X-Files mythology, TenThirteen Interviews Database, and more

Archive for March, 2026

Mar
25
2026

Megacon + Awesomecon cast appearances

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Megacon (Orlando, 20 March 2026): The X-Files cast reunion with Nick Lea, Robert Patrick, Gillian Anderson, Mitch Pileggi, Annabeth Gish.

See and hear actors struggle to remember anything from a 30+ years old show!

  • Robert wishes he could still play Doggett, if they paid him for it. Best role of his career. His first scene with Gillian was perfect, with the water on his face, it reflected a lot of the fan reception he sadly felt.
  • Gillian avoided TXF questions and conventions until about 5 years ago when she understood the Scully effect was still a thing today, and reconciled with it. [She mentions the Gina Davis documentary, sorry Gillian but that was… 10 years ago!]
  • Mitch singles out the moment when Skinner told the CSM “get out” of his office (that’s early, 2X01: Little Green Men), that’s when he knew Skinner would come to be an ally of Mulder and Scully.
  • Annabeth wishes they had had more time to develop the Doggett Reyes (or Scully Reyes) romance.
  • Annabeth’s husband-to-be was Robert’s and Chris Carter’s krav maga instructor. Robert remembers introducing them, Annabeth remembers differently.
  • Props they have kept: Nick: prosthetic arm prop (from Requiem); Mitch: brass bulldog from Skinner’s desk; Gillian: Scully’s grave stone (from One Breath); Robert: all the scripts he was in; Annabeth: bell rings from Reyes’s apartment; all of them have wardrobe.
  • Early on, Gillian was keen to show her range as a young actor, Chris was training her to show the kind of emotions that Scully would have, faith, science, cool.
  • Nick singles out Kim Manners, Rob Bowman, and especially Bob Goodwin for the success of the show. He said yes to anything, they just went out and did it, “like in the old days”. He remembers shooting the car explosion (Paper Clip), surrounded by explosives inside the car, it only worked on second take. He insisted doing the stunt hanging out over Skinner’s balcony instead of shooting around him standing on a platform (Tunguska). For Genderbender, he had just met Bowman, and he kept suggesting things for the shots, ” wouldn’t it be cool if”, “yeah!”.
  • Mitch and Steven Williams choreographed their elevator fight scene themselves (End Game). First take, Bowman wanted more, second take they damaged the elevator set!
  • Robert remembers learning to scuba dive to shoot in a water tank at Universal (Nothing Important Happened Today).
  • Nick explains the Black Oil perfectly! Nobody remembers anything!

Awesomecon (Washington DC, 15 March 2026): Gillian Anderson

  • Reboot: “We [GA and Ryan Coogler] we’ve had a few conversations. He’s such a cool guy and so talented. The pilot script is really good. I would say, have an open mind and give it a chance because it’s going to be fucking cool. It really is. It’s something different. It’s different and it’s special. So, give it a break.”
  • Where would you like to see Agent Scully go? “That’s got nothing to do with me. Who says that Agent Scully is even in the reboot?”
  • Influence of Jodie Foster in the Silence of the Lambs on Scully? “Chris had said to me that he had Clarice in mind when he was writing Scully.” “Even though I had seen it however many years before, I had decidedly not watched it because I didn’t want to be Jodie Foster being Scully. But I definitely feel like the grit and determination and single-minded seriousness of Scully and the nature of her intelligence too probably, was very much in line with how Jodie played Clarice, or how Clarice might have been written.”

Gillian having read Coogler’s pilot script is telling: the script would not have circulated to an actor unless Disney/Coogler want to convince her to participate. It looks like the new series would start without Scully (or Mulder), build up its own identity, then leave the door open for an appearance by Scully a few episodes in. But nothing is decided. “Give it a break” definitely sounds like she’s trying to anticipate a negative reaction (that inevitably comes with anything in fandom these days) and pre-empt it.

