David Duchovny is best known as FBI agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files and as Hank Moody in Californication. His first novel, Holy Cow, has just been published.
The yarn concerns a cow called Elsie, a pig called Shalom and a turkey named Tom, who break out from a farm in upstate New York in search of better times.
“I had an idle idea while driving one day that if I were a cow I’d probably do my best to get to India,“ the actor and writer tells The Observer. “I thought that was funny. But then I thought: what else could happen? If I were a pig, I’d try and get to a place where kosher laws were enforced and I wouldn’t be eaten. And… a turkey might think that Turkey would be safe."
Duchovny duly wrote up a movie treatment and pitched it as an animated film for kids. “But the story includes some Muslim-Jewish political discussion, some drug-taking, and the circumcision of a pig. They politely passed. So I shelved it until, a year and a half ago, I thought: why don’t I write it up as a novel?”
Holy Cow is not strong on any kind of message, it is primarily "a work of entertainment".
“A decent work of art raises more questions than it answers,“ says the actor. “If it answers questions, it becomes propaganda. The book really comes out of my earliest reading: I grew up on Aesop’s Fables, the first stories I ever heard involved talking animals.
He believes that he was more of an observer and a a thinker as a young boy. “I didn’t even see that many movies as a kid.”
Duchovny has a BA in English literature from Princeton, where he wrote a dissertation on the early novels of Samuel Beckett. He also has an MA from Yale.
