David and Tea

🖤

The following is a fun, dorky, and true anecdote submitted to me by the wonderful @mystery-ink​ regarding then-rising superstar, Mr David Duchovny:

I just started a new job in Vancouver. Someone I work with used to work at the Starbucks near the beach in Kitsilano, which was David Duchovny’s haunt back when they started shooting X Files. My colleague, being the bubbly, charming person she is, rapidly befriended “David” and they became buddies for a few years.

That’s not the point of the story. The point is, she was at a party at “David"s house. At this point the show had been going for a couple of years and Mr Duchovny had gone legit. His house was filled with beautiful things, and she was admiring a rare and genuine Mapplethorpe in his bathroom. “David” wandered in and they chatted for a while about the photograph before she glanced down and saw what he was using as a bathmat.

It was this:

‘Is that… who shot Mr Burns?’ she asked incredulously, gesturing to the towel — not bathmat — languishing beneath the sophisticated and eye-wateringly expensive Mapplethorpe.

‘Haha yeah,’ he replied, delighted she had noticed. ‘They gave it to me for free!’

She bursts out laughing telling me the story decades later. ‘People thought he was cool but he was so weird! Just a really bizarre dork of a guy.’ She’s fond, of course, when she says this.

She later recounts the time she drove “David” and Chris Carter around NYC in her “shitty car”. They spent the entire time making dick jokes. ‘They were 12 year olds.’

‘Were you friends with Gillian Anderson too?’ I absolutely must know.

‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘You were Team David or Team Gilly in those days.’