David Duchovny went from hating the gym to embracing his workouts – Muscle and Fitness

David Duchovny is back on our screens Anger and looks super fit at 65, but the X files And Californian star tells M&F that he wasn’t always a fan of weightlifting.

For Prime Video’s new psychological thriller, Duchovny plays a wealthy father who hastily appoints a mysterious nanny, played by Jack Whitehall. And as the six gripping episodes unfold, it soon becomes clear that the nanny has bad intentions for the family he is tasked with supporting. The show, partially filmed in Greece, required Duchovny to appear shirtless, but at age 65, this professional actor’s constant effort to stay in shape ensured he was never nervous. Yet the love for lifting weights didn’t come until he was forty.

David Duchovny had to avoid prejudice to lift weights

Before he became the man that many people still know and love Fox Mulder about the hit series from the nineties The X files, Duchovny was a standout basketball player at Princeton University. “I always played a game,” Duchovny reflects on his youth, but as he grew older, life began to get in the way of the sporting life, just as it does for so many of us. “When I was forty, my kids started getting older, they went to school and I worked a lot, so I didn’t really have time to play those games,” he explains. “And so it became: ‘How do I keep my body fit in the time allotted to me now?’”

With a leading role in California, the beloved actor spent a lot of time half-naked and understandably wanted to be in shape for the screen. To that end, Duchovny set up a gym in his garage, but initially had a conflicted view of lifting weights. “I’ve never been a gym guy,” he tells M&F. “I always looked down on those guys. Like, ‘Those are fake muscles’ and ‘I only like the muscles that can play the game.’ That kind of thing. And even when I was mainly playing basketball, they said you weren’t allowed to lift weights. It used to be that they would say, ‘No, you don’t want to get muscular.’ So I had this kind of prejudice in my head against the ‘gym training’, but I started to love it.”

Duchovny remains consistent in always being screen-ready

Today, Duchovny has a collection of resistance machines in his garage and can combine muscle-building moves with functional exercises like pullups, medicine ball work, bench presses and even a Pilates-style reformer. Duchovny trains six times a week and now has a very different attitude to pumping iron. “But I grew to love it,” he says. “I really like the kind of pain and the challenge. And as I get older and older, it’s also necessary. With. I love the pain.” Californian it was like, ‘Ah, shit, I’m going to take my shirt off a lot, it’s part of the job, I should probably get in good shape, but now it’s a health benefit for me at this point.’

Duchovny has also long been a detail man when it comes to his nutrition. He chooses to eat very little meat and opts for a more pescatarian-based diet. He also pays attention to where food comes from and often fasts between his evening meal and the next day’s lunch, apart from a high-protein coffee. Fortunately, this lifestyle and the love for gym training that Duchovny has developed Californian now pay dividends. In Malice, the star goes shirtless once again. How much notice did he get for that? “I think I got it from the script,” explains the actor, who dances half-naked in a glorious scene. “There was no way to set it up,” he says of preparing his physique, thanks to his familiar ‘stay ready to be ready’ mentality and the fact that he wanted the character to seem authentic. “But you know, I’m certainly as vain as any other actor, so I want to look good,” he laughs.

David Duchovny likes to stay active between scenes

Also in form for his sinister role as the family nanny is Jack Whitehall, who shed his comedic persona and became a fan of the Anger project. The two actors were able to play tennis between scenes in Greece, and Duchovny says Whitehall has developed a serious love for Padel. The boys even did push-ups on set to stay pumped.

For recovery, says Duchovny M&F that he regularly takes a cold dip. “It’s not good for fun,” he jokes. “But you know, even that’s an essential part of working out, because ‘No Pain, No Gain’ is the cliché, but when you put yourself in painful situations, or when you put yourself in stressful situations, I now really see it as a rehearsal for real stressful situations. An ice bath is not a real stressful situation in life, but it is stress. And I think it’s important to befriend stress and know that you can push through it a little bit.”

Fortunately, there are plenty of stressful situations that you can enjoy Malice, which starts Friday, November 14 on Prime Video.