X-Files move an awful thing
By: Alex Strachan, Sun Television Critic

"TV's nastiest villain" is grinning like the Cheshire Cat. William B. Davis goes by many other names in his most famous role, but TV's nastiest villain, as he was dubbed in a recent U.S. TV Guide poll, is a sobriquet any self-respecting actor would, well, kill for.

His character in The X-Files is officially known as "Cigarette-Smoking Man." The show's writers, directors and producers prefer "CSM" in the shorthand of the set.

To The X-Files' legion of fans on the Internet he is "Cancer Man," a name first given him by his X-Files arch-nemesis, FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), who seems destined to always be one step behind Davis' character and his diabolical schemes.

Davis is looking fit and tanned on this late summer's day, sipping black coffee in a downtown Vancouver cafe. Unlike his nom de plume, he doesn't smoke. He kicked the habit years ago, smokes herbal cigarettes for his scenes, and stumps for the Canadian Cancer Society during his off-time.

A devoted outdoorsman and avid waterskier -- he is a three-time Canadian national champion in his age group -- he is the picture of health, the antithesis of the chain-smoking backroom broker he plays on TV.

He laughs easily, unlike his character, and is quick to spot the absurdity in a situation. Take The X-Files' move to Los Angeles, for instance.

When the series packed up and moved there from Vancouver earlier this summer, Davis, a longtime Vancouver resident, elected to stay home rather than make the move south. Here, he is close to his family, his friends and his acting school, the William Davis Centre for Actors' Study, which he founded in 1989 and where he still teaches the occasional class.

Ironically, having made the decision to stay in Vancouver, he hasn't had much opportunity to be home. He was the main attraction in the X-Files' travelling convention tour, which moved across the U.S. earlier in the summer. On the days he wasn't speaking to a rapt audience in packed auditoriums, he was plugging the X-Files feature film, Fight the Future (which so far has taken in $84 million US).

Lately, he has been flying between Vancouver and the X-Files' Los Angeles set so often, he's forgotten what the inside of his car looks like.

Following his character's prominent role in the X-Files feature film, he has been written into two of the new season's first three episodes (the new season debuts on Global and the Fox network on Nov. 8). He is in Los Angeles this weekend, going through the paces for a complicated episode involving Nazis, the Queen Mary and, oh, never mind.

Filming in Los Angeles has not been a day at the beach. "The heat! The heat!"

It's been hot in Vancouver as well, I remind him.

"No! No, no, no. Not like this. There was this power plant in Valencia, where we were shooting, where the temperature topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit. 120 degrees! Kim [Manners, a regular X-Files director] said it was the most miserable set he had ever had to work on. It was unbelievable. I think they would welcome standing in the rain about now."

Davis believed from the beginning that it was a mistake to move the show to Los Angeles. Now that the move has been made and he has had a chance to reflect, he feels it is time to go on the record.

"The move was an awful thing in so many ways," Davis says. "If the show had ended after five years, it would have been different. But the people behind the scenes had committed so much of their lives to the show, and it was sad the way it ended.

"What I've always felt about Vancouver crews is that, at every level, from Chris [Carter, The X-Files' creator and executive producer] on down, to the ocus puller and gaffer, they always wanted to do that little extra to make sure that what ended up on the screen was the best possible.

"Now we're trying to do the show with new people who don't know the show, who don't even know the name of my character. It's like starting a new series all over again.

"I know from having run theatre companies how long it takes to get the machine oiled. I just hope they're able to do it, that the series doesn't end prematurely because it's not really do-able there."

Davis planned to fly to Halifax this week for the national waterskiing championships, but a last-minute change in The X-Files' shooting schedule scotched his plans. No indeedy, work on The X-Files has not been going, well, swimmingly.

"An assistant doing my makeup said, 'So what is this with this 'Smoking Man?'" Davis says with a rueful laugh. "I just kind of stopped. I mean, there's a movie out, you know? Do your homework! And then the hair person did the same thing. Had never heard of my character.

