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April 13, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:00:04
Edition 201 - *EXCLUSIVE* Dean Haglund

This time - with The X-Files reportedly soon to return - the man who plays computer geekLangly talks with The Unexplained...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, as I speak these words, springtime has arrived in London and they're talking about 24 degrees Celsius, 75 Fahrenheit this week.
And believe me, for this time of year in this country, that's damn good.
And you'll get no complaints from me.
No shout-outs on this edition.
We have something very special coming for you.
We'll tell you about it in a second.
Just to say thank you very much for all of your good feedback on my 200th edition.
201 I think you're going to find is a good show.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting the show out to you, for all of his hard work.
And if you want to make a donation to this show, your donation's absolutely vital to us.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv and follow the PayPal link for donations, or if you'd like to send me a message.
The special guest on this edition, and one of the reasons we won't be doing shout-outs on this show, is a man who's part of the X-Files.
His name is Dean Haglund, one of the lone gunmen.
If you're a fan of the series, you'll know exactly who I'm talking about.
He played Langley in the series, and the big talk both sides of the Atlantic is production on a new series of the X-Files is imminently about to begin.
The latest that we're hearing over here is that the last details of contracts and stuff are being tied down, and hopefully production will begin in the summer if everything works out.
So let's get to Hollywood, California, and talk.
Thanks to my good friend Roger Sanders for fixing this up.
To Dean Haglund, aka Langley from the X-Files.
Dean, a pleasure to speak with you.
Oh, it's my pleasure, Howard.
Thank you for having me.
Now, I know that you're a man who loves to travel, and I know that you're about to go to Australia, and I know you go to a lot of places around the world.
Whereabouts are you right now?
I'm confused.
Yeah, so am I, actually.
Looking out the window, I seem to be in Los Angeles, California, which I call home until 47 days from now, which I will be temporarily relocated down in Sydney, Australia.
Right.
And what's all that about?
It is my significant other is now promoted in her job.
So she is now head of Financial Planning and Operations Australia for a major manufacturing company.
Right.
Okay.
I thought you were going to say that she was involved in the movie industry because I once interviewed the head of Fox Studios down there.
And they have an amazing, as you will know, and you probably, you'll connect with these people while you're there, I would have thought, but they have an amazing movie trade there.
They do.
It's massive and kind of very close-knit, almost much more close-knit than here in Los Angeles.
And so when I was there just recently, I met with a significant amount of the people and we'll be working there a lot.
Well, I couldn't believe it.
I was doing a radio show for London out there.
And, you know, it was a big show in London, had a lot of listeners.
But usually when you just arrive at the gates of a place like that, they tend to be a little, we say here in London, a little standoffish for good reason.
You know, who is this guy?
Where's he come from?
And these people invited me in past the security.
And the next thing, there I was in the boss's office with a cup of nice Australian coffee in my hand.
I know.
Same thing happened to me.
I was having breakfast with a connection I knew.
And next thing, who joins us at the table at the head of drama development?
And we're all talking, you know, shows and pitches like within the first day of me setting foot on Australian soil.
I don't know about you.
I think that's the way to do things, isn't it?
It's better than being, you know, carried away with your own importance, I think is the way I want to put that.
Absolutely.
And they describe it as being more efficient.
Like they know the Los Angeles system of like, you know, talent has to fight their way through hitches and agents and all that sort of thing as a filtering process to find it.
But this way, you know, once they had, they can just sort of assess who's what and make those decisions much more quickly.
And so that's how they do it there.
They say it's efficient and I tend to agree.
I want to talk a lot about you, but a lot of people listening to this around the world, I have a lot of listeners in the US, a lot of listeners in the UK.
They will kill me if I don't ask you first to tell me what you know about the new series of the X-Files.
Wow.
Well, small question.
Yeah, exactly.
In keeping with the tradition of how the loan gunmen were notified when they were going to be on the X-Files originally, we were the last to know.
So we were just told a few days before, come to set and we'll give you a script.
So I imagine they're going to keep that tradition.
And so therefore, we haven't heard anything.
But that doesn't mean we're not in it.
It probably means they're just going to give us a call two days before they need us and rally us around.
Well, Dee, I cannot imagine the series without you, especially today, 22 years ago when that started, there were movies around like Twister and Contact, and they all had sort of computer geeks who knew stuff in them.
But it was all very new then.
Now, that role is absolutely pivotal.
Absolutely.
And think of how many shows, you know, CSI and CIS, all of them rely on some sort of nerdy computer person to solve everything.
Like it's necessary as opposed to then it was kind of a novelty.
I've got to ask you more about the new series.