Megacon (Orlando, 21 March 2026): Gillian Anderson

  • Casting for Scully: knew it was special just by reading the script for the pilot. Other candidates included Jill Hennessy, Cynthia Nixon. 10 Mulders, 5 Scullys, casting over two days. She was cast at the end of the second day, a Thursday. The next day, Friday, she left for Vancouver to shoot the pilot! Cast just as she got her last unemployment cheque.
  • About the reboot: more or less repeats the above. “I read the script. It was really good. [I told fans] to not think disparagingly about it. It’s very different and very similar, all at the same time, and it’s very special. I think he’s [Coogler] incredibly talented and I think he’s one of the only people who’d really be able to do something unique and do it justice. He’s completely obsessed with the series. I think he’s one of the most talented filmmakers who’s out there, so the fact that Chris has him as the person who’s going to be involved in the franchise is awesome and a huge gift. I think that you guys will see what he has in mind and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”
  • Question about the upclong LEGO set: it will include several of the iconic imagery of the series. [Presumably it will be Brent Waller’s original design?]

“Very different and very similar” is exactly what I would want from a new X-Files project.

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Mar
21
2026

2023 Philefest Millennium panel

Happy spring equinox!

Somewhat recently, already 4 months ago, a recording of the Millennium-focused panel surfaced, thanks to Kurt North from the X-Cast / The Time Is Now podcasts. This is the only panel from Philefest in September 2023 that had not been recorded by X-Files News, I suppose because it was not about The X-Files. The panel had Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz and Troy Foreman (producer of the Millennium documentary). Though short, this panel is excellent, on several points Carter has humorous comments followed up by very heavy stuff, and we finally got a good reason why MM is still not on any streaming platforms. Here are the highlights:

  • Carter: The idea for MM came from Fox forcing him to come up with a second series! He was a big fan of “Silence of the Lambs”. He finds Fincher’s series “Mindhunter” excellent.
  • Spotnitz: TXF episode “Irresistible” was an early template for MM. Among all the hours of TV they did, the Pilot of MM is the best. In the Pilot, the characters, the ideas are “closest to who you [Carter] are, closest to your worldview”. Carter does believe in the evil of the world, but we all have yellow house. There were no supernatural monsters or aliens like in TXF, it was the reality of the human condition.
  • Originally two highly qualified executives had been hired to run MM [who?], but Carter and Spotnitz had to take over. There were 1500 people working daily on TXF, MM and the TXF movie, it was amazing they pulled it off.
  • Why don’t we have MM on streaming? Season 2 has a lot of good music and securing music rights is costly. Carter: Disney/Fox is “cheap”. [Finally, an answer! Hold on to those DVDs!]
  • Season 3 was run by Ken Horton and Chip Johannessen, they had plans for season 4, but Carter and Spotnitz don’t know them, don’t know what was Peter Watts’s fate. Fox would have done a season 4, but Carter moved MM aside to do “Harsh Realm”. Fox was chasing better ratings, but the ratings never got better than MM, it was a structural decline.
  • Carter: “I’ve met evil people”, “some people have a defect”, “too many of them are lawyers”, “I know the face of evil, I’ve looked it in the eye and shuddered”.
  • The reason Carter took a break after TXF was an on-set accident where a crew member electrocuted himself and was killed. [This was Jim Engh; 8X01: “Within” was dedicated to his memory.] He went to the funeral, he met his widow. Later, the widow was suing and Carter was named specifically. He was called in for a deposition, the lawyers were trying in every way to connect the deceased with him. He had enough, he didn’t want to put himself in a position to be accused. Eventually the case was dropped. [These are rare details on a little-known case, and a surprising amount of detail. Along with a work burnout and other legal issues with Fox, this was certainly a contributing factor for Carter’s break after 2002.]
  • Question about common visual elements between the MM pilot and TXF: “The Red and the Black” (people with sewed orifices in their faces): Carter: both were made concurrently, it was not conscious.
  • Spotnitz: Carter loved Fincher’s “Seven”. He got “Seven”‘s assistant production designer for the MM pilot. [This was Gary Wissner, credited as art director on “Seven”.]
  • MM revival: the obvious way forward would be if Jordan has similar gifts and becomes a serial killer profiler herself. Carter: the number of killers has decreased in recent years, one would have to branch out for new stories. “Dahmer” was great.
  • Sarah Jane Redmond originally approached Carter for a role in MM. She had the perfect affect for MM. Carter wrote the Lucy Butler role for her.
  • In the MM documentary, the interview with her took place inside a church.
  • Spotnitz: originally the show would not have any supernatural at all. The studio was pressuring for it. By the end of season 1 they did “Lamentation”. Lucy Butler was Spotnitz’s favourite character after Frank Black.
  • What do they fear now? Carter: “the Trump administration”. If they’d do the revival, a scary title would be just “Trump”.
  • Season 2: Glen & Jim had ideas, they took a huge load off Carter & Spotnitz. He watched the season like a fan.
  • Spotnitz: he was exhausted after season 1, it was brutal. Carter asked him if he wanted to leave TXF for MM. It was a hard decision.
  • For season 2, Jim had T-shirts printed out “99% less serial killers”. It was a different direction.
  • Season 3: Chip was a poetic, artistic writer. It was a different tone and focus. Carter & Spotnitz came in and contributed, but it was Chip’s vision. The show was 3 distinct visions, a triptych. Spotnitz loved the work of Kristen Cloke.
  • On TXF: “The Erlenmeyer Flask”: the hybrid idea was something Carter and Anne Simon hatched together. Carter follows current research on genetic engineering, “we are on the cusp of changing the human race”.
  • Spotnitz: on the Scully effect. MM’s casting was diverse: it was not a calculation, it was not pandering, it was resisting pressure about ‘where’s the sexual tension?’ (regarding the Emma Hollis-Frank Black relationship). It’s amazing how well MM holds up. “That’s Chris’s respect for women.”
  • Carter: on female producers in MM. TXF had more female than male producers, he is super proud of that. He took offense with some comments in seasons 10-11. He tried to hire a female director of photography for TXF, Sandy Sizzle, which was rare at the time; Fox’s Charlie Goldstein said ‘no way’, that women couldn’t lead a crew. [This whole bit sounds like an organized defense of their work in response to criticism Carter in particular has received, and it looks like it has touched a nerve! All of these are good points but this is somewhat misplaced: I think the criticism has centered around the writing staff, which was nearly-entirely male for TXF and admittedly more balanced in MM. Also, there are many behind the scenes things we are not aware of and now that so much time has passed Carter is opening up a bit, it’s not usual for him or in the industry to be naming people like this.]
  • The leads of MM, Lance and Megan, were their first choices, no auditions, they gave them the roles based on past work. Megan had a unique intelligence and humanity. Spotnitz: when they killed Catherine he was sad and disappointed, it was not his decision.

