"David Duchovny"

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Speaker 1 Hey guys, this is welcome back. This is the first time, time

Speaker 1 This is the first time I've done this that we're doing the show since we

Speaker 1 did it last we made the well no we made a didn't we make a blood pact?

Speaker 1 I mean I did we not that I know of did we not make a blood pact who did I make a blood pact with oh no

Speaker 1 I'll figure it out later. All right, in the meantime, let's go to an all-new smartless

Speaker 1 smart

Speaker 1 Smart

Speaker 1 Less

Speaker 1 smart

Speaker 1 hey, you know, JB, somebody said to me the other day, you've become like the Jack Nicholson of the Dodgers. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 You're at the Dodgers, you're on the broadcast.

Speaker 1 High compliment. I know, I know.
And Shawnee, you were there with them, and the guys were like, somebody said that the guys were like, hey, there's two-thirds of the Smartlist crew. And

Speaker 1 we really, we had such a, we had such a joy, didn't we? I mean, Willie, if I had three tickets, I know, sure, sure. Yeah, this is last week it was dinner, this week it's the game.
I mean,

Speaker 1 most people would be like, Hey,

Speaker 1 and Sean,

Speaker 1 no, no, no, we're still good for Rome, right? Yeah, Sean.

Speaker 1 Oh, this is what it is. This is a, you're getting me back for all the holidays that Sean and I went on.
I mean, the stamps on your passports.

Speaker 1 No, you, we missed you, Willie.

Speaker 1 we really did have a nice time didn't we shawny oh my god it was so easy breathing we haven't we haven't done that in uh in ever and ever and it you know it reminded me willie of uh

Speaker 1 you know i took you to the uh was it game one of the world series last year when yeah freddie freeman hit that walk off transport yeah how good was that we were jumping around like what was the last game contest

Speaker 1 uh the last game of world is that where is that is that the famous last game last year where it wasn't the last game i believe i believe it was the first game It was the first game.

Speaker 1 And it was a World Series. Yeah.
Where he just got a bases loaded home run. Yeah.
And then the series continued for

Speaker 1 the Yankees to go ahead. And they kind of dropped the ball on the whole series.

Speaker 1 Yankee fans will know that pun. Oh, gosh.

Speaker 1 You alienated 50 million people.

Speaker 1 Listen, the Yanks are going to get another chance. Well, who knows when this is going to air, but

Speaker 1 it seems like they might get another chance. I also, look at what I just fucking did like five minutes before we came on.
I was playing with the dog outside, and I ran inside, and I fucking

Speaker 1 tripped over him. And to break my fall, I grabbed the door, and my this finger went all the way back here.
Oh, God. Really? Yeah, just like five minutes ago.

Speaker 1 I was like, oh, wait, so you're on ice right now? Well, just in case, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, luckily, no joke. Luckily, you're you're done with the with the play.
I know. Could you imagine? Could you imagine? No.
No, couldn't play. Wouldn't be able to play.
I know. Oh, that Ricky.

Speaker 1 It would be Good Night Oscar if that were the case.

Speaker 1 Incredible.

Speaker 1 Wait, Sean, why do you

Speaker 1 Sean, why have you asked me and then my wife separately if my dogs are good with other dogs?

Speaker 1 Because I want to bring Ricky over, but I don't want to bring him if your dogs are going to be. Why would you be bringing Ricky over? Because I might come see a movie this weekend.
Okay.

Speaker 1 But you spend... Three hours plus over at Jen's every week you don't you don't bring Ricky.
Look at the judging face.

Speaker 1 I just don't understand like what's going on. Is Ricky having separation anxieties lately? No, no, it's just a thing.
And as a dog owner, I just don't like to leave him alone for like three days.

Speaker 1 I would describe your face as a scowl right now. It's a scowl.
No, but

Speaker 1 I would like to bring him over to Jens, but they don't get along. Well, yeah, but so I was like, oh, if your dogs get along, it'll be great.
I could just bring him over.

Speaker 1 And if not, by the way, that's not a problem.

Speaker 1 But the bigger issue is

Speaker 1 why do you and Scotty feel like Ricky needs so much constant attention? Like, dogs can be left alone. And by the way, you just spent almost a full year out of the country.
I know.

Speaker 1 I don't know how he fed himself. He fed himself.
I don't know how many trouble sitting.

Speaker 1 Listen, this is going to be controversial, but we live in an era where people bring their dogs over to other people's houses a lot. And I don't, I'm not judging you, Sean, on this, but people do it.

Speaker 1 And they're like, I got my dog with me. I'm like, what do you mean you got your dog with you? It's not okay.
Yeah. And I'm a dog.
I love dogs. I've had lots of dogs.
I have a dog.

Speaker 1 But you don't need to bring your dog with you when you go to somebody else's house.

Speaker 1 I like the dog

Speaker 1 i'm not saying that you don't and

Speaker 1 then then continue having more morning playtime with them then people show up i got my dog with me oh you've got your dog with you

Speaker 1 everybody brought their dog everywhere would be mayhem this is what i love this is what i love well i'm a dog person you must be you're a monster sorry he ped wear your paper towels

Speaker 1 Now, this is what I love.

Speaker 1 I love the conversation that I know happened this morning and Jason's face as he was having it with Amanda. It was a couple days ago, and I've been really stewing on it.

Speaker 1 Sean, Amanda's like, Sean just texted me if our dogs are okay with other dogs. And you turn with your cup of coffee or just sludge, your cup of sludge.
And I said, fucking what? What?

Speaker 1 By the way, you know where he is?

Speaker 1 He's in his chair in his little study with the fire going, and he's watching MSNBC.

Speaker 1 And then he barely moves, and he looks at her, and she's at the door. She's too scared to come in because

Speaker 1 she sees the pre-scale. Who knows what stage of gummy he's at?

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? Yeah, I will scratch. And he's afraid of dad.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, she does a very tentative little

Speaker 1 knock. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Honey? Sorry. Are you sorry? Are you not on commercial? Is it not? I guess I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you who's not tentative.

Speaker 1 Oh, nice. Nice.
Oh, let's get into it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Check the chat. Hang on one second.
What is that? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, by the way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 1 Before we go, before we get into our guest who we want to talk to immediately, tickets to the Hollywood Bowl November 15th

Speaker 1 for Smartlist Live. Wait, do I need to buy tickets for that?

Speaker 1 I'd really like to go to that. Do I need to buy tickets for you? No, we're giving you two cops.
We're going to give you two copies. One for you, and then plus one.
You got to put it in the business.

Speaker 1 I'd love a stage seat. If you have a stage seat.

Speaker 1 Stage seat. You go to smartlist.com/slash live.
You go to smartlist.com slash live for the Hollywood Bowl Show on the 15th of November. Guys, this is going to be

Speaker 1 very nerve-wracking for us because what are we doing up there at the Hollywood Bowl show? Exactly this.

Speaker 1 We're barely doing this this morning. I will tell you that my guest is one of our biggest stars in

Speaker 1 the movie industry. So is my guest.
Really? Really? Yes, my guest also is one of the biggest stars out there.

Speaker 1 Let's have a little side bet. bet.
You and me. Let's go.
I can't wait. I'm going to have a single up on a camera.
We're going to single up on you,

Speaker 1 JB, when my guest comes out, gets announced. Oh, and I'll be right back.
You'll know why.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. It's going to be great.
It's going to be great. Listen, is it going to be a guest that's going to make me nervous?

Speaker 1 It's going to be so great on so many levels. I can't wait.
All right,

Speaker 1 Shawnee, you can be the judge between Will and I's guest. Will, let's, you and I have a little side $10 bet of who is the bigger guest.
And Shawnee, you get to decide. And we'll just do it like all.

Speaker 1 We'll do 10, 10, 20. Be right.
Be a remote. It's a big reveal.
We'll do a 10, 10, 20

Speaker 1 and presses. We have automatics.
Automatic presses. Okay.

Speaker 1 All right. I tell you what we are.
We're pressed for time because we want to get into our guest who is,

Speaker 1 get this, award-winning actor, writer, director, New York Times best-selling author,

Speaker 1 podcaster, singer-songwriter, multiple albums, multiple Golden Globes, multiple Emmy nominations,

Speaker 1 SAG Awards. He's known for

Speaker 1 an iconic TV show, which was his sort of breakthrough, even though he'd been doing it for a long time.