"Don't get me wrong, they're a really good crew. They're really nice people. I think that they care a lot, and they're really glad to be working on the show.

"There's a lot of warmth and goodwill. But down there, you're giving up five years of people who knew how to do the show, who knew what to do without being told."

It is no secret that many in the X-Files' inner circle, including Carter, wanted the show to stay in Vancouver. It wasn't just a question of money -- although it's a safe bet that Twentieth Century Fox Television executives have been watching the tumbling Canadian dollar with bewilderment. The X-Files brain trust was also reluctant to move the show because of the Lower Mainland's varied locations.

Carter, who has a reputation as an uncompromising and demanding boss, had assembled a tight-knit, hard-working crew, no mean feat when more than 200 technicians and craftsmen are putting in 15- to 18-hour days.

Duchovny wanted to go home, however, and in the end he got his way.

The actor insisted he was promised from the beginning that the show would remain in Vancouver for no more than a year. Following his marriage last summer to Los Angeles actress Tea Leoni, he felt it was time to force the producers' hand.

(Duchovny's colleague, Gillian Anderson, also wanted to rejoin her family and friends in Los Angeles. In the end, though, she was torn by her ties to Vancouver, where she had formed several close friendships and given birth to her daughter, three-year-old Piper. Anderson has kept her house in West Vancouver and occasionally returns to the city for recreation.)

"I was hoping to hear that David was happy and singing and cheering everybody up, but to tell you the truth, I haven't even seen him," Davis says.

Abducted by aliens? "I'm not saying," he says, and laughs again.

"One thing about David is that I believe he would have been perfectly happy if they had said 'Yes, we really want to keep the show in Vancouver and we're sorry you don't want to keep working in Vancouver,' and just moved on from there."

Davis says that while he would have preferred to see the show stay, he can understand Duchovny's reticence. "It's true that a celebrity has an easier time there than here, and that was part of David's concern, as I understand it. I'm sure it's true of them because it's true of me. It's probably because, in Vancouver, we have fewer celebrities packed into a smaller space.

"People are generally nice. They mean well. They're not unkind at all. They just want to say hello. But not everybody is comfortable with that. I don't believe David ever was."

The greater distances between shooting locations in Los Angeles, Davis says, are playing a key role in how the show is being made.

"Everything's farther apart in Los Angeles, so everything takes longer to do. You have greater distances, a new crew, the same scripts, and less time. I don't know if Fox really realized what people up here were saying all along, which is that, with The X-Files, you're not just shooting a series, you're shooting a feature movie every eight days.

"It's not like Chicago Hope, where they have sets that can be used regularly, that are pre-lit. We're on new locations all the time. The X-Files is a much larger show to do, and they're discovering -- quickly -- how difficult it's going to be to do it there.

"I wish them well but, golly, I don't think they realized just what they were getting themselves into."

WILLIAM B. DAVIS:

Known for: Davis plays "Cigarette-Smoking Man," the central recurring villain in the TV series The X-Files.

Background: Davis, 60, was just 11 when his cousins recruited him for their summer-stock festival in the Forest Hill neighbourhood of Toronto, where he grew up. While still in his early teens, he joined the Association of Canadian Radio Artists, the forerunner of ACTRA, and performed as a child actor on a series of radio dramas.

After studying philosophy at the University of Toronto, he was admitted to Britain's prestigious Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He studied there for a year, and taught acting at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In 1966, he was appointed assistant director of the National Theatre School in Montreal. He helped found the Festival Lennoxville in Lennoxville, Que.

He accepted a position as director of Vancouver Playhouse's acting school in 1985, and taught there for several years before opening his own school, the William Davis Centre for Actors' Study, in 1989.

In 1993, he accepted a non-speaking bit part -- he was to smoke a cigarette and look menacing in the background of a meeting of FBI officials -- in a TV pilot for The X-Files. The image stuck, and the character was expanded in subsequent episodes.

On whether his X-Files character will ever be killed: "You can't kill the Devil."