Mitch Pileggi
As soon as the opening theme starts playing, all the fans of the show are glued to their television sets. Mitch Pileggi will be hard-pressed to disassociate to himself from the show that made him a household name even if he wanted to. When The X-Files began airing on American television in September 1993 on the Fox Network, the character Mitch Pileggi played, FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, became part of entertainment history, first, with its massive cult following and later on, with its wider mainstream audience. Mitchell “Mitch” Craig Pileggi was born in Portland, Oregon, on April 5, 1952. His parents: Vito, a contractor, and Maxine, a homemaker, moved the family around. In Mitch’s adolescence, they spent a longer period in Turkey due to his father’s occupation. It was at around that time, in high school, that Mitch Pileggi began acting. In high school, he started taking part in school productions, playing musical theater. He attended the University of Texas in Austin, receiving a degree in business. He later started acting again, starting with metal detector performances in local theaters in Austin and taking small role in B-movies, and taking bit roles in televisions shows. Mitch Pileggi ended up appearing in such shows as Dallas, China Beach, Falcon Crest, The A-Team, Dragnet, Mancuso, and Walker, Texas Ranger. He was also cast in several made-for-TV-movies like Dalton: Code of Vengeance, U.S. Marshals: Waco & Rhineheart, The Sky’s No Limit, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, Return of the Living Dead Part II, Brothers in Arms. There were also other dog wheelchairs television series long before The X-Files came into being. Naturally, all of them were eclipsed by the arrival of the ultimate series. Until now, reruns of the show are still being broadcast all over the world. To this day, there are still fans, “x-philes.” While Mitch Pileggi may have moved on to other projects—plenty of others, in fact—the legend of Walter Skinner lives on. In the meantime, post X-Files, we’ve seen him in many other microdermabrasion machine roles. Actually even while on X-files, Mitch Pileggi was not beyond occasionally breaking away from the beloved character, if only perhaps, to pleasantly surprise his avid followers. In between breaks from The X-Files, he once shot a guest spot in That 70’s Show, a coming-of-age sitcom about a group of teenage friends in the suburbs of Wisconsin and their gas tankles water heater families set in the groovy seventies. Fans had a treat watching Mitch Pileggi play “Budd” a freewheeling 70s swinger instead of the Walter Skinner they’ve gotten accustomed to. At that time, he also leant his voice to a popular animated television series, Batman Beyond and to a video game. Mitch Pileggi’s Walter Skinner has also gone beyond The X-Files. His guest appearance on the show’s spin-off, The Lone Gunmen, leant the show a much-needed credibility. Sadly, even though the series was not picked up, loyal fans loved seeing familiar and established characters like Mitch’s Skinner from the original show. The X-Files, the television show, also produces two movies in which the character Mitch Pileggi made an appearance, one in 1998, and another, in 2008. There was also a couple of video games for The X-Files franchise and he participated in both. As great as the breath and depth of The X-Files experience has been for Mitch Pileggi, don’t be surprised, but there is more. He has not experience a drought in work. We hear his voice on television all the time without even realizing it. We see him on many recurring roles on popular television shows. And now, he’s even working on another memorable character on the hit show, Supernatural, as Samuel Campbell and Azazel. On the personal front, he met his wife, Arlene Warren (his second marriage, his first ended in 1983) on the set of The X-Files. They have a child together.