David Duchovny's Vancouver

His character may have pursued the paranormal throughout the five seasons David Duchovny spent filming The X-Files in Vancouver, but he was anything but spooked by the Canadian seaport. Here are Duchovny's favorite Vancouver haunts.

Dear Vancouver, David Duchovny got a bum rap. When he joked on a talk show about the city’s incessant rain, the comment wasn’t a complaint.

“Those things get away from you in the press, and all of a sudden, the rain became the reason I wanted to move The X-Files to L.A., when, in fact, I wanted to move it so that I could live with my wife,” he remembers. “I became the guy who hated the rain when, in fact, I love the rain.” This X-Files-worthy imbroglio still weighs upon Duchovny, who spent five years living in Vancouver while playing FBI agent Fox Mulder. This month, Duchovny displays a capacity for comedy in Evolution, about a meteor that hits Earth, bringing with it alien life-forms.

Born in Manhattan, Duchovny won a scholarship to the prestigious Collegiate School, where his classmates included John F. Kennedy Jr. He graduated from Princeton and received a master’s in English literature from Yale, but just before completing his PhD, he left academia for acting. After some low-budget fare, he landed movie and television parts (including that of a cross-dressing DEA agent in Twin Peaks and a recurring role in Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries) before hitting sex-symbol status in The X-Files, starring in both the long-running hit TV series and the 1998 feature film.

While he now lives in L.A. with his wife, actress Téa Leoni, and their 2-year-old daughter, Madelaine West, Duchovny misses the city that gave birth to his stardom. Here’s a weekend with David Duchovny in Vancouver, where, honestly, he loves everything - especially the rain.

FRIDAY: First Impression “I remember the first time I flew into Vancouver to start work on The X-Files pilot. It was evening and it was raining. I always loved the rain in the city because it kind of mutes everything. It makes everything quieter and slower and makes people more pensive, which I like. I’m less a fan of constant sunshine. I like moody environments, and Vancouver is definitely moody.”

LODGING: "The Sutton Place Hotel is where I stayed when I first came to Vancouver. I have a sentimental attachment to it because that’s where we started X-Files and went through all our growing pains when I lived there. I didn’t get an apartment until maybe five months into the first year, so I stayed there a good, long while. It’s right downtown. We were working real hard, and the hotel has nice massage people downstairs. You could get a massage in your room or down at the spa. That was always very relaxing.”

DINNER: "If I could eat only one thing in Vancouver, I would go with Tojo’s tuna sashimi. The chef there is named Tojo Hidekazu, and his tuna sashimi is outrageous. You could eat that raw fish all night long. It’s a pretty basic Japanese restaurant. You really can’t go wrong with Japanese food in Vancouver because the fish is so good and so clean. We used to go to Il Giardino di Umberto, which is authentically Italian. I used to go there when I was first dating my wife, so I have fond memories of it. It’s small and kind of famous, with a couple of floors and a little bar off to the side where you can wait until your table is ready.”

NIGHTLIFE: The Sutton Place is known for its bar, the Gerard Lounge. It’s known locally because a lot of actors stay at The Sutton Place and kick back in the Gerard Lounge. It’s a celebrity-watching watering hole, though I didn’t actually do that. It’s very small, and we had a great bartender who took care of us. We would just go there and relax every night after work. It’s not too big and not too loud. It’s also very dark, and I like a dark bar.”

SATURDAY

HOW TO LOOK LIKE A LOCAL: “Don’t carry an umbrella. Umbrellas are for foreigners. Not carrying one says that you can take it. The rain doesn’t get you down. I’m sure plenty of [locals] have umbrellas, but they just kind of ignore it. The rain in Vancouver is kind of misty. There’s rarely a deluge like the biblical rain you get in California. It rarely rains really hard, but it often rains just constantly. As for what to wear, it’s a West Coast city. It gets chilly because it’s damp, but I could get away with a leather jacket and a sweater and a scarf and a hat. I carried an umbrella, though.”