I know that there's some stuff you probably can't say, but we're all intrigued by it over here because you know the series was a big hit on BBC2 television over here when it ran originally.
So we were all glued to it.
Massive series.
So everybody's been asking since this news broke, which I think was about a month or so ago over here, you know, what the specifics are.
Is David DuCovney going to be in it?
Is Jillian Anderson definitely going to be in it?
And we've been looking sort of for confirmation of all that stuff since then.
Right.
Well, believe it or not, my best news feed is William B. Davis, Cigarette Smoking Man.
His Twitter feed is giving up the details.
So what we know for sure is David's in it.
Jillian is in it.
Skinner, Mitch Peleggi is definitely contracted for six of them.
And there's only shooting six episodes.
And it's going to be shot back in Vancouver.
And William B. Davis Said he too has been asked to be in some of them, according to his Twitter.
Right.
So that's as far as you know.
That's as far as I know.
That's the information that could be made public, as far as I know.
Okay, well, I'm sure the truth really is out there.
We'll find out very soon.
But it must be a real, real excitement for you to think that this is all going to happen again.
It is kind of exciting.
You know, I also have talked with some of my other friends, you know, in the conspiracy world.
And they said, you know, when the show first was on, no one knew about UFOs or ghost hunting.
And now there's, you know, ancient aliens and there's every channel has a ghost hunter show.
So what new thing are they going to go after?
And so they're kind of excited about that.
And also, you know, television, X-Files kind of laid the groundwork for that story arc that continued over several episodes.
So they think now that that's entrenched in a lot of shows, that they're really going to take their time and use these six episodes to really close out the entire narrative arc, which everyone really wanted.
Yeah.
I think the one thing people cannot bear is there being unanswered questions.
You know, unfinished business in life is bad enough, but in a drama on TV, it's terrible.
Well, exactly.
And the other business side of this is that Netflix was ready to buy the entire series to show it as a binge-watching event.
But because there was no closure to it, they asked Fox if they could possibly add some extra episodes so that everybody who would watch it from beginning to end would have a fully unified, satisfied watching experience.
I mean, it's a big act to follow, isn't it?
It's 22 years since the first one appeared or was made and it ran for, what, nine seasons?
So that is a pretty, I won't say it's a unique thing for American television, but it's a pretty amazing experience and a pretty amazing achievement for American television.
So you're having to follow after a break of how long?
How long has been the break?
13 years.
Right.
After 13 years not doing it, you're going to have to come back and be as good, if not better.
Yes, exactly.
No pressure.
No, no, I don't think there's any, frankly, we were all really young and seeing the work of Jillian and David, I think they've become better actors, actually.
Particularly Jillian Anderson when she did Great Expectations.
Did you see that?
I think it was a BBC miniseries.
Yes, she played.
She developed enormously.
I mean, she was hot from the series, but was able to go in other directions.
I think probably she got to the stage, you can tell me better, where she was able to call the shots in her own career because, you know, X-Files were so big.
Absolutely.
And then she did The West End.
She did What the Night Was For in swing time.
And she just came off of Streetcar, I think just last year to rave reviews.
So she's really developed her acting chops across the board there.
The series was just a perfect storm, wasn't it?
I mean, they, to me, seemed to be the almost the bogey and bacall of alternative reality.
You know, they had that kind of dynamic going.
It really did.
They had a sense of humor.
They had a respect for each other.
There was not, you know, there was actually no plan immediately to have a romantic relationship between the two.
It just sort of developed.
In fact, amongst the fans, there were those who wanted them to be in a relationship.
Those were called shippers.
And then those who wanted them to remain platonic were called no Romos.
And at the conventions, no Romos would stay on one floor and shippers would stay on another floor of the hotel and then have panel debates about these things by myself, you know, staying mostly on the no Romo side, of course.
Well, you know, look at that.
Look, for a viewer, and I re-watched today a documentary about the whole series, and it was wonderful to relive some of those moments because they leapt around the different episodes and the different seasons, and it was good to see that.
But it was also great to see the developing of that relationship.
The way you all developed as characters, but their relationship obviously central to the whole thing.
And she started as a kind of debunker of him.
Then we got to learn more about him and her.
And the more that we learned about the two of them and the fact that their pasts were intertwined in many ways, the closer they got, but without actually becoming sexualized.
Yes.
And see, that's what was so, to me, refreshing about this was here was a relationship built on trust, respect, a mutual goal that they had, working out issues together and not having to, you know, make it boyfriend, girlfriend, oh, we're living together sort of thing.
And that to me was great writing and so rare in television that I wanted that to continue.
Two formidable people like that.
In minority amongst the fans, but what are you going to do?