Speaker 1 He's got a degree from Princeton. He's got a master's from Yale in literature.
He's still an unfinished PhD that I want to ask him about.

Speaker 1 He's one of the all-time great guys. It's David DuCovney.
Oh, David DuCovney.

Speaker 1 Hey, David. Was that not who you were going to guess, Shawnee? No, I thought it was David DuCovney or Louis C.K.
Oh,

Speaker 1 wow.

Speaker 1 Often, often

Speaker 1 mistaken for one another. I don't think Louis has a master's in literature, all due respect from you.
Yeah, but you said Princeton. You said Princeton as well.
And Princeton first, I think.

Speaker 1 Is that true? David, welcome.

Speaker 1 Is it true? Yes, it's true. Thank you.
God,

Speaker 1 this is so wonderful. David, why would you, why would you, you're such a, you know, I remember

Speaker 1 we spoke about a year ago where you would just say, I don't like the tone of that. Why? Immediately.

Speaker 1 Why would they give you a degree? No, no, no. It wasn't that.
It wasn't that.

Speaker 1 It wasn't that. No,

Speaker 1 why would you, because

Speaker 1 you graduated, you were ahead of your class in high school, and then you go to Princeton, and then you go to Yale.

Speaker 1 And then I feel like you lowered yourself to come into show business a little bit,

Speaker 1 a little bit. Why would you do that, David?

Speaker 1 Clearly, I have

Speaker 1 a gaping hole, a gaping hole inside me. Yeah, you feel me? Decided to slum it.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Slummed it with us morons. Yeah, what is that?

Speaker 1 Go ahead. No, that's it.
No, I want to,

Speaker 1 I just want to know. I want you to walk me through your academic prowess.

Speaker 1 I'm fascinated with all this stuff. Well, at Princeton, I majored in English literature, and I wrote my thesis on Samuel Beckett's novels.
Come on.

Speaker 1 Wow. Wow.
Because, well, let me tell you why I wrote on the novels because nobody writes on the novels, and I didn't have to do that much work in research because I could just make the shit up myself.

Speaker 1 This is pretty short. This is nothing to compare it to.

Speaker 1 No chat GPT cheating. It was an open field.
And then what happened at

Speaker 1 that was Princeton or that was Yale? That was Princeton. And then I took a year off and I traveled and I didn't really know what I wanted to do at all.
I just knew I wanted to be a writer.

Speaker 1 And then I thought, I applied for a

Speaker 1 Mellon Fellowship, which I got from the Mellon Foundation, which they were trying to lure people that might go into money-making businesses and steer them towards academia.

Speaker 1 So it was for people to get PhDs who might, you know, not be able to afford staying in school.

Speaker 1 So I got one of those and I went to Yale and I thought that I'd become a professor of English literature and then write novels in my summertimes. That's

Speaker 1 the plan. Wow.

Speaker 1 And forgive me, have you written like a hundred novels and I'm an idiot?

Speaker 1 I've written

Speaker 1 four or five novels.

Speaker 1 wow yeah and i just had a book of poems come out yes oh that's cool david this is and then and by the way by the way he's also he's admitting the fact that he's put out an uh a number of records he just finished a tour am i right you just finished a tour in europe yeah yeah oh no this was in the states this one but but go ahead but last year you were on tour in europe yeah and and i listened to your records by the way your music is great and you know thank you sometimes and i mean this all there sometimes when you see people who do multiple uh disciplines they're like i'm gonna put a record out.

Speaker 1 You listen, you're like, yeah, it's pretty good.

Speaker 1 Your records are really good. I mean, they're very, these aren't just a lot of people.
Will's got very good musical taste.

Speaker 1 I'm a music lover. Really, really good stuff.
I mean, thank you, Will. I love that tune, Hell or High Water.
I think that's a great tune. Yeah, it's super cool.

Speaker 1 What type of, is it rock and roll? Yeah, I guess it's... I'd say it's rock and roll.
Yeah, like 70s rock,

Speaker 1 you know, late 60s rock. Like

Speaker 1 yacht rock? Not quite like yacht rock.

Speaker 1 I'm not very jazzy. I stay off the water.
I try to stay off the water. Well, it's kind of like indie rock in a way.

Speaker 1 I mean, sorry to forgive me for saying that, but I'm a 90s indie rock dinosaur major. Yeah, it's well, well, the 90s was kind of like the garageification of 70s rock in my mind.
Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1 And so I think 70s and 90s have a lot in common. And you're playing the guitar there and you're singing the guy? I don't play the guitar on stage because

Speaker 1 I'm kind of self-taught on the guitar, so I have an inability to play it the same way twice, which is not very nice for my band.

Speaker 1 So I write the songs.

Speaker 1 And do you sing them? And I sing

Speaker 1 in my fashion. So on stage,

Speaker 1 you have no guitar as a crutch. Nothing to do with my hands.

Speaker 1 I just can't stay going.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you just kind of work the mic and the

Speaker 1 hold onto that fucking mic stand for dear life is what happens. I wouldn't know what to do.
It's like a life jacket.

Speaker 1 You're like Liam Gallagher does that, you know, with the... Liam is amazing because

Speaker 1 when I first started performing live i just thought well i'm like the mc

Speaker 1 and i want i want people to have a good time you know and i i'm dancing around and making a fool of myself and then

Speaker 1 it was actually my my my wife said to me you know you don't have to move around so much oh no oh

Speaker 1 and and then i saw you know then i saw liam and liam is just still you know he's just still he's got his hands behind his back for the most part yeah kind of leaning up in a way and it's really it's really powerful to be still

Speaker 1 Do you close your eyes a lot?

Speaker 1 Sometimes. Sometimes I close my eyes and then I go, this isn't good.
There could be shit happening out there that I need to keep an eye on.

Speaker 1 Do you ever go full Sia and just turn your back to the audience?

Speaker 1 But David, David, I just want to say, so

Speaker 1 David, you were self-taught on guitar. I think you only started playing guitar a couple years before your first album.
Is that true? True. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you barely start, you basically teach yourself how to play guitar for a couple years. Then you have the audacity to be like, all right, well, I'm going to write a record.
And how are you,

Speaker 1 do you know how to read and write music? How did you do that? How was that process? I don't know how to read and write music. But here's something that you guys might appreciate as actors.

Speaker 1 When I decided I wanted to learn guitar, I'm not 100% self-taught. When I decided I wanted to learn, I was doing Californication at the time.
And

Speaker 1 I said to Tom Kapanos, the producer, I think Hank Moody should learn how to play guitar.

Speaker 1 So I could get the free lessons. Free lessons.

Speaker 1 That's amazing. The intelligence permeates everything you do.
I know, I know.

Speaker 1 He's playing four-dimensional chess, if that's a thing. So I

Speaker 1 also with singing,

Speaker 1 I'm not like Sean.

Speaker 1 I'm not that kind of a singer.

Speaker 1 I'm not either.

Speaker 1 Yes, you are.

Speaker 1 How dare you?

Speaker 1 It's been a journey to try and put over the song because I can hear melodies that

Speaker 1 I can't necessarily sing, which is weird. I never thought that was a possibility.

Speaker 1 Well, you know,

Speaker 1 I'm just really quick, sometimes the best singers are the, quote, untrained singing, you know, because you don't think about it. You're not in your head about it.

Speaker 1 You know, David, when we had Michael Stipe, our friend from REM, on here a while ago, and he was talking about that wonderful song. He was so good.

Speaker 1 And that first record that he made when he was down in Athens, Georgia with those guys,

Speaker 1 Radio Free Europe, I think, was their first single. And he was talking about, he basically was singing gibberish and he didn't know how to sing.
Do you remember that guy's name?

Speaker 1 He's talking, he was like, I just kind of winged it. Yeah.
Because he didn't know what and he kind of taught himself how to, and he got better at it. I think the correct term is wong.
He won it.

Speaker 1 He won it. He won.

Speaker 1 Sorry, Jason. I don't mean to embarrass you.
I'm so sorry. Stickler.
He got a master's in English from a school box.

