Some recent cast reunions in conventions were billed as The X-Files 32th anniversary events, and it’s true such events with so many cast members are by now rare.

This made for some beautiful photos. Robert Patrick says “pure joy“:

Fan Expo

With Gillian Anderson, Robert Patrick, Annabeth Gish, Mitch Pileggi, Nick Lea. Some highlights:

• Robert: Doggett is his favorite role of his entire career!
• Gillian typically doesn’t remember anything (but does remember the scene where Scully throws water on Doggett’s face), whereas Nick remembers details.
• Robert remembers doing script table reads, nobody else does.
• Mitch remembers shooting a scene with Duchovny, Carter called and was rewriting the scene, he passed the dialogue over the phone: that’s how a short notice they had with getting and learning the dialogue.
• Nick: he had little notice, except the one time he knew he would have to speak Russian 2 weeks in advance [4X09: Tunguska].
• Robert: the director of photography would give them directions to direct their flashlights to hit a board, so that the reflection would light their own faces.
• Did they have any input to their character to Carter? Everyone, quickly: “no!”
• Mitch didn’t like the prosthetics with the nanobots [6X10: S.R. 819], he told them to get rid of this storyline. [And so sadly this was another story thread that was not followed up, I would have liked it to.]
• Annabeth watches Stranger Things and Pluribus, which tackle similar questions as TXF.
• About 7X17: all things: Gillian wrote the outline one day until 3 am. Carter got Spotnitz to guide her through the process of turning it into a script. The 1st day directing she felt unbelievably lucky, the 2nd day she just wanted it to be over! She hadn’t thought of it beforehand but she wished she had spent more time working with the actors, working through each scene and what specifically she wanted out of them.

+ a panel just with Gillian, where she mentioned that getting back into the Scully character for the revival was really difficult.

Reboot talk

The Ryan Coogler reboot project was touched upon in Fan Expo.

Mitch has not been approached. Gillian had just one conversation with him it feels like 2 years ago, her knee-jerk reaction would be that she’s not interested as she’s done this already, but Coogler is talented and doesn’t say no, she’s interested to read what he’s created.

Gillian repeated just as much for a Screenrant interview: “I have no idea where they are at, or if it’s at.”

So any Scully reappearance talks in the potential reboot are way overblown, this is far from happening yet!

Monster Mania

Another cast reunion, same with the above minus Nick Lea but with William “Bill” Davis and Laurie Holden. Apart from the usual questions (do you believe, what’s your favorite, how did you meet Arlene, did you really eat the 2X20: Humbug cricket) there were two “incidents” I want to flag:

On the William arc, anything else you want to know?
Gillian: I guess to find out who the father is.
A fan shouts “The Cigarette-Smoking Man”…and Gillian gives Bill a comic look.

Anything you would like your character to do?
Bill: I had to offer to write an episode to get some scenes with Gillian.
Gillian: But he gave me something else instead.
Bill: I didn’t plan that part.

This is both funny and tragic. It’s awkward to say the least that actors have to answer for the writer in front of fans… They will be doing this for the rest of their lives!

Gillian Anderson on “War of the Coprophages”

Gillian confirms on Jimmy Kimmel that the happenings in one shot in 3X12: War of the Coprophages were not planned: as she walks into a supermarket, a car accident happens behind her and an extra bumps into her. She continued in-character, and the shot made it to the final episode. Both these things were great and contributed to the sense of panic that the episode was trying to convey at that point!

David Duchovny on “Aubrey”

A story relayed by Annie on X-Files Diaries: David told her that one particular line in 2X12: Aubrey came from him, and not from script writer Sara Charno. The line in question:

Mulder: “I’ve often felt that dreams are answers to questions we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.”

This memorable line was repeated from Scully back to Mulder in 4X08: Paper Hearts.

Is this true? Let’s do some forensic work. We can compare script versions, thanks to boggsfiles: earlier script versions as late as the pink version (dated Nov 14 1994) don’t have it, while the yellow version (dated Nov 16, just two days later) has it. The dailies from that episode show that Nov 22 or 23 was day 5 of shooting, placing the start of shooting to Nov 18 or 19. So it looks like it checks out and that David could have provided that line after a script read just a couple of days before shooting began!