Actor David Duchovny recalls strange Scientology recruiting effort

David Duchovny explained that he checked out Scientology when he attended his friend, actor Jason Beghe's wedding at Scientology's Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles in 2000. Photo: Handout

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 re-creation 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 a small red Speedo.

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 cult-like following and otherworldly mythology — not unlike Scientology, as critics say.