Speaker 1 So, hey, hey, Sean, hey. Yeah.
Okay. Really, speaking of music, struck a chord with you.

Speaker 1 Now, David, this, this is,

Speaker 1 I don't read, and I'm not proud to say that.

Speaker 1 You strike me as a reader, though. I'm surprised you read it.
I appreciate that. You read scraps.
He doesn't read books. A lot of this is the glasses.

Speaker 1 It's just the glasses. But

Speaker 1 to be an English major

Speaker 1 and to say you want to be a writer and you are a writer and to be a professional, it just, it sounds like a lot of reading. A lot of

Speaker 1 sitting down. Can't get with by you.
Nothing else going on.

Speaker 1 There's total silence in the house. Maybe there's a little bit of classical music or something.
Nothing with lyrics, because that'll distract you. Exactly, right.
But like,

Speaker 1 and Will, I wanted to ask you about this too at times. And then I just said, fuck it, I don't want to talk to Will.

Speaker 1 How do you do that?

Speaker 1 How do you just say, of all the things I could be doing, I would rather just sit in this chair and shut out the world and stare at at this stack of paper and go left to right, top to bottom, word after word after word after word.

Speaker 1 So I'm not reading Hebrew at all, is what you're saying.

Speaker 1 I mean, I just, I wish my, I wish my parents, for all the good that they did, I wish they had somehow tricked me into really loving that process because there's so much that I've read.

Speaker 1 Are you talking about writing or reading? Reading. Reading.
Writing I've got, but it's the reading that's.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Have you ever loved reading a novel or reading? I have.

Speaker 1 I backed into a couple of those, but it was, you know, it wasn't by choice. I do not read for pleasure.

Speaker 1 All the jokes, JB, that I make about you not reading, I will say of the, of the, the handful that I mentioned that you have read, you've always said you really enjoyed reading them.

Speaker 1 So that's what's surprising to me. I'm like, well, why don't you double?

Speaker 1 It is the time allotment. It is the decision to go sit in a chair in a quiet corner of a house and

Speaker 1 shut everything out and do that. There's so much discipline

Speaker 1 that I have for other things, but I just don't have for reading. I'm so envious of that.
Yeah. I think it's just, it really just comes from my parents, I think.

Speaker 1 On my mother's side, she was from a small town in Scotland. And the only way to advance for her family, which were generations of, I did that 20, I did that finding your roots show.

Speaker 1 So I found out that I come from a long line of fishmongers. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. That's wild.
So the only way out of the fishmongering business, in fact,

Speaker 1 one of my ancestors' occupation was

Speaker 1 widow of fishmonger.

Speaker 1 I didn't even know that was a job.

Speaker 1 I was like, how does that pay? How does that pay?

Speaker 1 Not well, is my guess. Well, you need the person to die, first of all.
I mean,

Speaker 1 you need to be included in the will.

Speaker 1 And so the only way out of...

Speaker 1 The only way out of that place in society was education for my mother. So my mother was the first woman, first person in her family and a woman in the 1940s to go to college.

Speaker 1 And so she was very much just somebody who believed in the power of education and of reading and writing as a social climbing tool.

Speaker 1 Is it is also

Speaker 1 the appeal of reading sometime

Speaker 1 like the pure escapism of, because I do remember this one book I really enjoyed reading once, I was once on a job that

Speaker 1 I didn't enjoy.

Speaker 1 I didn't like where I was. I was on location somewhere and I was lonely.

Speaker 1 And it was great to just like, I was dying to get back into the book any chance I could because it would travel me from where I was. That feeling is amazing.
Yeah. Well, it used to be,

Speaker 1 you know, I think the place of books has been taken by, you know, TV and movies, you know, that

Speaker 1 escape. But before there was that technology, you know, this was what you had.
You had the book. And people used to read books on set.
I think way back in the day, you did.

Speaker 1 But JB, I would say that you, as somebody who travels a lot, you're on a lot of, you're on planes a lot. Yeah.
That's such a great time to get that escape where you're not watching.

Speaker 1 Can I send you one of my books? Yes, please. Yes.
Can I send you one of my books for a plane ride? It's baseball contingent.

Speaker 1 It's near baseball. It's called Bucky Fucking Dent.
I made a movie of it.

Speaker 1 I made a movie of it, but I want you to read the book. I'll send you the book.
Now,

Speaker 1 that sounds like non-fiction. No, no, it's fiction.
Is it? It just uses that moment in time as a jumping off. And then, does that make you a big Yankee fan? I am a big Yankee fan.

Speaker 1 And I heard what you said earlier.

Speaker 1 You got a big day today.

Speaker 1 Big day today.

Speaker 1 So, David, all of this to say. So then, my father,

Speaker 1 my father's family,

Speaker 1 his father wrote for

Speaker 1 The Forward, which

Speaker 1 was the only Yiddish daily newspaper in America, the longest-running one. And he wrote kind of in a Dickensian way, he wrote cliffhangers for the paper.
He wrote stories about Lil Nell or whatever,

Speaker 1 somebody being tied to the train tracks, that kind of a thing.

Speaker 1 And my father, his entire life, my father had to work kind of a nine-to-five job, but he always said he was a novelist. He always said he was a novelist.
And at the age of 73,

Speaker 1 Two years before he died, he published his first novel. So he was a hot young novelist at the age of 73.
So

Speaker 1 I'm coming out of that kind of history of respect for the word, respect for the efficacy of the word, respect for education. Just it was all,

Speaker 1 that was part of my growing up. That was part of my foundation.

Speaker 1 And we will be right back.

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Speaker 1 And now back to the show.

Speaker 1 That's funny, David. My dad also, who worked forever,

Speaker 1 but he's been retired for a while, but since COVID has written two novels. Amazing.
And he wrote his last one and came out when he was 86. He's just written it in

Speaker 1 that last year. Yeah.
What is the name of it? And where can purchasers find it?

Speaker 1 Yeah. well,

Speaker 1 his latest is the Monmouth Manifesto, which is an

Speaker 1 interesting novel. And it's sort of historical fiction, if you will.

Speaker 1 This is about when Caterpillars change into

Speaker 1 the American Revolution in a way. Monmouth County, New Jersey is a reference about loyalists going to Canada based on one of my ancestors and about really at the heart of the revolution.

Speaker 1 I was just trying to do a moth joke. Okay, sorry.
You don't want to get into it.

Speaker 1 Really? This is why you're committed to it. Let the readers buy it and discover it.
What's his name?

Speaker 1 My dad's name is James Arnett. Oh, you sure? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Emerson James Arnett, if you will. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 My dad wrote me off.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, Sean.

Speaker 1 Sean. Sean, Sean.

Speaker 1 He would be having so much. So it wasn't so true.

Speaker 1 He wrote me off.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 All All right. He wrote a goodbye note.
He wrote,

Speaker 1 see ya.

Speaker 1 That's where bye came from, by the way. It came from Sean's dad.
Bye.

Speaker 1 Wait, wait, David, David, David.

Speaker 1 So I do want to, so you get in, you graduate, you go to

Speaker 1 Christmas Sean. I know I do.
Well, we've done a lot. Anytime you have a question on Sean, please interrupt me.

Speaker 1 But you decide

Speaker 1 and you're studying English lit, and you get a master's. And then what's the moment you go like, all right, I'm going to put this down for a second.
I'm going to dip my toe.

Speaker 1 What was your first acting job and why did it come about?

Speaker 1 I was at Yale.

Speaker 1 I was getting my Ph.D. or so I thought.
And Yale is famous for its drama school and

Speaker 1 they have a lot of productions going on all the time. So I decided I was going to start trying to take classes over at the drama department and they were very loose about it.

Speaker 1 They would just let me walk in and do writing classes because I thought maybe I'm going to write plays because the idea of writing novels or poems seems so very lonely to me.

Speaker 1 You know, and I was 22, 23 years old, and I was just sitting in a room all day long alone trying to write. I was like, this is fucked up.

Speaker 1 I like people. It's not as romantic as you thought.
No, but

Speaker 1 I like collaborating. So I thought, okay, I'll write plays and that way at least I'll...
I'll get out into the world.

