead.

DETAILS: It's your version of The Sixth Sense.
David Duchovny: Exactly. [Laughs]

DETAILS: I don't know how knowledgeable you were about Charles Manson and that storyline beforehand, but it's ripe dramatic material, for sure.
David Duchovny: I think there's a couple things going on: I think we—as a country, and maybe even as a world—are kind of obsessed with the 1960s. We keep on coming back to this time more than any other decade, I think. Maybe there's some World War II obsession, but the sixties—culturally, musically, just in terms of the hope, the revolution that did or did not happen, we keep going back. It's like we haven't figured out what happened. It's like the mystery is in that decade and we're going to find it if we keep on looking.

Manson, very conveniently, through no talent or fault of his own, is symbolically both the light and dark side of that. He's a greaser: He's in his thirties when he's doing all this shit with these teenagers but then acting like a hippie. He's faking it: He's not a real hippie. He's a greaser who's grown his hair long. He's a con man and a Scientologist, and he's a pimp, and he's spouting this free-love stuff, and that he wants to be a rock 'n' roll star. The sixties are really all about light and dark: flower power and the darker side of that Manson comes to symbolically contain. We as a country, we're speeding down this road, and we run right into Manson, and we can go left into whatever the hippies were offering and McGovern and McCarthy and the anti-war movement and black-power movement and feminism and the drug culture and free love and all that stuff and Woodstock, or we can go right and there's Altamont and the dark side and Nixon and Bush and Reagan. And Manson kind of is both those things. I think, in a way, he's a great conundrum to kind of understand what the fuck happened to us as a country? Why did we go that way, when we might have gone the other way? And what was down that road? Was it better? We don't know.

DETAILS: In terms of acting, was it a smooth transition between something comedic like playing Hank Moody on Californication to a more serious role on Aquarius?
David Duchovny: It's natural. To me, that's my sense of what an actor does. You keep working, and you keep playing the characters that you feel like are interesting. I remember coming out of X-Files and seeing the Californication guy and thinking, Well this is very different. I'd like to see if I can do this, a comedy. I'd like to see if I can create this world legitimately and make it real and funny. And I felt like we pulled that off. I felt a certain kind of liberation from having done something 180 degrees from X-Files. But, in a way, I don't feel the need to do that, either. I don't feel the need to prove I can play straight or I can play a movie-like character. I feel like I've done it. Now it's just a matter of making whatever character I do as full and as realized and as human as possible.

DETAILS: Even though Aquarius is a drama, there are certainly comedic beats to your character.
David Duchovny: Because he's classically a fish out of water. He's a man of the 1920s in the 1960s. So there's a lot of comedy because he can't believe what he's seeing. He can't believe how lame he is. He wasn't a lame guy, and all of a sudden, he's a lame, square guy with the wrong haircut.

DETAILS: Aquarius feels more like a cable drama than your typical NBC fare.
David Duchovny: I was drawn to the material before it was set up anywhere. It was brought to me by John McNamara, who is the creator of the show and had written the pilot and had six years of the show in his head. He sold it to me as a 13-episode-a-year show. I said, "Let's do it. Let's go set it up." So we set it up with me attached as Hodiac, and I assumed that we would get it done on HBO or FX or AMC. I love Showtime, but I imagine it's too early for me to come back in any kind of show for them. And then NBC, out of nowhere, [NBC chairman] Bob Greenblatt said, "We want to do that." I thought, "Wow, that's a very interesting idea. We're going to do this show on NBC. All right. Let's do it!"

DETAILS: NBC didn't seem to stifle you guys creatively.
David Duchovny: It's the same show. The reason being is that we said, "This is great. We can do it on NBC. But can we make the show we want to make?" You do have to make a few concessions—with language and violence and nudity, and that's all fine with me—but we still made the same show.

DETAILS: NBC also opened its wallet for the show, securing classic songs from bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones.
David Duchovny: It's smart by NBC and by John McNamara because the era is so much about music. And that was part of the revolution that was going on. You do want the period to be authentic, and I think a lot of that can be achieved with music. It's just part of what you need to pay for making a period piece. They're a little more expensive than other shows. I'm glad that they did.

DETAILS: Speaking of music, you recently released your debut solo album, Hell or Highwater. That came out of nowhere.
David Duchovny: I had more time to devote to music, and I found myself with people who were encouraging me to do it. It was never anything that I was encouraged to do before. [Laughs] I met a guy named Keaton Simons who was really gentle and wonderful about me beginning as a songwriter and as a singer. And then through him I met Brad Davidson at ThinkSay Records, and he was super-encouraging and super-active in getting me together with musicians who could help me execute the sound that I heard in my head that I'm not necessarily a good enough musician to do myself. So it was really a matter of finding people that saw merit in my songwriting and in achieving the sound that we did. I couldn't be happier with it. It's still like a dream come true, even though I never even dreamed it. It's just like it happened, and I couldn't be more proud. It's a very direct expression. It's a sincere expression of myself. I'm very calm about whatever reception happens with it because I know in my heart that it really is a labor of love. And if you don't like it, that's okay, because I didn't try to make it any different to make you like it. When I go to sleep at night, I know that I did the right thing and that I did it from the heart. Of course, I'd prefer you like it. [Laughs] But it's not like a movie you do, where you're like, "Eh, maybe we shouldn't have done that ending because we were trying to please those people." I wasn't trying to please anyone. I was just trying to make these songs as honest and as good as they could be.

DETAILS: Was it a bit nerve-wracking having other people critique music you'd written?
David Duchovny: It's more in terms of my voice and my singing. Because I'm not a guy who can naturally get up there and belt out a song. It was so difficult at first for me to even commit to trying to sing and then to go, "Okay. Well, I'm going to work on it. I'm going to actually try. I'm not just going to talk. I'm going to try to sing the melodies that I've written for these songs rather than just point to them." That was terrifying and remains terrifying. I think a live experience with me is going to be a live experience with me. It's not going to be a record. I'm not going to hit all the notes: I'm going to be flat, I'm going to be sharp, I'm going to be good, and I'm going to be bad. That's music. That's what you get. I'm trying to tell a story. I'm not trying to hit notes.

DETAILS: What can you tell me about revisiting The X-Files?
David Duchovny: I haven't done it yet. We start in June. It's going to be interesting. I kind of haven't thought about it. I know I'm going to be there with Gillian [Anderson] and [series creator] Chris Carter, and we'll all check each other and be like, "No, that's not the way it is at all. What are you doing? You lost it." It'll be maybe a clunky first couple of days, but then we'll find it, I'm sure. We'll just fall into a rhythm. It's like an old song, and I think we'll find it.

DETAILS: Even between seasons on The X-Files or Californication it must have taken a few days to reacquaint yourself with the character.
David Duchovny: It's true. I remember, maybe not so much with X-Files because it's so long ago, but I remember on Californication, by Day 2 or 3, I'd be like, "Ah, there it is." And hopefully the first few days weren't so fucking bad that they were embarrassing. But it's almost like the rhythm of the voice falls into place, and then you're like, "Ah, there's the guy. Now we can go!"