Speaking of which: an extended cut of the Millennium After the Millennium documentary is coming on April 7 on BluRay and streaming (Amazon Prime)! (I don’t know if this will be available globally on Prime, it wasn’t in the past.)

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Mar
09
2026

RIP Tom Noonan

Lest we forget: actor Tom Noonan passed away a few weeks ago, on February 14 (The Hollywood Reporter article). The X-Files fans will remember him for his very memorable portrayal in one of the series’ best episodes, as child serial killer and Mulder’s dream tormentor John Lee Roche in Vince Gilligan’s 4X08: Paper Hearts.

Noonan had previously portrayed the serial killer Francis Dollarhyde in Michael Mann’s Mindhunter (1986), the first adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel and certainly an influence on Chris Carter on The X-Files and later on Millennium. Noonan had a very varied career, mixing high-brow with low-brow roles, all memorable: I remember him from Robocop 2, Last Action Hero, Heat, Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa, and the short They’re Made Out Of Meat… Here’s to one of the great guest roles of the series.

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Mar
08
2026

25 years of The Lone Gunmen + Spotnitz, Gilligan interview

Ten Thirteen’s fourth series, The Lone Gunmen, first premiered 25 years ago, six months before 9/11/2001 — with that now infamous pilot episode that involves a false flag operation from the US military-industrial complex to fly a plane into the World Trade Center and increase arms sales in the aftermath. The series would go on to be much more humorous after that pilot, with a type of humor that was not to everybody’s taste, more like some season 6 episodes than Darin Morgan episodes, but the photography and the Vancouver setting were unmistakable Ten Thirteen. It premiered during The X-Files’ season 8 and lasted half a season with 13 episodes. It was not picked up for a season 2 and the series would be given a finale with the controversial “Jump The Shark” in TXF’s season 9.

