David Duchovny found fame with the TV series The X Files, which has now been made into a second film. He was born in New York and attended Yale and Princeton universities. He is married to Téa Leoni and they have two children, Madelaine, 9, and Kyd, 6

David Duchovny is not the only Hollywood star to drive an electric vehicle - in these eco-friendly days Los Angeles is clogged with Toyota Priuses - but he is one of the few to talk openly about their weaknesses.

“I’ve had my RAV4 EV [Toyota’s all electric 4x4] for the last four years,” Duchovny says. “It was supposed to be a prototype for the next generation of cars. But the problem is that the car needs charging every night and the most you can do in a day is 80 miles. It is like being tethered.”

He has become so fed up with it that since moving back to New York from Los Angeles he has bought a Vespa scooter.

Duchovny, who has returned to the big screen in a second film version of The X Files, the 1990s TV show that made him a household name as the brooding Agent Fox Mulder, will be the first to admit that cars are a form of transport, rather than objects of desire.

As a struggling actor in 1980s New York he used buses and the subway and it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles that he had to buy a car. “I never needed a car,” he says. “I could always get public transport. But there’s no public transport to speak of in Los Angeles and I needed to get myself around.”

After passing his driving test at t h e s e c o n d attempt, aged 27, he bought a s e c o n d - h a n d D o d g e D a r t . “ I could finally get to meetings and auditions for TV roles,” he says. “In New York, there was only one show being made, called The Equalizer. I must have auditioned 10 times for roles in that and didn’t get any of them.”

His first few years in Hollywood were hard work, and resulted in a couple of bit parts in TV series such as Twin Peaks and a beer advert. “I was broke, living in a rent-controlled apartment and looking for work,” he remembers. “It is a typical Hollywood story for any actor. It is best not to know too much about how Hollywood works, otherwise you might never try it in the first place.”

His big break came in 1993 when he was cast as Mulder alongs i d e G i l l i a n A n d e r s o n ’ s Agent Scully, charged with investigating para-normal activity. The show was a huge, unexpected hit and propelled Duchovny to stardom - something he wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

I recall meeting him in 1992, when he had a small role in Richard Attenborough’s biopic of Charlie Chap-lin. He was quiet, almost embarrassed - as if his education at Princeton University and Yale, where he gained a master’s degree in English, had got in the way of being an actor.

“I was an introvert,” he admits. “I was more solitary then than I am now, because I have a family. But I was not unusual among actors. Away from all this” - he gestures at the suite in the Dorchester, London, where we meet - “we are probably more quiet and sensitive than people realise.”

Duchovny says marriage helped him come to terms with fame: he wed Téa Leoni, an actress, in 1997 and they have two children.

Even so, he displays a striking similarity to his other on-screen character when he talks about the problems of fidelity and marriage. In Californication he plays Hank Moody, a man who cannot keep his hands or his mind off girls. His ex-wife Karen (played by Natascha McElhone), to whom he still professes love, is resigned to the weakness of his flesh. “I think every man feels that, don’t they?” he asks. “But dare he admit it? This is no shock for Téa. She knows my thoughts. She’s probably thought the same thing.”

And to us blokes who may have silently wondered but never expressed such questions, Duchovny offers the consolation that they are far from alone. “Is there a single married man who has not had second thoughts, at some point, thinking: ‘What if . . ?’ You would be asleep not to wonder.

“For me, getting married was saying, ‘I think this has a shot’,” he says. “This was the person I wanted to be with for a long, long time. I don’t think that any man or woman can plan every eventuality. You certainly know if you are profoundly interested in somebody else. It is what you do about it that matters.”

One advantage of a long-term relationship, he admits, is that it increases the size of the car pool. As well as owning a classic Mercedes, Téa also has a BMW that they use for those journeys his electric RAV can’t handle. “It’s an old BMW 540, which Téa bought just before our wedding,” he says. “We joke about it, because every time I get in there are various warning bells going off: check brake lights, check fluid, check oil. But it’s a great car.”

MY STUFF...

ON MY CD CHANGER British invasion bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and 1970s punk bands such as the Clash
ON MY DVD PLAYER Classy films such as Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of Woody Allen’s best, and Jaws
IN MY GARAGE A 2004 RAV4 electric car
I WOULD NEVER THROW AWAY My travel alarm clocks, which are my only fetish. A Swiss Army one sits by my bed at the moment

DAVID DUCHOVNY: MY LIFE IN CARS

PUBLIC TRANSPORT In New York as a struggling actor he couldn’t afford a car
1972 DODGE DART In 1987 he bought his first car after passing his driving test at the second attempt
BMW 540 The car his wife Téa bought just before their wedding in 1997
TOYOTA RAV4 EV His all-electric 4x4 is green but impractical
VESPA He has bought a scooter to cope with the congestion in New York