The Cast of ‘The X-Files’ Will Reunite for a New Audibook
Here’s a little bit of free relationship advice for you: find someone who loves you like David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson love playing Mulder and Scully. It’s been more than two decades — two decades! — since both actors debuted their iconic characters on Fox’s The X-Files, and even after nine seasons, a movie, another movie, and a sorta-miniseries, neither one shows any signs of slowing down. In an era where audiences seem to demand that actors love their characters as much as we do, there’s something refreshing about two performers who come by such affection naturally. Anderson in particular is a powerhouse star of stage and screen, but get her talking about Dana Scully and she’s just as passionate as any of us.
So color me completely unsurprised to see both actors returning for The X-Files: Cold Cases, a new audiobook set to launch this July. While some might wonder if the cast of The X-Files are beating a dead horse here, I’m actually inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I can still remember my dog-eared — or whatever the audio equivalent of dog-eared is — collection of cassette tapes from the 1980s Star Wars radio drama, where stars like Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprised their roles for a special NPR miniseries that, in a lot of ways, played a bigger role in my fandom than the movies themselves. Radio dramas and audiobooks alike offer us the chance to hear our favorite characters while imagining the actors not as they are but as the way we remember them growing up. For my money, there’s no better blend of sequel and nostalgia.
As for the potential for more X-Files in the future? The last we heard, Fox still had plans for a longer season in 2018, with studio executives noting back in January that an announcement could come “shortly.” That last part might not have worked out quite the way they hoped, but whether The X-Files is set to return or will die a quiet death, we’ll still get one more auditory adventure from the FBI’s most beloved undesirables.