BOSTON (WHDH) - David Duchovny has a new movie with deep ties to the Boston Red Sox.
The star sat down with just one Boston station to talk about the film.
“Reverse the Curse”, now available on streaming services and on demand, tells the story of a son trying to keep his dying father alive by keeping his Red Sox pennant hopes alive.
In the movie, Duchovny’s most personal project yet, he plays an obsessed Red Sox fan named Marty dying of cancer in the summer of 1978, when his estranged son moves in to care for him.
After realizing Red Sox wins make his father stronger, the son gets a team of Marty’s friends to elaborately lie when the team loses.
The actor, known for “The X-Files” and “Californication”, directed and starred in the story he wrote in 2016. Duchovny said the flawed father/son dynamic was inspired in part by something that happened with his then-infant daughter.
“It mostly came from an experience I had when my daughter was nine months old and she got very ill and it seemed like it was touch and go for a while for a week or so,” the actor said. “She’s fine now, but I found afterwards I was so terrified of losing her that I found myself in kind of a numb space where I was afraid. I was still afraid of losing her, even though she was not going anywhere.”
By telling his story through the rise and fall of the ’78 Sox, Duchovny hopes to flip the script for losers everywhere.
“Instead of fearing loss and losing we should always know that all of us are going to experience those things and, therefore, life belongs to us — to those people, to the losers,” Duchovny said.
A lifetime New Yorker — and Yankees fan — Duchovny said he had to dig deep to play a Sox fan.
“Boston used to be such a great losing town,” he said. “Now they’re just as bad as New York – they win all the time.”
What is it that Duchovny think makes this movie a winner?
“I grew up wanting to go to the movies to have an experience, and if you can hit the comedic moments that come out of sadness, and hit the tragic moments, and kind of bounce back between the two, to me that’s the real rollercoaster of movies rather than necessarily special effects,” he said.
Duchovny said he got the idea to write about the ’78 Sox while vacationing on the Cape, where he says he heard someone complaining about Bucky Dent, the Yankees player who ended the Sox pennant hopes that year.
“Reverse the Curse” is now available on streaming services and on demand.
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