Speaker 1 And so I met all these actors and they're always looking for bodies because there's so many productions going on around in Yale.

Speaker 1 And they said, hey, you know, come and do this thing, this Arthur Schnitzer play Schnitzler play we're doing,

Speaker 1 which name escapes me. But you can play the Count de la Tremouille or something.
I had one or two lines. And

Speaker 1 I liked it. It wasn't like, oh, this is a revelation.
In fact, I thought, oh, well, I'm comfortable. And I was so comfortable that in between the first and the second performances, I smoked a joint.

Speaker 1 How'd the second one go? Yeah. Yeah.
Not so good.

Speaker 1 That's really funny.

Speaker 1 I was so cocky. I was like, I got this.
And then I was like, oh, I don't have anything. I like people looking at me.

Speaker 1 Did you then sign up for acting classes?

Speaker 1 I started taking classes

Speaker 1 in New York with a woman named Marcia Haufrecht who taught Strasbourg Method. She was associated with the actor studio.
And that was wonderful because she was completely supportive.

Speaker 1 You know, it was all about the interior world, all the things that are so difficult to work on when you're actually a working actor.

Speaker 1 But were you thinking about it in terms of like informing your playwriting? Was that part of it? Yeah. Yes, that's what I was thinking.
So it wasn't like this is going to be my

Speaker 1 future occupation. No, I thought if I'm going to write plays, I should probably know what it's like to say these, whatever lines I'm going to write, see if they're sayable up on stage.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so that was my approach. And then at some point, I was just like, I liked, I'd played sports my whole life and

Speaker 1 I liked the team aspect of acting and of making things. I liked the high wire kind of put up or shut up feeling.

Speaker 1 Did it ever frustrate you that it didn't hold the same sort of academic rigor that

Speaker 1 because it is not with all respect to our

Speaker 1 colleagues that are actors,

Speaker 1 it doesn't have this sort of highbrow, sophisticated

Speaker 1 reputation that a playwright is. It's just a different game.
It's just a different game. It's like baseball and basketball, whatever.

Speaker 1 It's just, I look at life as a series of games or setups, and this was just another game, and I knew it had different rules, and I knew that

Speaker 1 I would have to examine different strengths in order to do it. Yeah, and probably less constraints, too, than writing,

Speaker 1 because it is such a different discipline. It probably started exercising a different muscle creatively that you're like, oh, this feels good.
Yes, it was the

Speaker 1 emotional aspect of my life, which had been neglected because

Speaker 1 I was in academia, which doesn't really prize, you know, being volatile.

Speaker 1 Right. So the emotional side of it and the teamwork side of it is being satisfied.
But

Speaker 1 do you feel like this fucking academic superhero that you have inside of you has been satisfied, been utilized properly in your life thus far?

Speaker 1 Yes, now that I when I started writing novels about 10 years ago now,

Speaker 1 and you know, people, I'll go on Goodreads and

Speaker 1 I'll read people's suggestions.

Speaker 1 Oh, you will. You will.

Speaker 1 Stupidly, yeah. But people,

Speaker 1 I will be accused of showing off my learning when in fact I don't write with any books around. It's all in my head.
You know,

Speaker 1 if I'm quoting something or if I'm referencing another, a great work of literature, it's coming from my head. It's coming from my memory.

Speaker 1 So I'm not doing it just to show off, but it's part of me.

Speaker 1 And I really feel like I finally joined in the conversation with these people that I grew up reading and loving and feeling like this is the conversation I want to be involved with.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure you guys have had this

Speaker 1 as actors where you're like, okay, now I'm in conversation with the people that I want to be in conversation with. That's true.
That's true.

Speaker 1 And then what about did you ever, sorry, Shawnee, did you ever end up writing any plays or any screenplays? Have you kind of married the two? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, in fact, the novel writing came out of not being able to make

Speaker 1 a screenplay. Bucky fucking Dent, I wrote as a screenplay probably in

Speaker 1 2005 or 6. Yeah.
And then I couldn't get it made. You know, these are usually

Speaker 1 my soul goals goes towards like more independent kind of stories. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so Bucky I couldn't make. I got close.
I got close. I got close.
I couldn't make. And then I finally did.
And then I I was like, I'm going to write it as a novel. And then I made it as a movie.

Speaker 1 So you flipped it. You went the other way.
So you wrote it as a screenplay. Because Will always talks about it.
It's IP now, because now your book is IP. So they love that, right?

Speaker 1 I don't know if you first loved that. Reverse engineering.
I mean, no, Hollywood loves that.

Speaker 1 Was it a book first? Then what? I'll just say that as a director, you know, writing the novel of the screenplay was the best preparation I could have done as a director. Oh, sure.
Because I just knew.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 now I'd be suggesting that you have to do that next to the direct guys. No, yeah.
I'm just saying for me, that worked.

Speaker 1 Is there a genre that you like writing more of than not?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm just of the, I guess, you know, I go back to the movies when I started acting,

Speaker 1 you know, like James Brooks, just these movies that can live in

Speaker 1 a real,

Speaker 1 in terms of endearment, you know, sobbing. but also laughing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Great.

Speaker 1 David O. Russell stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.
Just like real emotional stuff.

Speaker 1 Emotional, but fucking funny. Yeah.
It looks back and forth. Yeah.
So that's always the balance that I'm looking for. As an actor, too, it's always the balance I'm looking for.

Speaker 1 That's just where I live. So what ended up becoming, so to go back to my, what ended up becoming the first

Speaker 1 professional acting gig that you had that you went up for and you got?

Speaker 1 Professional is a funny word. Well, you know, that you got paid, that you got a paycheck that you had to fill out a W for or whatever, you know?

Speaker 1 Well, I'll tell you about two.

Speaker 1 The first one I got paid for, and then there's the first one I did, which was even better. But the first one I got paid for, I believe, was a Michelo beer commercial.
Wow. And

Speaker 1 I got on set and the guy told me, okay, you're at the bar here. The guy, the director, said, you're at the bar here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that guy, some guy said, you're at the bar. Okay, this guy says I'm at the bar.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you run into an old professor of yours and you guys have a conversation and you're happy to see him. And I was so fucking tight.
I was so nervous.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm 26 years old. I mean, I'm not young, young, you know, and I had kind of staked my life on this path.
Like I wasn't. I wasn't going to get my PhD.
I wasn't going to be a professor.

Speaker 1 And I just thought, okay, I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to be good at it. Now I get on set and I'm like, I'm just tight.
Because you feel like you needed to do so much.

Speaker 1 I just didn't know, I didn't know it was going to be so fucking tight.

Speaker 1 I know exactly what you mean, man. I know we needed that joint.
It wasn't that

Speaker 1 it wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, oh, I'm in the right place.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was like, no, I'm in the wrong place.

Speaker 1 Cameras pointed at you. That button guy comes in.
Yeah, I can't do it. I can't go on.
I can't lie on the ground and go,

Speaker 1 right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there's pretzels there. And I start, I toss one up, you know, catch it in my mouth.
And the director's like, that's, I love that. I love that.
Oh, no. And I just remember,

Speaker 1 again, that was my lifeline. And I was like, so I did it for like 10 minutes.
And then I just remember the director going, okay with the pretzels, we got the pretzels.

Speaker 1 I thought you were going to say you could never get it in your mouth again. No, no,

Speaker 1 that I could do. Yeah.
So that was the first paying job was Michelob.

Speaker 1 The first job that I remember was my acting class went and uh my my acting class put on uh a night of one acts and i decided to adapt this charles bukowski short story called the copyletting mermaid of venice california sure

Speaker 1 and sure

Speaker 1 sure

Speaker 1 as one does sean's always referencing that yeah it's a painting sean has i just call it mermaid yeah yeah so in this in this story these two guys

Speaker 1 kind of unemployed guys watch the hearse unload at the Venice Morgue. This is not a true kind of geographical thing, but they can see it from the beach.
And they know the timing of it.

Speaker 1 They know when the guys are going to come around. They know when the body's going to be unattended, and they're going to steal a body.

Speaker 1 So they do. They steal a body.
And they, you know, and here's where, you know, it's Bukowski and it's like the logic kind of fails you.

