David Duchovny Reveals How Scientology Tried To Recruit Him, And It ‘Didn’t Go Well’ (For Scientology)

David Duchovny’s lengthy TV stretches include a bifurcated role on FOX’s The X-Files as the alien-believing Fox Mulder. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s all up in the alien business, in real life, to the degree that he’d believe everything that, say, L. Ron Hubbard wrote. The sci-fi author notoriously (thanks to the Internet) penned the “scripture” upon which the Scientology religion (and many call it a “cult”) is based. There’s a particular passage of the organization’s lore, known as the “Xenu” story, that one only is supposed to hear once achieving a status called Operating Thetan Level III. That’s the same creation myth that South Park once skewered because it involves a blown-up volcano and disembodied alien souls possessing humans and all that jazz.

Well, Duchovny did not sign on to pay far too many thousands of dollars to read that story. He did, however, answer a question from The Daily Beast about how Scientology tried to recruit him. He’s careful to say how his good friend, ex-Scientologist Jason Beghe, “never tried to recruit me,” but someone tried to lure him in (during Beghe’s wedding reception), and then this happened:

I did go to [Jason’s] wedding at the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, and they made a play for me. I did squeeze the cans and I did a session on the E-meter, and I realized immediately, because they’re asking very personal questions, that they were gathering information that I didn’t want to give out to a stranger. So, the session didn’t go well. I didn’t play by the rule, and I never went back. And Jason, to his credit, never tried to recruit me. He only “recruited” me in the sense of saying, “This is great, and I think you should try it,” not anything harder than that.

Duchovny added that he and Jason “drifted apart” during his years in Scientology, which is how they do things because they consider those who aren’t in the organization to be “suppressive persons.” The Californication star also noted that Jason’s “vocabulary was different” and his views “had changed completely” during those years. However, it’s worth noting that Beghe left Scientology in 2007 and did a video interview in the aftermath. Within that deep dive, he revealed how he and David reunited to hang out, and David asked him what Scientology was really all about. Jason tried to explain the Xenu stuff, and then they both completely lost it, dissolving into laughter and rolling around on the floor with tears streaming down their faces. Good times.