The Television Academy has an interview with show co-creators Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz (the third member of the John Gilnitz trio, John Shiban, is missing!) to reflect on the show. Here are a few highlights:

Spotnitz: I actually think we wanted to do The Lone Gunmen [earlier] and it was delayed by Harsh Realm.

Spotnitz: I also think, looking back on it, it was season eight of The X-Files — we had already hit our peak, and we were already on the way down in terms of the mania for The X-Files. It was probably two or three seasons too late to do that spinoff. If we had done it in season four or five [during The X-Files’ run], we might have had a different reception. 9/11, in my view, really killed The X-Files. The mood of the country was no longer government conspiracy and all that.

[Entirely agreed that the spin-off came too late. The Lone Gunmen-focused episodes of TXF were during seasons 5 and 6, and this is when a spin-off should have started.]

[One thing that neither of them mention is that TXF season 8 was given a break between airing “This Is Not Happening” and “DeadAlive” in order to accommodate the first episodes of TLG. To introduce a break during what was perhaps TXF’s peak emotional moment and have viewers follow a humorous spin-off was not the producers’ best decision, and probably hurt viewership too. Of course all of these are past considerations, things would have gone very differently with today’s streaming format, and TLG is the kind of niche show that might have found its audience eventually.]

[I think this is the first time we hear that it was delayed because of “Harsh Realm”. As good as that one was, we can now blame it for first cancelling “Millennium” season 4, and for postponing “The Lone Gunmen” further into an untimely period.]

Spotnitz: There’s a story I’ve never told, but I feel like I can tell it now that it’s been 25 years and Fox has been sold to Disney. The deal that Tom and Dean and Bruce made — Fox screwed up. They paid them way more money than they meant to pay them. So, when the show got canceled, Vince, John, and I wanted to have a sendoff for them. We wanted to write “Jump the Shark.” Fox did not want to bring them back. They really tried to stop us; they were so mad. In their mind, they’d overpaid them for The Lone Gunmen. They were absolutely against it. And we just said, “We’re doing it, so you’ll have nothing to broadcast if we force their hand.”

Spotnitz: I do regret that that episode didn’t end with a laugh — it just ends with sadness. That was a mistake. If you’re going to do that, then you’ve got to bring back the joy that the characters represented, and we didn’t.

[Spotnitz said in the “Jump the Shark” DVD commentary that Fox was very difficult an only gave them the greenlight to do the episode when they decided to have the Lone Gunmen die. It was a heroic death all right, but this gives a whole another vengeful layer to this: the Lone Gunmen died because of some clerical error!]

Gilligan: I’ve said this a lot: You don’t know if it’s going to be hit. You don’t know if it’s going to be a failure. That’s what keeps it interesting and keeps your guts churning.

Gilligan: You don’t learn anything from success. And I’m not being funny, I’m being 100% serious. When something’s a success, you try to say, “It was because of this, it was because of that.” But you’re always wrong. There’s nothing I would call a mistake about The Lone Gunmen — not even time slots or any of that. You just do your best, and everybody did their best. I’m as proud as I can be of The Lone Gunmen, and to this day, I’d love for people to [read] this and say, “What show are they talking about?” And then look it up online and buy it. We put out DVDs.

Gilligan: We were lucky to get 13 [episodes]. Nowadays, it’d be six. I just couldn’t be more proud of it.

[I personally don’t think “The Lone Gunmen” was a very strong show, especially because of the way it handled its humor, and I’ve always thought it would have been a stronger show if it had half-hour instead of full-hour episodes. Given the quality work that Gilligan became famous for, it’s interesting that he still defends “The Lone Gunmen” so earnestly. It is undeniable that that show had a lot of heart, both in front of the camera and behind it. It is true that the popular success of a show relies on many factors that are conjunctural and difficult to pin down or purposefully recreate. Let us think about that when we consider the successes and failures also of TXF’s revival seasons, or the potential success or failure of the proposed TXF reboot.]

Let Gilligan have the final words about “The Lone Gunmen” and its heroes:

Gilligan: It’s just timely 25 years later. We need The Lone Gunmen more than ever. Three guys who, trying to save democracy, save the rule of law. God bless them. I want to think they’re still out there somewhere.

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