Tight- lipped
Cigarette Smoking Man survives, somehow, to join fresh characters on ‘ X- Files.’
“X- Files” motto “trust no one” seems to apply when trying to get Joel McHale and others to open up.
Two questions into the interview with “The X-Files’ ” mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man ( William B. Davis) and it’s apparent that Big Brother really is listening.
“How is your character even still alive?” I asked, a question any “X- Files” geek worth her “I want to believe” T- shirt would want to know, but Davis never had the chance to answer. He was interrupted by a Fox television publicist who was monitoring the telephone line: “We don’t want to say exactly,” she said conspiratorially.
The censored moment was a perfect in- road back into the paranoia- fueled series, which opened a back door into the ’ 90s World Wide Web by introducing audiences to government conspiracy theory message boards and “I-heard- it-from-a guy-who- heard- it-from- a guy” chat rooms.
And now that the series is back with six totally new episodes, any question that comes close to spoiler territory is immediately blacked out like a redacted government document.
But this is the way of Cig- arette Smoking Man, also known as Cancer Man, Smoking Man or for brevity’s sake CSM. He’s the face of the shadow organization ( the Syndicate) that special agents Fox Mulder ( David Duchovny) and Dana Scully ( Gillian Anderson) chased down over nine original seasons, often through dark hallways guided only by the foreboding beam of a f lashlight.
CSM is responsible for presidential assassinations, alien coverups and even rigging the Super Bowl against the Buffalo Bills. It was his always- apparent cigarette, resting just between his thumb and forefinger, that gave him one of the show’s most indelible monikers.
True fans have been left been wondering what became of CSM. Last we saw of him, he was blown to bits by a rocket in the “X- Files” finale, but evil never dies that easily.
Even now, however — years later — Davis denies the any of that even happened.
“Do we know that he’s alive?” Davis counters. “I can’t say very much. Maybe the character of Cigarette Smoking Man has a withering imagination and memory? However [ when] he appears, he’s dangerous. There’s no question he’s on the side against the angels. He’s on the side of some other power, some other concerns that are in opposition to Mulder and to Scully. He is the antagonist of the conspiracy in the mythology lines. So however he appears, he’s going to bring presence and a danger to everyone else.”
The mythology Davis eluded to refers to a larger plot line that ran through the whole series. Though the new miniseries has plenty of fresh fodder for nightmares, it will start and end with that same mythology.
Long- running questions pertaining to Mulder and Scully will be addressed as well, just not right now, during interviews with Davis or any of the other actors in the new series — including newcomer Joel McHale, who plays a right- wing conservative talking head.
Just the mention of the word “mythology” causes him to pause, then say, “I’m not going to tell you,” as if he were subscribing to the classic “X- Files” motto of “trust no one.”
His Glenn Beck- like character Tad O’Malley is entirely new, or at least that’s what they want us to think. “I read my scripts and the ideas in them and the way it f lushes out, I think is so original. It’s not like a greatest hits. You know when you go see U2 they have new songs. When you go see the Rolling Stones, it’s the same old songs. There’s no new songs. So [“X- Files” creator] Chris Carter is U2.”
McHale joins Kumail Nanjiani, Lauren Ambrose and Annet Mahendru as the new faces of the “X- Files,” but it was the classic characters like CSM and the return of Mulder and Scully wrangler Skinner ( Mitch Pileggi) that really got him going.
“What’s remarkable is how both of them still look tremendously good,” McHale said. “They’re both insanely attractive people, which makes me insanely jealous. Pileggi is in great shape, and he’s in his 60s. He looks exactly the same, he looks like he’s 35. I don’t know if there’s ever been a cast that got together, after this much time, and still looks as good as they do. It’s kind of remarkable.”
Even eerie, you might say.