Film has never been easy. The Academy is very good in terms of finding people who work in the industry, and people who have the right qualifications. You can get into the Academy by doing a test, or by having an excellent GPA. But there’s nothing magical about it: I just work very hard and I make the most of those opportunities.
Have you ever worked in television? When did you first begin looking around for work?
I started watching TV in my second year of university. I really loved it, and I started following the shows on the news during the day. I’m not really proud of that because I know I did the best I could to pass, but that’s as close to journalism as I can get.
Have you ever been interviewed and not been very well received?
I think that’s a good question. At first, when television came to be in the UK in the 60s, there was always a lot of resistance to it. I’m not saying everyone was scared of it, but there were definitely some people who believed they wouldn’t make it and that there’d be a competition for all of us in the end. I think some people actually said as much.
I know you’re working with the BBC: can you talk a little more about what they did to make you part of the programme?
The BBC put me on for a series of eight episodes which took six different formats from the US to film what would actually become the British version of The X-Files. That was the BBC’s contribution to the US version, though there were a number of other countries who made contributions.
They made the show a little tighter, as everyone knows: a lot more emphasis is put on the science and research aspect, and they actually showed people the actual X-Files special and not that we’d had a chance to see that before. And they showed people what they wanted the show to be by changing what had previously been in [the show].
Did you feel like you’d been treated fairly, or that you’d been forced to play to the British audience?
In many ways, yes. It really showed you the difference between the US version versus the UK version where it was just a different character, and in the US, the special was on Monday nights so it was a very popular show in the States, and there would be two weeks of the US version at the beginning of the week. So, there was something of a
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