David Duchovny is best known for portraying Fox Mulder, a believer in all things supernatural, in the long-running TV series “The X Files.”
But Duchovny also has a master's in English literature. And in the last few years, he's turned his talents to writing novels. The most recent one, “Truly Like Lightning,” came out last month.
Here & Now producer Emiko Tamagawa interviewed David Duchovny about his book for a virtual event held by the Massachusetts-based Brookline Booksmith. A Zoom crowd eagerly awaited Duchovny as assistant events director Bryana Tribuna spoke for many of the fans in her introduction: “David Duchovny has been a constant in my life since ‘The X-Files’ first aired, and I was just a weird little kid obsessed with bigfoot, werewolves and aliens.”
When Tamagawa started reading Duchovny’s new book, she immediately leapt to the acknowledgments in search of where the book came from. Two things stood out to her: the writings of Harold Bloom, a professor Duchovny had when he attended graduate school at Yale University, and a connection to an episode the actor wrote for “The X-Files.”
After six years of starring in the hit science fiction series, Duchovny says he wrote and directed one episode per year. He took inspiration from the case of a man named Mark Hofmann, a forger of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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“The thing about Mark Hofmann is when he was writing in the hand of Joseph Smith, he said they weren’t forgeries because he was channeling Joseph Smith,” Duchovny says. “And so that’s what I kind of used, you know, it intrigued me as an actor because we talk about becoming a character.”
In Duchovny’s “Hollywood A.D.,” episode 19 of “The X-Files” season 7, an old hippie named Micah Hoffman, played by Paul Lieber, forges ancient texts about Jesus Christ to fool a Catholic cardinal. But then Micah Hoffman has a conversion: “One day I was just not impersonating Jesus Christ, I had become him.”
Fast forward about two decades. Duchovny is working on "Truly Like Lightning," which centers around Bronson Powers, a former Hollywood stuntman who is disillusioned by the business and finds solace in religion.
“There is something about the Mormon sense of ‘we are not belated, we are now, and now is when miracles are happening,’ ” Duchovny says, “that struck me as: If you had somebody like Powers, who feels it’s hard for him to have an authentic life, he would glom on to this religion.”
Like the texts in the “X-Files” episode, Powers’ brand of Mormonism is something he made up — and yes, it involves polygamy.
Powers and his two wives live on an isolated settlement near California’s Joshua Tree National Park. They homeschool their 10 children, raising them free from technology and what they view as the evils of society.
But then a real estate developer, who covets Powers’ land, bets him that his children would benefit by attending public school. Despite his misgivings, Power agrees to enroll three of his kids and let them live in a city along with one of the mothers.
The children get to experience everything from cellphones to pizza to Michael Jackson for the first time, Duchovny says. The book explores what happens when a 19th-century person enters a 21st-century world.
What follows will cause patriarch Powers to question the faith that has sustained him and served as “the ground beneath his feet,” Duchovny says.
“I envy people that have strong faith in many ways. I envy the idea of really believing that there’s a bedrock of, not just morality, but a spiritual truth,” he says.
That envy inspired him to write such a character — and he plans to take on the role of Powers in a TV adaptation of the book. Think along the lines of a "Big Love” meets “Saved By The Bell" with a Duchovny spin.
The first season of the show would cover the events of the book, he says. Then, Duchovny hopes people get invested in the world and the characters’ stories for a few more seasons.
How “The X-Files” Sparked David Duchovny’s Writing Career
". . .Duchovny went on to write and direct more episodes of the X-Files, usually at a rate of one per year, and later in his career dove deeper into writing, becoming a New York Times-bestselling author, currently with his fourth novel, Truly like Lightning, being recently released.
Truly Like Lightning, rich in plot and character development, centers around former Hollywood stuntman and converted Mormon Bronson Powers and his family as they are forced to battle with the type of modern world temptations and complications they were living in the uninhabited desert outside of Joshua Tree to avoid.
On Wednesday, Deadline reported that Duchovny will co-write and star as Powers in a series adaption of the book for Showtime.
“This is a guy who is kind of a cowboy, a stuntman, but feels somewhat if not insignificant ... a sense like (he’s) a shadow, he's a double,” Duchovny told Forbes on Monday of the character. “He's looking for the sense in which he hasn't come too late on the scene. Like if he had been born 100 years earlier, he would have been an actual cowboy. This is a way, through Mormonism, through his reading of Joseph Smith, he starts to feel that authenticity.
“I related to that. I related to not just being an actor, which kind of sometimes feels inauthentic or like being a double, or like being a shadow in a way, playing at life... But also, we're coming to the 21st century, all the great thoughts have been had, all the great discoveries have been made, all the great battles have been fought. It's like, what can a person do to feel authentic, relevant, present, in the thick of history in a way?”
Get to Know the Story Behind Netflix’s ‘Murder Among the Mormons’
More than three decades ago, in October 1985, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suffered one of the darkest chapters in hits history when a Mormon missionary named Mark Hofmann killed two others and injured himself with three bomb blasts in and around Salt Lake City, Utah. 
Though they made national news at the time, the bombings have faded from memory—even in Utah, where more than half the population identifies as Mormon. “It’s kind of lived in this weird, semi-mythological space,” filmmaker Jared Hess said in a recent interview. “And it was such an isolated, regional story. It ran the news cycle nationally and then it kind of came and went.”
Hoffman’s horrific crime is back in the headlines thanks to Hess and Tyler Measom, co-directors of the Netflix docuseries Murder Among the Mormons, premiering on March 3. Over the gripping three episodes, they detail how document dealer Hoffman grew desperate as his forging business began to unravel.
Coincidentally, Hofmann’s story has another TV connection: It piqued the interest of The X-Files alum David Duchovny, who tells a tale of Mormonism his new novel, Truly Like Lightning. “I had a thread of a story I wanted to tell based on some Mormon precepts and I only knew them because I wrote an ‘X-File’ in, like, 2000, where I made a fictional character out of a Mormon forger named Mark Hofmann, who—it’s an amazing story, . .
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Who Does David Duchovny Think He Is?
Duchovny finds both defaults lame. The emphasis on alma maters is a corollary of the kind of thinking that prompts people to say, on hearing that an actor has published a novel, “Who does he think he is?”
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