Speaker 1 But they open it up and it's a beautiful woman and I decide I'm going to have sex with her. And then I'm so ashamed of myself that I force my buddy buddy to have sex with her.

Speaker 1 Jeez. You sure you have this on your wall, Sean? I'm not sure.
No, no, no, no. It's how you do it.
I should see the poster. It's bizarre.

Speaker 1 So then I said, we go, what are we going to do to the body? I don't know. I swim her out to the ocean to get rid of the body.
And then I come back and I say.

Speaker 1 She wasn't dead. She turned into a mermaid.
She was beautiful. She swam away.
So it's this like beautiful, not beautiful after this. It's this gross, horrible necrophilia.

Speaker 1 and then coupled with this high romantic it's just Bukowski right so we decide we're gonna do it and I ask the class you know which which which of the women in the class is gonna be the corpse and everybody's like yeah it'll be me it'll be me but then when the time comes to do it nobody shows to be the corpse and we're stuck and we had been the place where we were making these plays was a a uh

Speaker 1 it was an SM dudgeon sure well you know of course they're They're not used during the day.

Speaker 1 No, they're not used during the day. And

Speaker 1 we got to use it for two nights. By cleaning up, we had to clean up.
And that was a whole other different story. Yeah.
But

Speaker 1 there was the madam there, was named Magda,

Speaker 1 and she heard that we didn't have a body. So she said, why don't you use one of my blow-up dolls?

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 This is how things happen. So there at Yale.
So, oh, she, yeah, right. And I'm thinking, maybe I should have stayed at Yale.

Speaker 1 So I

Speaker 1 put up a, I had always put up like a bulwark on front of the stage to lay a body down so nobody could see the body. They couldn't see what was going on when I was supposedly making love to this

Speaker 1 body.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so I had this blow-up doll. And what I hadn't been able to rehearse with her.

Speaker 1 And she wasn't available on her lines or anything. As I was copulating with her, her arms and legs started flying out.

Speaker 1 Because she's only made of air, right?

Speaker 1 So the audience sees this. Sure.

Speaker 1 Like a used car lot, the things that you.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to do this most intense scene, young actor, like I'm really,

Speaker 1 I'm fucking edgy.

Speaker 1 And the audience is laughing and laughing.

Speaker 1 And so in between performances, I went to Paragon. I hope you know it.
It's a sporting goods. Sure, very well.
And I got four ankle weights, and I weighed down her wrists and her ankles.

Speaker 1 So the next time

Speaker 1 she didn't have as much mood as it was. But she still had the squeaky.

Speaker 1 The other part of it was when I walked through the audience, and I go, I put a pail of water off stage where I was going to go. Because I swim around and I'm, you know, I've got to be wet.

Speaker 1 And so I walk through the audience, and I'm sure the audience is like, oh, my God, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. And I'm thinking, yeah, that's right.
I'm an edgy motherfucker.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I go around the corner to,

Speaker 1 and I realize it's totally quiet. There's no door.
They can just hear me sponging myself down.

Speaker 1 They can just hear me.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. So that was my first play.

Speaker 1 How long did it last?

Speaker 1 It was two nights. Okay, great.
Those two nights. Two full nights.

Speaker 1 Two full nights.

Speaker 1 So you do the Bukowski where you're, as you described, making love to an inflatable doll in an SNM dungeon. You do the Michelin.
You threw away a PhD at Yale for this.

Speaker 1 What I hear my mother saying. Yeah,

Speaker 1 your parents must have been, at this point, they're beaming with pride.

Speaker 1 But then, what's the sort of the first? Because I'm leading up to X-Files because I want to get into X-Files a little bit.

Speaker 1 We'd be remiss if we didn't get into X-Files because I was a fan of X-Files and I watched it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you get that, and that leads to what?

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 what was the first film you did?

Speaker 1 An old girlfriend of mine whose name is Maggie Wheeler. That's her married name.
She's a terrific actress. She was on.
You want to give an address or friends quite a lot.

Speaker 1 First and last, okay. She's on Friends.
She was Janice on Friends. Oh, yeah.
Chandler's

Speaker 1 girlfriend. Yes.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 So Maggie was doing this film with Henry Jaglum, who just passed last week. And Henry's this Maverick independent filmmaker.

Speaker 1 And Maggie was going to be one of the three stars of this film called New Year's Day. And she asked Henry, you know, can you, David's acting now, can you, can you see if you can put him in?

Speaker 1 So Henry did. And I had a couple scenes of the movie, and they were.

Speaker 1 They were kind of notable enough to kind of get me going here in LA and get an agent. And, you know, at that point, it was like, it wasn't like get your sad card.

Speaker 1 It was like, how do I get film on myself? You know, how do I show people that I'm not a vampire and I don't disappear when I'm doing it?

Speaker 1 Well, people didn't have, they didn't have phones and you couldn't put shit on YouTube the way kids can now and create their own stuff.

Speaker 1 So it was really this one, it was one long scene in New Year's Day that really kind of opened it up for me in L.A.

Speaker 1 And then I, you know, I auditioned forever here and didn't get tons of stuff and would get, you know,

Speaker 1 feedback. You moved to LA to be, to do it, to go all in.
Exactly. What were you doing to pay the bills while you were swinging a missile? I was doing commercials.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I would get commercials.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 no waiting tables, no bartending?

Speaker 1 I bartended.

Speaker 1 I catered.

Speaker 1 Where did you live when you were here in LA? I lived on 4th Street in Santa Monica. I got a sublet there.

Speaker 1 An efficiency apartment, which means it didn't have a kitchen, which means I did my dishes in the shower when I had a fresh shower. Oh, David.
Yeah. Wow.
I mean, dishwashing liquid is pretty good.

Speaker 1 Wait,

Speaker 1 fourth and what? I lived on Ocean Park and 2nd for years.

Speaker 1 Fourth between California and Washington. Yeah, right.
Right by the stairs.

Speaker 1 That was my gym. I'd go to the stairs.

Speaker 1 That's me.

Speaker 1 I catered too. I catered for

Speaker 1 a wedding at Anthony Edwards' house when I just moved here. And I was like, oh my God, it's the guy from ER.
And I'm in his kitchen. Yeah.
It was so wild.

Speaker 1 And then you were shooting pretty much next door to him when you guys were doing Will and Grace. That's right.
It's crazy. Yeah.
Oh, my God. And you did a lot.

Speaker 1 Shawnee, you did a lot of commercials too back in the day.

Speaker 1 Tons, yeah. It's the only way to pay the bills.
We talked about, remember, you had those commercials that you were doing, like when Will and Grace was on. Some of them came out.
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Isn't that weird? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That was wild.

Speaker 1 I had two commercials, two on the Super Bowl in 1998.

Speaker 1 What were they?

Speaker 1 One was a

Speaker 1 Bud Light commercial.

Speaker 1 I did a Bud Light commercial. Oh, really? When?

Speaker 1 87, 88. Well, you did Miller Light and Bud Light.
Yeah. Mikkalov.
Look at you. No, Michelovite.
Mikalov and Bud Light. That was all of the beers.
That was King of Beers. Wait, so David, so

Speaker 1 when did you, I mean, because I was a, I'm a big sci-fi nerd. So, so, X, yeah, so X-Files, how did that's what you're getting to, right, Shawnee? How did that, how did X-Files?

Speaker 1 I know you're sick of talking about,

Speaker 1 I didn't ask,

Speaker 1 but I'm ready to listen.

Speaker 1 Jason read the books. Yeah, it was,

Speaker 1 it was just an audition. And

Speaker 1 I remember at that point, I was not wanting to do television. You know, at that point, there was a real divide between

Speaker 1 television actors and movie actors, which has been erased in the past few years or the past 20 years. So it was really, you know, I'm not a TV actor.
That was my sense.

Speaker 1 Who was your North Star in film? Who did you want to be?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, I didn't want to be Brando, but he was my North Star.

Speaker 1 Gotcha. Right.

Speaker 1 Did you ever write any of the X-Files? Yeah, I did.

Speaker 1 You did? I wrote and directed two or three of them. Yeah.
That's one of them was a baseball one, Jason.

Speaker 1 I can't believe we haven't made this. I know.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 And now back to the show.

