Al Weisel
Mitch Pileggi
By Al Weisel
US Magazine, July 1998, pp. 90-91
Mitch Pileggi is incognito. It's hard to believe it's him when he first slips into Encounter, a flying-saucer-shaped restaurant whose plastic purple-and-lime-green interior is straight from the planet Kitsch. Instead of wearing the dark, strait-laced G-man suit of Assistant Director Walter Skinner on The X-Files, Pileggi is dressed in an X-Files Expo parka, a baseball cap pulled down over his trademark bald pate and a tight muscle T-shirt that shows off his body. But most surprising of all, the 46-year-old actor, who never cracks a smile on TV, is wearing a big grin on his face. The reason for this blessed-out state can be summed up in one word: Arlene. Every time he mentions his wife's name (and he mentions her almost every chance he gets), he lights up like a neon sign: Luckily, Pileggi doesn't have to spend too much time away from the love of his life. She works on the show, too, as Gillian Anderson's stand-in. "If it's a long shot of a redhead driving," he says, "it's Arlene: If a hand pulls out a plug or picks up a phone, it's her hand." Recently she got her first speaking role, playing Skinner's secretary, and just talking about it makes Pileggi beam like a stage parent. "I was very nervous," he says. "Between each take I was running over, going, 'OK, honey. Do it like this.' Finally, she went, 'I've got 10 words to say. Just leave me alone.' And she did great!" In May, Pileggi was due to become a proud, real-life parent.
Pileggi and his wife were introduced on the X -Files set by David Duchovny, who was the best man at their wedding. The nuptials, administered on a Hawaiian beach, were not what you'd call stuffy. "Right after the wedding, David said, 'Is it OK if I jump in the water?"' Pileggi says: "And I said, 'Yeah, man.' So he bodysurfed, came out, got dry, and then we went to dinner." Details about the rest of the evening are somewhat sketchy, however. "I was pretty hammered," the groom confesses.
Pileggi is the first to admit that life is sweet these days. For years he played nothing but heavies and bit parts, in movies like Shocker and Basic Instinct. Now he gets to deny any and all details about the top-secret plot of this month's X-Files movie. To get the role of Skinner, he had to audition three times. "I thought, this guy {X-Files creator Chris Carter} either hates me or I must be a totally bad actor," says Pileggi. "But he told me later it was because my shaved head was too extreme for an FBI agent." The role was originally intended to be a minor one, but it fit Pileggi so well that he was soon getting more and more lines. His big break came when he stripped down to his BVDs in one episode and revealed that under that serge-suited exterior was a hunky bureaucrat waiting to get out. He became so swamped with requests for hugs and kisses from smitten fans at X-Files conventions that orders came from on high putting the kibosh on such close encounters. "When we first started to do conventions, fans would always want to kiss the top of my head," he says: "But recently my wife handed down the. rules, and I appreciate her feeling that it's not appropriate anymore."
Now he has a cadre of cyberfans who refer to themselves as the Mitch Pileggi Estrogen Brigade. But his fans run the hormone gamut. "Just last week a guy came up and told me I was big in the gay community," says Pileggi, who blushes when mentioning his testosterone brigade. 'A magazine was asking famous people who their favorite male stars were, and Scott Thompson, from Kids in the Hall, was like, 'Mitch Pileggi of The X-Files.' Then after that they wrote, 'Spank me, Daddy!' I thought that was hilarious."
"When I was younger, I was a small, skinny kid," says Pileggi, recalling a time before his sex symbol status. "It was a struggle at times. I had to take on some pretty tough kids: Then I started wrestling in high school, and playing football; and that changed my physical makeup." Pileggi's father, a defense contractor, moved Pileggi and his five brothers and sisters from place to place. After living in Oregon, California and Texas, Pileggi spent most of his teen-age years in Turkey. After college in Germany, he got a job working for a defense contractor in Iran, where he met his first wife. Then revolution broke out. "Basically, the reason we got married this is really romantic is because if I got killed, she'd be taken care of," he says, laughing morbidly. Pileggi's escape from Iran could be a movie of the week. "My brother commandeered this bus, and we were weaving in and out of streets," he recalls: "We got on the plane, took off, and another plane tried to take off, but they forced it down. We were supposed to refuel, but we couldn't get down because there was this really bad storm. The pilot came on and said, 'We weren't fully fueled when we took off. We're going to try to make it to Athens.'"
Of course, Pileggi did make it. And after wandering the world (and fleeing other occasional armed conflicts), he has, for the first time in his life, a permanent place to call home, a new house just outside L.A., to which he's rushing to perform a very down-to-earth task. The sprinklers in his yard need fixing.■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.