As Tooms, Doug Hutchison portrayed him as a quiet, lowkey individual...until he attacked. It was the actor's incredibly unnerving performance that made those shows as successful as they were. 'Squeeze' was directed by Harry Longstreet, while David Nutter (who gave us some of the finest episodes of the early seasons) took the helm of 'Tooms'. Both shows were scripted by the team of Glen Morgan and James Wong, who have gone on to success on both the big and small screen.

'Squeeze' was Glen Morgan and James Wong's first filmed script for the fledging series. Yet the episode was not what the duo had in mind, and they blame Longstreet. "I felt the director had no respect for us or our ideas," said Wong. "In fact, he had no respect for the script. He didn't shoot coverage and we didn't like the dailies that were coming back. Ultimately, we had to go back up and reshoot the coverage, shoot a scene he didn't shoot, and add a lot of inserts to make it work. I'll always be disappointed because of what it could have been, but I think it turned out OK."

The character itself was a great success with audiences and critics alike, and the writers realized there was more that could be done with Tooms. " We liked him a lot,", Wong said of the formation of 'Tooms'. "The fans liked him and he was scary and we decided to finish him off. That was the show that David Nutter directed. We thought 'What a perfect combination.' We get Tooms -- we like the character and the actor -- and we had a great experience with David."

Prior to his show airing, Nutter described Tooms as "one of the show's most memorable characters. It should be very, very good. He's one of the scariest guys I've seen in a long time. He's every bit as scary as Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs."

Hutchison also brings up the character of Lecter when summing up how played Tooms in 'Squeeze'. "My monosyllabic 'Yes. Yes. No. Yes. No.' scene. I was able to create a character without speech. With Tooms, I tended to flirt with underplaying. I was really inspired by Anthony Hopkins' performance in Silence Of The Lambs, because I thought he had a grasp on stillness in that film which was incredibly powerful, because he had an inner life going on inside. I had a blast with that because there was so much room to explore stillness with that character. I would say the character was fairly fleshed out...so to speak."

"With the 'Squeeze' episode, one of the things it said was that Tooms' eyes glowed an ominious yellow when he spots his victims. I was so into that. I felt like, 'Yes. That's so important and compelling.' And I just envisioned it being this eeries thing, kind of animalistic. So, I was looking forward to the contacts and using that as part of my character. Well, they fit me for the contacts down here in Hollywood. When I got up to Vancouver, they had a meeting with me -- Chris Carter and James Wong and Glen Morgan -- and said that they decided to ax the yellow eyes. They thought it would be more chilling if I was just a normal person throughout. I put my case on the table and I was fighting for it like a cat. They wouldn't budge. What could I do? So, we ended up shooting a day-and-a-half's worth of scenes."

The situation changed the very next day for Hutchison. "I suddenly had my contacts back. Now, I don't know if I had anything to do with that. I doubt it. They must have looked at the rushes and it didn't look right. So, they ended up giving me my contacts. I was thrilled."

For the climax of 'Tooms', in which Mulder and Scully invade the villain's lair, the actor fought to perform the scene nude. Originally, the character was supposed to be wearing his dog catcher uniform. "I wanted to be slimed, you know, from head to toe. I had pictured myself nude, like a caterpillar in a cocoon. So I fought for it and they finally relented. They gave me a dance belt. I said, 'No, I don't want the dance belt. I want it to be pure nude. Tooms in the buff.' And finally they said, 'All right. If you're sure.' So we shot it in the nude."

Hutchison, who went on to appear in such major movies as Batman & Robin, A Time To Kill and ConAir, had expressed interest in returning to the role for a third time. However, by the end of 'Tooms', the character is apparently deceased. Nevertheless, Hutchison wasn't forgotten by those who made The X-Files; he played a recurring role on Wong and Morgan's shortlived Space: Above And Beyond, and Chris Carter gave him the part of the mysterious Polaroid Man on several episodes of his downbeat series Millennium.