Speaker 1 So wait, so you get this gig and

Speaker 1 you sign the five-year or seven-year standard thing before you go in and you test.

Speaker 1 So you know that if you get this, you're stuck with something that you're not really kind of excited about. Then you get it.
Was your... Yeah, are you excited when you get it because of that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, you... You're not excited to think it's going to go forever, which is a blessing when it does, but

Speaker 1 you get competitive. You know, you're just like, if I'm going to do do it,

Speaker 1 I want it to win.

Speaker 1 I want it to go. You do the pilot, you want it to get picked up.
Yeah, sure, every step of the way. Then it gets well received and you're like, well, all right.
Now,

Speaker 1 for Tracy, can I just say, so the testing process, so you don't know, Jason just alluded to, and David knows, we all know,

Speaker 1 it used to be, I don't know if it still is the way, but what would happen is you'd go in for a show, whether it's X-Files or Will and Grace or whatever it is, and you'd get the audition and you'd go through and then they'd get a callback and you'd read for producers.

Speaker 1 Then what they do is is they sort of take for any given role, they might have three or four people who they decide that they're going to, as they call it, bring to the network.

Speaker 1 And that means that

Speaker 1 they're kind of their select pick, three or four people for each role.

Speaker 1 And before you go and do this final audition, usually like in a conference room or something in an office building, the most uninspiring place you can imagine.

Speaker 1 Before you do that, for a day or two before, your agents and the

Speaker 1 show negotiate your contract, a five-year contract, and you sign it before you go into the final audition in the lottery. Right before you walk in.
So I got you.

Speaker 1 So you're broke and then your agent goes, like, here's your contract. We've agreed you're going to get $25,000 an episode for the next five years.
It's a lottery ticket. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you're like, oh my God, I'm so broke. And I'm going to get $25,000 an episode for the next five years.
And you're doing the math and you're like, and then I'm going to buy it.

Speaker 1 I'm going to buy a new episode. And if you weren't nervous before, you're petrified.
And you sign it.

Speaker 1 And then you go, once you sign it, they take the signed executed uh copy so that you have no leverage if they give you the job you

Speaker 1 go in and you then audition for all the execs at the network and then you're waiting and they decide whether or not you got the part so you

Speaker 1 they have you so over the barrel you never realize you're never not over the barrel in that in that uh process and it's really uninspiring and it's a very specific thing to get good at that to be able to block that part of it out to to then go and deliver at the final moment it's you're you're kind of torture yeah you're fighting out of a hole right what what if after that david was like it was an offer but anyway

Speaker 1 but that's it wasn't it wasn't an offer so so so david so david your process is you're kind of you're a little conflicted about doing a tv series but you want to do and it's a great paycheck so you go in and you sign the contract you do the test now you and then the you do the pilot

Speaker 1 right and so then now they've got the extra executed thing and then the network sorry again for tracy then they decide from all their pilots what shows are going to make it on the air next year.

Speaker 1 So you're waiting for a month or two for that.

Speaker 1 And then they go, great, your show is happening. You're in it.
And we've got you for five years. And then what happens a lot is you go, oh, my God, this is so great.

Speaker 1 I'm going to make $20,000 or $25,000 on an episode. And then two years in, if you're lucky enough that it's going, you're like, hey, man, I deserve way more than $20,000.
Yeah, fuck out.

Speaker 1 I got to get out of here. I got to stay available for all the feature opportunities I think are out there waiting for you.
David, so you know that process, right?

Speaker 1 Like, so you're you're you're there and you're doing X-Files and you guys come out of the gate pretty hot. It's a it's kind of a hit.
Am I well or wrong? It's a hit on Fox.

Speaker 1 And if you can remember that far back, Fox was really like not a real network at that point.

Speaker 1 It just started. This is like 93 when 93.
They didn't have programming, you know, across the board

Speaker 1 all day long, really. And, you know, they had married with children and

Speaker 1 I can't remember. You know, they had made

Speaker 1 9021 Tracy Ullman yeah yeah that's right but they were really the upstart network so they didn't have a big drama kind of like

Speaker 1 no not at all and we didn't need to get like huge numbers to be a hit for Fox which was nice because we Fox wasn't even in all the homes who was running Fox at the time when you guys were there do you remember who's running it Garth Nancier

Speaker 1 who was it Garth Ansier

Speaker 1 was one of the starters of Fox yeah I can't believe you remember that name Jay it was a WB he didn't want me for a gig, and I had to re-audition. You ready for this?

Speaker 1 For my buddy Michael Malley's show, we did the pilot. I get the pilot, we do it, we shoot it, it gets picked up to series, and then he didn't want me, and I had to go back

Speaker 1 two months later. It might have been Sandy.
I had to go back two months later and re-audition for a part and do a scene in the conference room, a scene holding up pages that I had already filmed

Speaker 1 that existed on film to get my J. That's terrible.
That's crazy. In a conference room in Burbank.
That's crazy. And I'm like, wait, you don't need to see me do this in the room.

Speaker 1 Do you remember what year that was, Will? 1999. That's when I first met you.
Yeah. I met you at the upfronts.
Yeah, that year. That's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Did you get it, Will?

Speaker 1 I did, actually, yeah. Again, well done.
I got it again. You mutated yourself.

Speaker 1 What a fucking victory.

Speaker 1 I think I counted, I think I had a thousand beers that night.

Speaker 1 That's not enough. That's not enough.
Wait, David, were you a sci-fi fan when you got it?

Speaker 1 And are you now? Not at all. No.
Wow. How about that? No, not really.

Speaker 1 So you get X-Files, you go up to Vancouver, you guys start doing it. It's a hit for Fox.
And then it really starts to, when's the moment you can feel that it's kind of pushed through to the general?

Speaker 1 Probably like the third year, just globally. It felt just huge.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was a global hit. Yeah, massive.
How did you like relocating up into Vancouver for so long? Well, I loved it at first

Speaker 1 because I didn't really have any roots in Los Angeles. You know, I just

Speaker 1 had come here to try to get work.

Speaker 1 And you weren't going to, the blow-up doll wasn't going to start crying.

Speaker 1 I mean, they can perform a lot of duties, but tears are not one.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to speak for her.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ. But I will tell you.

Speaker 1 So I hear. This is what I hear.
He's rehearing.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, my God.
So, you know, I don't know how you guys feel about Vancouver, but it's a beautiful part of the world. And I just

Speaker 1 never failed.

Speaker 1 You've never been? I've never been. I want to go so badly.
How is that possible? It's the greatest.

Speaker 1 Of course. It's so beautiful.

Speaker 1 So I loved it. And

Speaker 1 yeah, I didn't mind being out of LA at all. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just loved being up there. And in a way, we got to just focus on doing the work.
There wasn't any kind of LA around us.

Speaker 1 There wasn't any kind of whatever heat that was happening, we were kind of cut off from in a really good way.

Speaker 1 And in many ways, it was my education as an actor, having to go to work every damn day for 14 hours. I mean, these were really long days.
And I really taught myself how to act.

Speaker 1 How soon into the run of it and the success of it, did you start thinking, all right. Good here, ready to move on and

Speaker 1 maybe parlay some of this into, you know, what would you have your eyes on? Was it still features?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, that was really, you know, I had that kind of bias, you know, that was kind of baked in from a young age. You know, the

Speaker 1 TV shows that I watched when I was a kid, it was quantitatively different, the acting in it, you know, that it's not the way now. But you were, you, you, so I just remember that the, the,

Speaker 1 you, you had very much a

Speaker 1 movie

Speaker 1 style of acting. In other words, you're very subtle.
Well, that's how I would not get, that's why I didn't get, I would audition and not get any roles in television. Right.
They would say,

Speaker 1 he's a movie star. And I was like, oh, fuck, I can't, I don't have a pot to piss in either.
So

Speaker 1 can I please play Puppet Man? Can I get that part?

Speaker 1 Puppet Man.

Speaker 1 David, I want to ask you about time management because you're a musician.

Speaker 1 You literally write novels, which is amazing.

Speaker 1 You act, you do some other stuff. I'm sure you haven't mentioned.

Speaker 1 Some other stuff.

Speaker 1 How do you manage all of that on a daily basis or weekly or monthly or whatever? Do you pick a priority that you focus on or just?

