The X-Files

"There is a lot of soul there. But, you know, I do think theres also something to the fact that we kind of flip-flopped the gender roles early on, before it was ‘smart,’ or whatever, to do. Mulder was kind of this guy being instinctual, emotional, irrational, while Gillian—Scully—was rational and stoic. At least in TV terms, I think that was revolutionary, and it strengthened our performances because it was something Gillian and I could both sink our teeth into."

"The frame of The X-Files, which started out as a pretty much straight-ahead thriller/mystery/horror genre science-fiction show, kind of started to mold and get more flexible as writers like Glen Morgan and James Wong and then Vince [Gilligan] and then Darin Morgan took it into a more comedic area, sometimes into a more horror area. And the show started to bend and it never broke, and I think thats a testament to the vision that [showrunner Chris Carter] had in the beginning, which I dont think he had consciously. But he created a show that could bend and could grow, and he had the luck or the foresight to hire writers that were going to take his baby and turn it into something else from time to time."

"I think [Carter] made two characters who were complementary to one another, and kind of completed one another in the romantic comedy sense. You know, they had aspects of a personality that the other was lacking, and I think because it took so long for them to be physical in any way there was a certain ache to the show. ... That wasnt what the show was about. The show was about the cases; the show was about the quest. Whatever the show was about, it wasnt about this relationship. Thats kind of, I think, the magic of the relationship and the show, is that it was never the point of the show — it always happened in the spaces of the show."

"Somebody at one point said something about the fact that I’ve ended up with, or have chosen, these roles where it’s me. . . not necessarily against, but rivalling these [male] characters: the triptych of Mulder, Hannibal and Spector [the killer from The Fall]. That I find myself in those situations, those roles. I mean, Mulder’s not really a predator, we’re not in that dance, but there’s tension. Various forms of both intellectual and sexual tension."

"Its a curious time to be doing the show because everything is upside-down. Theres been a flip since we were first on the air. Now its as though people dont trust science anymore. In fact, they dont trust anything! Although they do believe in something: They believe in conspiracy theories, more than ever, it seems."

"The X-Files form of American folk paranoia wasn’t just part of the zeitgeist. It was a lot older and a lot deeper. It’s very much part of American culture. I’d been reading Fortean Times [the journal of unexplained phenomena, named after one of Mulder’s spiritual antecedents, the paranormal researcher Charles Fort, who was born in 1874] almost since it began and The X-Files was a gloriously pulped-out version of that."

"The Gothic tradition concerns things lurking in the beyond and monsters that often represent ourselves. It’s traditionally looked at how big institutions like the church and state are in fact fundamentally corrupt. That idea of the evil within is a very X-Files thing. Both Gothic literature and The X-Files are about taking that walk into the dark woods and facing what we can’t define. That’s essentially what Mulder does in the show."

"The very idea that the corrupt and the murky could be centred on something as crazy as a government cover-up of aliens in Area 51 now seems almost quaint. The X-Files is actually a naively optimistic show from a time when America hadn’t been so deeply threatened and could turn its attention inward. Any show that opens every episode by asserting ‘The truth is out there’ is fundamentally pretty optimistic and open-minded."