BREAKFAST: “There is a funny breakfast place called the Elbow Room Cafe, which is very small and crowded. It’s mostly known because the waiters are abusive to the customers in a kind of funny way. People go there to be abused by the waiters. We actually filmed a couple of shows there. The food is good, but the abuse is better, as I recall. I became addicted to coffee in Vancouver. Starbucks started in Seattle, but I think Vancouver was like the second city it went to. That’s where the virus started spreading. On Robson, there are two Starbucks right across from each other. They keep two coffee shops busy. That’s how much coffee people drink in Vancouver. The two Starbucks are slightly different. One is more of a sit-down and the other is more of a run-through. The former is a great place to sit and watch the window-shopping traffic walk by. I would just sit there and slowly addict myself to the substance.”

SIGHTS: “On Saturdays, we would go to Stanley Park, a huge park on the other side of the water there. It has this sea wall that runs all along the park, where people rollerblade and stroll and jog. My numbers may be wrong, but I think it was 10 kilometers if you wanted to jog all around the sea wall. Sometimes, we would do what we called our ‘Vancouver triathlon,’ which was to swim the Kitsilano Pool, then run the sea wall, and, for the third event, go and play with the dogs.”

SWIM: “If I could do only one thing in Vancouver, I would swim in the Kitsilano Pool. I enjoyed that so. When it was nice, I would go every day. I believe it’s one of the largest outdoor swimming pools in North America. I like to swim to keep in shape, and I think this pool is like 11 laps for a mile. It’s just enormous. It’s outdoors and right on the ocean, so you actually feel like you are swimming in the ocean. If you get good weather in the spring and summer, it’s just the most beautiful place to swim in the world because you can see the harbor and the ships, the tankers out in the bay, and the mountains beyond. You’re swimming in this pool that’s so long, it feels like you’re never going to hit the other side.”

SCENERY: We were there for five years, so there’s really no place in Vancouver where we didn’t shoot. We did a lot of filming in Stanley Park because it’s so big. Aside from the kind of paved places, there are a lot of woody areas where we would shoot. We also did a lot in what’s called the LSCR, the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve. We were there almost every week. If you go up to the LSCR, you could run across a bear. I drove past a couple. The LSCR is an amazing natural wonder. There’s nothing like being in the forest in the rain and walking my dog. It’s great to be with dogs in the rain because they don’t complain at all about it, and they never ask for an umbrella.”

SHOPPING: “Robson Street downtown was always a good window-shopping street for me when I wanted to kill some time and just kind of stroll around. There’s the Vancouver Flea Market, which is open every weekend. You can get just about everything there. Duthie Books is a nice bookstore. On Sundays, I would grab a Times there and sit outside and read. They have a good selection of everything. They have these free Canadian newspapers, which were always interesting. They were radical Canadian papers that you could occasionally peruse and get some ideas from.”

LUNCH: “For health food, I would go to a place called Capers, which has really good produce and organic stuff. That’s a good place for lunch. You can get egg dishes and things like that, but it’s pretty much healthy fare. We usually try to eat pretty simply and healthfully, and there’s a famous neo-hippie place in Kitsilano called The Naam. Kitsilano is a place where a lot of Americans came to live during the Vietnam War when they came up to Canada. The Naam still has a ’60s kind of flavor to it. It’s open 24 hours a day and there’s no meat, no alcohol, no nothing. We would eat there all the time. It’s a college, barefoot, tie-dye crowd. I would always get something called the Buddha’s Feast, a vegetable stir-fry on rice. For dessert, they have this thing called Noh Pie, which is kind of a custardy pie. I never knew why it was called Noh Pie. It was very tasty and we never figured out what was actually in it. You should ask them, if they ever answer their phone.”

ISLAND HOPPING: “If you have the time and the inclination, it’s great to go island hopping. There are many of them off the coast of Vancouver, and they’re all beautiful and remote. All of the islands are different, some bigger than others. The people who live there want a simpler life. I went out to Galiano Island on a little boat, although you could do it on a seaplane. All of the islands are fairly close to one another so if you have a little motorboat, you can make it. There’s also the ferry out to Vancouver Island. So you can take the plane or boat or drive the islands with your car on the ferry.”