Speaker 1 Whatever's like in front of me is what I'll do. Songwriting can happen at any time.
Pick up a guitar. But with writing a novel, everything has to stop and I have to work on that for a few months.

Speaker 1 I write really fast,

Speaker 1 but it's an intense experience of like eight-hour days doing that. And then, of course, I can't write when I'm acting.

Speaker 1 I can't write when i'm directing um so that right do you have a do you have a a a goal in your in your mind that is louder than all the other goals and that then informs how you allocate your time

Speaker 1 that's probably the problem that i have is i don't really have a goal except to satisfy some kind of itch or and that's a daily itch not a weekly or a monthly or no it's a lifelong kind of a thing it's just uh for instance like i want to make a a series out of one of the novels that I've written.

Speaker 1 And that's really my greatest ambition at this point. But there's also a movie I'm shooting in February that I wrote, but I'm not directing.
I'm just acting. And so you've got a new series airing now.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 November.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? Hey, thanks for not having me on the live show. I mean,

Speaker 1 dude, that's for movie stars, bro. I'm pretty good on my feet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Malice. It's Amazon comes out.
I'm not sure, November 3rd or something like that. What's it called again? Malice.
Malice. Malice.
Okay. Yeah, it's coming out of November on Amazon.

Speaker 1 And by the way, David, we'll get you a seat on one of the, we have these new stage seats that we're up to on the last day. I was listening.
I was listening. Thank you.

Speaker 1 You know, I've always wondered this. We've had people on who have been part of something that sort of really struck a chord

Speaker 1 culturally, pieces, as Sean would say, IP, but part of. And X-Files, obviously, over a number of years,

Speaker 1 has this intense following and had a, and I I was one of the followers. I used to watch it religiously back in the 90s.
And I saw the film.

Speaker 1 I saw the first film. I didn't see the second film.

Speaker 1 The first film was a big hit. Do you, is there that thing when you run into people who are big fans of it, do you ever feel a responsibility, weirdly, I'm just like a responsibility as the sort of the

Speaker 1 as the caretaker of that thing of X-Files? Does that,

Speaker 1 I don't want to say there's a burden, but like you're the guy, you're the front-facing face person of the show. You feel that, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, of course, there was a time when I wanted to leave it behind, you know, and reinvent myself. But then over the years,

Speaker 1 you begin to

Speaker 1 respect

Speaker 1 the kind of power of the show and the size of the show.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the meaning that it has for people, you know, at first when you're younger, you think, oh,

Speaker 1 it's not because of me, but it's personal. And then you realize it's not personal.

Speaker 1 it's just that this thing has a place in people's lives and i represent that to them yeah i'm an asshole if i don't respect that i say that all the time i say that's an asshole

Speaker 1 no i do say that

Speaker 1 i know i i do say that all the time i i said it before on here where you become famous for playing a certain role or in a movie or whatever it is, and then you spend several years trying to distance yourself that because you want to be able to play all these things.

Speaker 1 And in doing so, you alienate the fans that made you, kind of, because

Speaker 1 they are in love with you because of the thing that, like you just said, that you made them feel.

Speaker 1 And you're doing a disservice. And I always say that I'm an asshole if I don't embrace.
the character Jack from Will and Grace and what it did for so many people. I'm sorry.
All that characters that

Speaker 1 are shows. Exactly.

Speaker 1 And you're depriving yourself

Speaker 1 the treat that you deserve, which is like all about how lucky, how rare it is to be a part of something that held. That's right.
That's exactly right. Yeah, it is rare.

Speaker 1 And you get old enough to appreciate that, you know, that you got to do something that was that was great, that did strike a chord with people. And when you're young, you don't think like that.

Speaker 1 It takes a few years to go, oh, I need to appreciate that more.

Speaker 1 No, it's funny.

Speaker 1 I read somebody, I made the mistake, David, of reading a comment a while ago with somebody saying like, he thinks that he doesn't, that he should have had more of a thing or whatever about me.

Speaker 1 And And I was like, no, motherfucker, I'm so grateful for any time that I was able to do anything that even anybody liked for a moment. What a joke.
Yeah, right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I don't even have my high school diploma. Like, the fact that I deserve

Speaker 1 Brad. The world doesn't owe me a living.
No. The world doesn't owe me a living.
We're so lucky that we've been able to do this at all.

Speaker 1 It's so not the way I think. Now, I'd like to ask a question that Sean's too shy to ask.
Did you ever learn anything doing the X-Files that gives you any sort of confidence that we are not alone?

Speaker 1 And Sean promises not to tell anybody if you get just a little bit of a test. Yeah, it's just us four talking.

Speaker 1 I never learned anything, no, but I have the same kind of sense as when I went into it, which is

Speaker 1 it seems to me that the impossibility would be that we are the only sentient live friend. I mean, there's just too many galaxies, too many planets, too many Goldilocks planets.

Speaker 1 So the odds to me are slanted way in favor of the existence of extraterrestrials, whether or not, you know,

Speaker 1 we haven't advanced technologically enough to reach out to them. Yeah.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 And they might be all around us and we just don't have the technology to see it. Right.
Well, they don't want us to.

Speaker 1 I always look at it. You know, when you see all these things, these congressional hearings and stuff about pilots who run into these shapes or things that are moving in ways that we can't understand.

Speaker 1 I always think, I always think, oh, we're so dumb. We think that they want to, that we need to connect.
And they're like, no, no, no. You guys, you guys.
We're good. We're good.
Yeah, we're good.

Speaker 1 We're watching you.

Speaker 1 We're just watching you guys. We don't want to have anything to do with it.
You're ripping over yourselves like a bunch of ding-dongs.

Speaker 1 Didn't we have, we had a guy on once that had,

Speaker 1 and, and I'm, I'm, I'm paraphrasing here,

Speaker 1 but he said something that was really sort of interesting that it makes a lot of sense to me that that perhaps they are all around us in a way that we can't see, just like our cell phone service or radio waves, you know, from like television with gravity or something.

Speaker 1 It's just flying all around. You don't see any of that,

Speaker 1 all the ones and zeros of whatever the hell it is that fly around that make our phones.

Speaker 1 They could be all in that stuff. Yeah, they live in the space between the space.
Yeah, yeah. The dark matter.
The dark matter.

Speaker 1 I used to say this thing with...

Speaker 1 Are you aware of like the phenomenon of like a ship of fools? Do you remember that from the Middle Ages where

Speaker 1 it was a great Robert Plant song? Is that

Speaker 1 razor song? It could be.

Speaker 1 But the idea was that they would take their deviants and criminals, their incorrigible criminals, and they'd put them on a ship, you know, because they didn't have space for them.

Speaker 1 They just put them on a ship out to sea. Floating Australia.
Sometimes,

Speaker 1 well, sometimes, you know, you'd encounter a ship of fools and it wasn't a fun thing, right? Well, they weren't armed. They shouldn't be armed.
No, no, they make sure they weren't armed.

Speaker 1 But my theory about because

Speaker 1 so much of

Speaker 1 alien abduction testimony testimony has to do with being

Speaker 1 probed anally and having their teeth drilled,

Speaker 1 my theory was that alien civilizations were putting their deviants and dentists on a ship.

Speaker 1 Okay, very good. They're sending it out into the galaxy, and somehow they've come to the argument.
We can cut this, we can cut this, but why are aliens so obsessed with anal? Okay, so

Speaker 1 why would you want to cut that?

Speaker 1 Do you want to get any comments from that?

Speaker 1 So if you're not reading and you're not writing and you're not writing music and writing screenplays and doing all this stuff, what is this is sort of the Sean question that he has.

Speaker 1 What are you doing?

Speaker 1 Is there anything you do in your downtime that you're like, what's your guilty pleasure? You'd be surprised to learn. What do you do in the space between the space? Is it gardening? Nice.

Speaker 1 Anything dumb that you do, you go like, oh man, I'd be embarrassed if people knew I did this stupid thing.

Speaker 1 I don't really.

Speaker 1 I'm so bad with hobbies. I really should have a hobby.
Not one. It's really a problem.
Well,

Speaker 1 you do 25

Speaker 1 things. That's really a problem.
Are you playing basketball? You're playing golf? You wish you were cross-country skiing? I wish I was playing basketball.

