By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Part of what makes Fox Mulder such a large X files The character is that it is cool and collected; The kind of guy who can face extraterrestrials and sewer monsters and who still gets a few jokes before saving the day. Normally, David Duchovny is just as similar to a Zen as his character from Mulder, but he ended up being panicked by one of the biggest guest stars in the series. This star was Doug Hutchison (who played the wicked stretch Eugene Tooms), who insisted on playing his naked culminating scene, a decision that frightened Duchovny when he had to act alongside a man of monster covered with naked slime.
Toom, naked horror
In the highest point of the episode “Tooms”, Mulder discovers and confronts the bad holder, who is hidden, naked and covered with goo, under an escalator of the shopping center. It was not the idea of writers to make the bad naked, but Hutchison insisted to undress for the final scene because it made sense to its animal character. As the showrunner Chris Carter later pointed out, nudity made this scene much more frightening for Duchovny: in his words, “David was very nervous to be in a small space confined with a naked man.”
A large part of this information, including the souvenirs of Carter on Duchovny, comes from the special characteristics of the DVD of X-Files Season 1 set. There, the showrunner revealed more thoughts of the actor of Mulder on the action alongside the naked form of Hutchison. About the “Tooms”, he revealed that “the thing I felt worse, it was that David Duchovny was actually going to have to enter this elevator well with this naked, fatty, filthy and sweaty man and having to be afraid of being afraid of him, which was probably the easy part.”
While Carter initially felt bad to pass his star through this ordeal, he finally decided that everything was for the better. The showrunner thought that “little discomfort … added to the scene” in part because Duchovny “was very nervous at the idea of being in a small space confined to a naked man”. However, “it has been afraid, the flipper, quite more real”, which means that the fear of Duchovny was shared by almost everyone who looks at “Tooms” and seeing his naked fear (AHEM).
But while the X files Showrunner concluded that nudity was an excellent idea, the man who originally proposed the idea ended up regretting it. The actor of Eugene Tooms, Doug Hutchison, obtained his wish to perform the naked scene, but he also has something else: the cold. According to his words, “I was sick as a dog and naked as Jaybird and I had this frozen cold mud on me.”
Continuing, the actor described his discomfort in an excruciatingly visceral detail: “I literally stuck everywhere and everything stuck to me,” he said. “I had stuffed animals in the most absurd places of my body,” he said before concluding that all the experience of filming this scene “was really a kind of rude”. While the star guest painted an extremely lively image here, a large part of this is not exactly surprising … After all, whoever had seen the character toom naked and covered with goo can easily imagine how much the actor would stick to almost all the surfaces around him.
This whole tale is very enlightening because it shows how many different creative factors are going to make a large X files episode. The character of Tooms would not have been naked if the actor had not insisted and Chris Carter had not signed it; Meanwhile, the culminating scene would not have been effective if Duchovny was not rightly panicked upon its proximity to a naked guy and covered with mud playing a functionally immortal cannibal. Everything came together and raised the episode … But really, what did you expect from an episode that transformed an escalator into a deadly weapon?
