From his mother, a teacher from Scotland, David Duchovny grew up valuing education. But in the park with his father, a New York Jew from a dynasty of Polish-Ukrainian writers, he cultivated his love of sport. So when writing and directing his debut solo script, a 1999 episode of The X-Files, he crafted a satirical story about an alien who loves baseball and hides himself by playing in the old pre-integration leagues.

An English graduate from Yale and Princeton, and respected five-time novelist, the man who first made his name as supernaturalist FBI spook Fox Mulder is acutely aware of baseball’s place in the canon of American literature, as memorialised by the likes of Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, WP Kinsella, and his own hero Philip Roth. And in the shadow cast by The Natural, Field Of Dreams and A League Of Their Own, the 63-year-old has fought shy of describing his second feature, Bucky F*cking Dent, as a baseball movie. ‘I get my guard up,’ he admits in his measured drawl about the film based on his own 2016 novel. ‘There’s been a lot of interesting writing about baseball and America. But it’s just something I played as a kid. It reeks of childhood dreams, of hero worship, of heartbreak or exultation. Also, it’s slow. It’s not a modern game.’

The film is a backhanded tribute to Bucky Dent, an unheralded New York Yankees shortstop who broke Boston Red Sox hearts in 1978 with an unexpected home run, denying them a World Series final spot and a shot at their first title in 60 years. But it’s really about Yankees-stadium peanut vendor and struggling novelist Ted (Logan Marshall-Green) and his terminally ill father Marty (Duchovny), whose health fluctuates with his beloved Red Sox’s form. 

In the 15 years it took Duchovny to bring Bucky to cinemas, from screenplay to novel then back into screenplay, he had aged out of playing the hippyish but simmering Ted and into cranky but dryly funny Marty. Meanwhile, Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz is Mariana, Marty’s ‘death specialist’ nurse whom Ted takes a shine to. Hesitant about gendering sport as an emotional proxy, the enabler that allows men to express their feelings, Duchovny ventures: ‘I don’t want to get attacked for this, I’m not saying women can’t enjoy sport. But it does channel a lot of masculine concerns. Being defeated makes men feel vulnerable. And they like being part of a team. You can share your love of a team with someone you have trouble talking to, like a parent. It can open up pathways that might otherwise not be open.’

Men also deflect with humour. The film balances heart-rending moments with broad comedy, including memorable scenes of Ted and Marty embracing naked, and incessantly breaking wind. ‘Did you know Tesla has an app that makes fart noises?’ Duchovny marvels. ‘We auditioned all these farts but ended up using this app from my car. I hope I don’t have to pay Elon Musk.’

He began writing novels in 2014, scaling back his acting. Having portrayed ‘David Duchovny’ on The Larry Sanders Show and drawn upon his publicly disclosed sex addiction for Californication, it’s tempting to read him into Ivy Leaguer-turned-wannabe author Ted or secret memoirist Marty. However, while also pursuing a parallel late career as a singer-songwriter, he maintains that he’s uninterested in autobiography. His lyrics tend to universality. And he chuckles as he stresses ‘there is art involved. There’s very little of my life in there. But as Neil Simon suggests, it’s all autobiography really, even the stuff we make up.’

He’s launching a podcast, Fail Better, echoing another of Bucky’s themes: that life belongs to the losers. Nodding to Samuel Beckett, Duchovny feels that ‘the richest, most humbling, most profound and human thing is failure. And resistance. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Returning to the UK shortly to shoot Malice, a psychological thriller from Rev’s James Wood in which he stars alongside Jack Whitehall, he’s also hoping to adapt his 2021 novel Truly Like Lightning for television.  

The X-Files creator Chris Carter remains a sounding board. Alongside giving him a chance to act with Billy Connolly (‘as funny and charming and smart as we all know; a talented, talented guy’), the hit sci-fi series educated him in filmmaking, through the ‘osmosis’ of working with ‘wonderful’ directors. ‘I was coming out of graduate school, not really knowing anything,’ he recalls. ‘The X-Files taught me how to move a story forward; how to make a plot work over three acts.’

It also predicted conspiracy theories turning mainstream. And if the series were to be revived, as has been mooted, he’s open to Mulder returning. ‘Yeah, I’m proud of it,’ he enthuses. ‘I love the people associated with it and I feel it’s an evergreen show. The world has changed since then though, so how would the show change? It’s an interesting question and one that would have to be answered.’
Bucky F*cking Dent, Cineworld, Glasgow, Wednesday 6 & Thursday 7 March, as part of Glasgow Film Festival.