Speaker 1 No, now I feel bad.

Speaker 1 I do those hobbies.

Speaker 1 When people like me, when dummies like me are watching television, you're reading, so you're not watching. No, no.

Speaker 1 I watch TV. I'm watching Black Rabbit.
Come on. Oh, hey.
Black Rabbit. Black Rabbit are now on Netflix starring Jason and Jubla.
So I watched from Aggregate Films brings you Black Rabbit.

Speaker 1 So it's not like you're not watching Below Deck or anything like that. No, but I do watch, I watch A Love Island.
Sure. Oh, you do? But then I realize 45 hours.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not like a 15-hour season. No.

Speaker 1 Somehow they make 45 fucking hours stuck in there.

Speaker 1 But so you watch baseball. Is there another, is that your number one sport to watch? Basketball is probably not my

Speaker 1 sport. I hear the Lakers are going to be good this year.
It could be. Okay.

Speaker 1 Who's your team? Knicks? Oh, the Knicks. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm a Knicks. Now, you're not in New York now.
Where do you live?

Speaker 1 I live in L.A. Okay.
Why the Knicks? Because I grew up in New York.

Speaker 1 Were you not awake when we started the podcast recently? Well,

Speaker 1 there was some doll fucking and stuff like that there that

Speaker 1 put you in kind of a state that

Speaker 1 I figured that was just like an hourly thing that you were doing in new york stayed with you huh

Speaker 1 how are we gonna side text this is terrible i'm just glad he's not live what if the next time we watch jason on tv at the dodgers game he's sitting next to a blow-up dog

Speaker 1 he was the other day with an x-wise t-shirt up

Speaker 1 wait david i i have an idea for you Okay, come on. So because you write novels and you're not a sci-fi thing, you want to sell a lot of copies of something?

Speaker 1 Do like, you know, Bucky fucking dent was baseball adjacent.

Speaker 1 Do whatever you do brilliantly and just make a little sci-fi adjacent thing. Just a little bit, right? Well,

Speaker 1 this is that episode of

Speaker 1 The X-Wells that I wrote and directed that I want Jason to watch because it's called The Unnatural. And it's a baseball thing.
Oh, I like that. Oh, all right.
So you'll have to.

Speaker 1 I did that.

Speaker 1 Wilford Brimley, do a cameo in Angel?

Speaker 1 No, but

Speaker 1 Wilford Brimley. M.
Emmett Walsh. Wow.

Speaker 1 Wow. That's pretty.
That's it. That's Wilford pretty adjacent.
Yeah. I love MMET Walsh, by the way, just as a quick aside.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was fantastic.

Speaker 1 Did he give you a $2 bill? He didn't. No.

Speaker 1 He does that with a lot of folks, or did. I had one.
No, we just made David Feel Bad again.

Speaker 1 This is before $2 bills were being made. Not hard to make David Feel Bad.

Speaker 1 He replaced an actor who got ill.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he had short notice, and there was a lot of dialogue. His character was really the exposition man in this episode.

Speaker 1 And at one point, he turned to me, because I only think he had a couple days with the script.

Speaker 1 And he said, this isn't writing, it's typing.

Speaker 1 I was like, well, I did the typing.

Speaker 1 And at one point,

Speaker 1 he fucked up. It was so great.
Instead of calling me Agent Mulder, he called me Agent MacGyver.

Speaker 1 And I kept it in. There you go.
Did you really? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It was too good.

Speaker 1 That guy was so good. I just remember,

Speaker 1 what was the one he did with Simple Keaton? No,

Speaker 1 you know, the great Clean and Sober. Yeah.
And he was also in Fletch. Is that right?

Speaker 1 He was the doctor in Fletch. He was a fan of his fancy.
Yeah, he was a fantastic guy.

Speaker 1 David, you're fantastic. You're fantastic.

Speaker 1 We've gone over. We rarely go over.
We've gone over with you because we love talking to you.

Speaker 1 So Malice is out, Amazon Prime. We would be remiss if we didn't mention that again.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 can I plug Black Rabbit again? Should I do that? Please.

Speaker 1 Please.

Speaker 1 What service is that on?

Speaker 1 Where do we find that?

Speaker 1 Very, very nice of you to share some of your time with. I'm sorry.
I'm glad we did this. I'm so happy.
What a joy. Thank you for coming on.
You know, I love your show.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks for having me. You guys are.
Thank you for coming. Thank you, Danny.

Speaker 1 Actor, writer, screenwriter, novelist,

Speaker 1 academic, music,

Speaker 1 and all-around great guy. David DuCovani, thank you so much, David, for your time.
Thank you. Enjoy having you.
Thank you. Thank you, David.
Thanks, David. All right, bye.
Bye, bud.

Speaker 1 Double D. Double D comes

Speaker 1 to the Smartless

Speaker 1 studio, I guess is what this is.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the Smartless Studio. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Smartless is shot in front of a live studio audience.

Speaker 1 He's real slick and cool. He's just, well, he's confident because he's smart.
When you're smart, you're confident. He's very confident.

Speaker 1 I didn't know half that stuff. That's amazing.

Speaker 1 You're not smart. You're not smart.
It's true.

Speaker 1 I mean, it is true. I mean, think about it.
He graduated like ahead of his class in high school.

Speaker 1 And, you know, he's, and then he goes to, he goes to Princeton, then he goes to Yale, and he gets a master's in English literature. And then he starts to work on his PhD.

Speaker 1 And while he's working on his PhD, he's like, it's a mickel-up spot.

Speaker 1 I want to go and start doing some acting lessons just to sort of see how that is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 could you imagine being his parents? You're like, oh, boy, baby, we hit the lotto. Look at this kid.

Speaker 1 We can't wait to brag about this with our friends, blah, blah, blah. And then they go see his first job.
He's become an actor. Let's go, yeah.
And he's fucking

Speaker 1 goddamn inflatable. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, there's nothing more disappointing than just going, I want to be an actor. And you're like, oh, Christian.
All right. Well, maybe he's good.
Hopefully he's good.

Speaker 1 And then they go see his banging this doll.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 1 I know. But listen, he landed on his feet.
He did. You know?

Speaker 1 Boy, did he ever. He lay on his feet a few times.
Yeah, he's such a, we didn't even get into Californication. We just, he's just done so much.
God. And he did some movies, too.

Speaker 1 He did a bunch of movies, and he's just got this new show. New show called Malice.
Malice. What do you think it's about?

Speaker 1 What do I think?

Speaker 1 What do you think Malice is about?

Speaker 1 Is it about, is it

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 a guy's girlfriend

Speaker 1 and her name is Alice? And

Speaker 1 it's M apostrophe Alice. Oh, oh, Alice? Yeah.
Oh, this is my Alice.

Speaker 1 Now she. This is my Alice.
This is my Alice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's about that.

Speaker 1 It could be. Why don't we throw everybody off? Right away.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, Bennett suggests this is a way. I'm calling.

Speaker 1 Jason, you said he landed on his feet, maybe, maybe on his

Speaker 1 tights.

Speaker 1 Desimoids, which is

Speaker 1 the symptoms and treatment options are

Speaker 1 from the Melbourne podiatrist. No.

Speaker 1 You're not going to take bipartite? No.

Speaker 1 No, no, no.

Speaker 1 By the way,

Speaker 1 have you seen the new show?

Speaker 1 By chance?

Speaker 1 By no, no, we're not taking that. How are you doing that? How are you overruling with that? With just like a.

Speaker 1 I tried to tee you guys up with, you know, what do you think Malice is about? I thought maybe one of you ding-dongs had a bio. Oh, you know what? Well, I thought you were talking about it.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it is. Is it a bio pick? About

Speaker 1 a girlfriend named Alice.

Speaker 1 Whose whistle was that? Who's that?

Speaker 1 That's great. That's really good.

Speaker 1 Oh, we got to start adding the whistle. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Smart.

Speaker 1 Smart

Speaker 1 less.

Speaker 1 Smartless is 100% organic and artisanally handcrafted by Rob Armjarf, Bennett Barbico, and Michael Grantary.

Speaker 1 Smart Less

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