By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Part of what makes Fox Mulder such a great X-Files character is that he’s cool and collected; the kind of guy who can face down aliens and sewer monsters and still get a few quips in before saving the day. Normally, David Duchovny is just as Zen-like as his Mulder character, but he ended up getting freaked out by one of the show’s greatest guest stars. That star was Doug Hutchison (who played stretchy villain Eugene Tooms), who insisted on playing his climactic scene naked, a decision that spooked Duchovny when he had to act alongside a nude, slime-covered monster man.
Tooms, The Naked Horror
In the climax of the episode “Tooms,” Mulder discovers and confronts the titular villain, who is found hiding, naked and covered in goo, beneath a mall escalator. It wasn’t the writers’ idea to make the villain nude, but Hutchison insisted on stripping down for the final scene because it made more sense for his animalistic character. As showrunner Chris Carter later pointed out, the nudity made that scene much scarier for Duchovny: in his words, “David was very nervous about being in a little tiny confined space with a naked man.”
Much of this info, including Carter’s recollections about Duchovny, comes from the DVD special features of The X-Files Season 1 set. There, the showrunner revealed more of the Mulder actor’s thoughts on acting alongside Hutchison’s naked form. About “Tooms,” he revealed that “the thing that I felt worst about was that David Duchovny was gonna actually have to get into this elevator shaft with this naked, greasy, grimy, sweaty man and to have to…pretend to be afraid of him, which was probably the easy part.”
While Carter initially felt bad about putting his star through this ordeal, he ultimately decided that it was all for the best. The showrunner thought the “little bit of discomfort…added to the scene” in part because Duchovny really “was very nervous about being in a little tiny confined space with a naked man.” However, “it made the scare, the creep, all that more real,” meaning that Duchovny’s fear was shared by just about everyone watching “Tooms” and seeing his (ahem) naked fear.
But while the X-Files showrunner concluded that the nudity was a great idea, the man who originally proposed the idea ended up regretting it. Eugene Tooms actor Doug Hutchison got his wish to perform the scene naked, but he also got something else: the cold. In his words, “I was sick as a dog and naked as a jaybird and had this icy cold slime all over me.”
Continuing, the actor described his discomfort in excruciatingly visceral detail: “I was literally sticking all over everything and everything was sticking to me,” he said. “I had lint in the most preposterous places on my body,” he said before concluding that the entire experience of shooting this scene “was really kind of gross.” While the guest star paints an extremely vivid picture here, much of this isn’t exactly surprising…after all, anyone who had seen the Tooms character naked and covered in goo can easily imagine how much the actor would be sticking to pretty much every surface around him.
This entire tale is very illuminating because it shows how many different creative factors go into making a great X-Files episode. The Tooms character wouldn’t have been naked if the actor hadn’t insisted on it and Chris Carter hadn’t signed off on it; meanwhile, the climactic scene wouldn’t have been effective if Duchovny didn’t get rightly freaked out at his proximity to a naked, slime-covered guy playing a functionally immortal cannibal. It all came together and elevated the episode…but really, what else were you expecting from an episode that turned an escalator into a lethal weapon?