DINNER: “We really liked the Blue Water Cafe. It’s big and kind of loud and has a big bar to one side, not too fancy. It’s a place to go to have a good time. They have a great oyster bar. Of course, with Vancouver being in the Pacific Northwest, the seafood is great everywhere. You can’t go wrong. You have salmon out your ears in Vancouver. You can’t put your foot down on the street without stepping on salmon. They have so many different kinds of oysters that I can’t remember them all. Some places have those oyster-shooter-type things where they mix them with alcohol and you just slug the whole thing down and the next thing you know, it’s Sunday morning.”

NIGHTLIFE: “Delilah’s for a drink. They are famous for their martinis. They’ve got two pages of martinis. It’s a dark bar in one of Vancouver’s best restaurants. They have something called the Delilah martini. I always got that, although I can’t remember what’s in it.”

SUNDAY

EXCURSION: “When I first started dating my wife, we took a seaplane over to Vancouver Island and we stayed at the Sooke Harbour House. It’s still one of the best weekends I’ve ever spent in my life. When we got there, we immediately had dinner, which was one of the best dinners we had ever had because the place has its own herb garden. Everything is grown locally or actually grown there. The hotel is very quaint. It opens onto the harbor. We stayed in kind of a cottage-style room. All the rooms have a fireplace and some of the views open onto the lake. We woke up and just kind of hiked around. It’s a beautiful island, nothing too regimented, just a lot of hiking and eating. It’s just that beautiful Northwestern weather up there.”

FIREWORKS: “For four days at the end of July and the first week of August, they have the Symphony of Fire. It’s a fireworks competition set to music on the bay. Different countries compete against one another, Canada always being one of those countries. (Webmistress note: Just so you know, this isn't entirely true. I've never seen a Symphony of Fire in which Canada competed. Last year South Africa, China, and Spain competed. And it was excellent!) Each country choreographs a fireworks display to music that’s broadcast by huge speakers all up and down the beach. I was lucky enough that my house was right on the water so I could watch it from my deck. You could tune in to a certain radio station so you could play the music in your own home and watch the fireworks. Or you could rent a boat and watch from the middle of the water, which is what a lot of people do.”

ONE SPECIAL DAY: “We used to always brag that my dog, Blue, had never, ever gotten so tired that she couldn’t go on. I always said, ‘There’s no way I could ever tire Blue out.’ I had never done it in my life. But one weekend, my wife and I got on our bikes and went out to Pacific Spirit Regional Park, where the University of British Columbia has some forest lands, and Blue ran alongside us for like three or four miles. Then we went out to Jericho Beach. We played that smash ball game where you’re just hitting the ball back and forth, and Blue was playing Monkey in the Middle, going back and forth, for about half an hour. Then, I hit balls into the ocean for her for about half an hour. It was one of those low-tide days where she could run a quarter of a mile out and not get wet past her neck. Finally, Blue ran back home with us in the afternoon. When we got home, Blue actually collapsed and went to sleep and couldn’t go any farther. That story sticks in my mind when I think about Vancouver as a great outdoor city. There’s so much to do outside that you can actually tire out a tireless dog.”

David Duchovny's Vancouver Essentials

LODGING

Sooke Harbour House
$125-$365
(250) 642-3421

The Sutton Place Hotel
$155-$292
(604) 682-5511

DINING

Blue Water Cafe & Raw Bar
seafood
$12-$20
(604) 688-8078

Capers Cafe
health food
$6.50-$8
(604) 925-3374

Elbow Room Cafe
diner
$2-$6.50
(604) 685-3628

Il Giardino di Umberto
northern Italian
$10-$22
(604) 669-2422

The Naam Restaurant
vegetarian
$3.50-$6
(604) 738-7151

Tojo's
Japanese
$32.50-$52
(604) 872-8050

NIGHTLIFE

Delilah's
cocktail lounge and restaurant
(604) 687-3424

Gerard Lounge
hotel bar
(604) 692-5511

SHOPPING

Duthie Books
bookstore
(604) 732-5344

Vancouver Flea Market
(604) 685-0666