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David Duchovny is still conquering fears.
The “X-Files” star told Fox News Digital recently that he never played an instrument until he was 50 and conquered his fear of singing in public when he started his band.
“Music is the most surprising to me because I never really played an instrument until I was about 50 and I… certainly, nobody was clamoring for me to sing songs,” the 65-year-old said when asked what about his career would surprise his younger self.
“My number one fear actually would have been singing in public,” the actor, who is set to read from his book of poems at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, explained. “So, the fact that I am not even afraid of it anymore, but welcome it and look forward to it is — it’s shocking to me. Actually, every time I think about it, it’s like shocking that I did — I do that.”
David Duchovny said his younger self would have been surprised to see him fronting a band. (AFP/AFP via Getty Images; John Lamparski/Getty Images)
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Duchovny remembered when he first started recording, and it was “maybe the first or second time I was gonna sing in public.”
“When I first started recording, I said to my guy, I said, ‘Well, you know, we can auto-tune me, it doesn’t matter, you know?’ And he’s like, ‘No, we cannot, you know, that doesn’t really work.’ And I said ‘Well, I’m not gonna play live.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, maybe you should.’”
He said he found himself readying to play live without “having confidence that I was gonna be…not slippery on the notes.”
While he was waiting to go on, he said he could hear his band turning up the amps, and he could hear the crowd.
“And I just had this kind of revelation because the crowd seemed kind of hyped up,” he said, “that they came out to have a good time, you know, they didn’t come out to a bad time. And I wasn’t gonna like lead them into a bad time because I’m thinking I’m gonna have a bad time, so I was like, ‘Get out of their way.'”
Duchovny called it a “very good lesson just in terms of all performance, which is like get my ego out of the way and just be a conduit for a good time.”
The actor is also expressing himself through a new poetry book called “About Time: Poems,” explaining that he’s been writing poetry his whole life and only recently decided to put them together in a book from 20 to 25 years of writing.
Duchovny will be reading his poems at the Los Angles Times Festival of Books on April 18 at the University of Southern California.
The 31st annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books returns to the University of Southern California (USC) campus on April 18–19, 2026. As the nation’s largest literary festival, it features over 550 authors, poets, and storytellers, hundreds of exhibitors, and free outdoor activities, including panels, cooking demos, and live music.
David Duchovny performing in Ireland in 2019. (Ben Ryan/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
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“I live in L.A. And I’m a reader and I think it’s very important that we continue to try to prop up this dying art,” Duchovny said of why appearing at the festival is important to him. “There’s not a lot of quiet time or at least reflective time to read, especially books of poems, especially literary fiction. So any, any institution that backs that, I’ll back that institution, you know, so I’m happy to show up and happy to read to whoever shows up to listen.”
WATCH HERE: DAVID DUCHOVNY CONQUERED HIS ‘NUMBER ONE FEAR’ WHEN HE STARTED A BAND
“For me, the personal expression really is about, it’s really like a spiritual exercise,” he explained. “It’s almost like a religious exercise where I’m trying to get at truths that are beyond words. Basically, that’s what poems are, you’re trying to use words to say what can’t be worded. And that’s usually matters of the spirit of the heart.”
David Duchovny performing in London in 2016. (Zak Hussein/Corbis)
His poems aren’t “confessional” or “literal,” he explained. “There’s no plot for me anyway. It’s really just a conversation between me and, you know, the bigger picture.”
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He said he wouldn’t call his book a “conversation with God, but it’s similar to that. It’s like, it’s really trying to see beneath whatever’s happening today, to really, you know, along lines of reading and taking time to read, really just taking a moment — more than a moment — taking time to like sit down in the present and reflect deeply and quietly and slowly enough that I can come up with something that’s worthwhile.”
“And I just had this kind of revelation because the crowd seemed kind of hyped up, that they came out to have a good time, you know, they didn’t come out to a bad time. And I wasn’t gonna like lead them into a bad time because I’m thinking I’m gonna have a bad time, so I was like ‘Get out of their way.'”
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Describing his poems, he said, “Some of them are obviously about my kids or about relationships, but they’re not specifically, I mean maybe they’re poems that are about the loss of love or whatever, but I’ll be damned if I’ll say who or what or where, you know?”
David Duchovny with Gilllian Anderson as agents Mulder and Scully on “The X-Files” in 2001. (FOX Image Collection/Getty Images)
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“So they’re not like tied to any kind of specific thing,” he continued. “And I actually kind of, I’m prickly about that just because I don’t think that that’s what makes the poem meaningful, you know. The poem is not a puzzle to be solved.”
Duchovny said he thinks of acting more like sports. When the “buzzer sounds, and you’ve got to play and you gotta, you gotta bring it.”
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“Poetry is like the opposite of that,” he said. “You know, there’s no buzzer at all, and you just have to, you know, you really just are sitting there. I mean, I keep coming back to the same formulation, which is trying to put into words what can’t be put into the words.”
David Duchovny at the Sundance Film Festival in January. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
He added, “And I think that is another name for whatever you want to call God or your relationship to the spirit or to something that’s beyond what’s in front of us. And, I don’t personify it, but I do know that as I raise my consciousness, these things come out and these things are discussions.”
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He likened it to “flicking your Bic lighter in the darkness. You know, [poems are] just like momentary, like, ‘Oh, I see something momentarily.’ That’s what the poems are.”