When you do these conventions, I've interviewed a couple of Doctor Who's.
You get Doctor Who there, don't you?
Yes, love it.
In my life.
And they all have to do the convention circuit.
And actually, they all grow to love it eventually.
But you're coming across people who probably know more about the series than you do.
That is true.
They take their time to study the minutiae of it, as opposed to, you know, you trust the writers or sometimes you don't even see the entire episode when you get your script.
So often you are learning about the show at the same time the fans are.
Is that good?
Yes, it is, I think.
I quite like it like that.
And then when I go to conventions, I actually avoid the Q ⁇ A by using my 45 minutes on stage to improvise a brand new episode of The X-Files, bringing fans up on stage and making them mulder and scully and that kind of thing.
Well, that's good.
And you're well equipped to do that because there's a bit of the Robin Williams, I think, in you.
The stand-up comedy side of that well equips you to do what you have to do in the series.
Yes, thank you very much.
I was in the same theater group with Colin Mockery And Ryan Stiles from Whose Line Is It Anyway?
We performed together on stage for 10 years before I ever got to television.
So I had that kind of background and bring that to an X Files episode all around the world.
I did the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
I did that show three years in a row back in 2010.
But the long hair, the t-shirt, that kind of ethos, that kind of appearance.
We had a series over here that you also may have seen on public television there called The Young Ones.
Yes, of course.
I love that one.
Yeah, and you would have fitted right in, I think, as the American cousin in The Young Ones.
Thank you.
They were a little nutty, but yeah, I could see that.
So, somebody who trained...
No, that was my real hair when I came into the audition.
And then the t-shirts, the writers were big fans of the Ramones and that sort of thing.
So they were putting the t-shirts on me and I was showing up with the hair and it all sort of came together.
So as Langley in the X-Files, you were a rock and roll dude, but you're a rock and roll dude with a computer brain who had access to information that Mulder needed.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so the three of us, we were each had our own component.
You know, Fro Hickey, the short guy, seemed to know surveillance and stuff like that.
And then the guy in the suit, Byers, he was the more official and knew the government's angles in and outs and that sort of thing.
He was an ex-government employee.
So the three of us made a perfect synergy of espionage.
Well, not espionage, but computer hacking and conspiracy theories.
Before you were asked to do it, were you into all of this?
Did you believe that there was more to the assassination of JFK than we were told?
Did you tend to believe some of the conspiracy theories of this world?
Yeah, I didn't know as much.
My brother was the real official on this one.
And so I would often call him up and refer to him on a lot of this stuff.
So I had to go through a really fast training schedule.
And of course, the writers were great too, because then they introduced me to real life counterparts that alone gadmin like Jordan Maxwell, Dr. Roger Lear, Richard Noland, you know, these guys.
And so I met a lot of them in my travels and started actually going to real life UFO conventions and conspiracy cons.
I don't know what you feel about this.
I've found this with my own interest.
It kind of takes you over.
When you start to meet and talk with these people, like I met and talked with Stanton Friedman when he came to London.
I interviewed Dr. Roger Lear as you met Dr. Roger Lear.
Sadly, I think he died this year, didn't he?
Or the end of last year.
Yeah, just about eight months ago now.
I think it is.
I interviewed him on phone lines on the radio in the UK.
Never actually got to meet him face to face.
What was he like?
He was actually really a funny guy.
You never get that sense of humor.
He actually, I actually dragged him up on stage to play Mulder, one of my improvised X-Files.
And he was quite good, actually.
But yeah, his background was as a skeptic and a non-believer, as a celebrity potiatrist of all things, doing Johnny Carson and his clients included Johnny Carson and Jerry Lewis.
Yes.
And so from that, he got into a neighborhood MUFON convention and started seeing x-rays of people's feet with implants in there.
And that got him into that world fairly quickly.
And what was your view on all of this?
Whenever I heard him interviewed by the likes of Art Bell, who is my hero in this field, he always sounded to me to be totally credible about how he cut this implant thing out of somebody's heel.
And the metal is like something that he'd never seen before.
And it had to be of some kind of weird origin.
Well, that was the thing.
You know, he never, he wasn't breathlessly like making it dramatization.
He was laying it out as a doctor would.
He would just say, yeah, here's what we did.
Here's the procedure.
This is what we extracted.
He showed me the small piece of metal that had the cheesecloth-like material wrapped around it that when he cut it with a bone scalpel, the scalpel snapped.
You know, these kind of things.
So there was no evidence of any trying to, you know, trying to push an agenda of any sort on his part.
He sort of was just a medical doctor laying this stuff out, which made it seem all the more plausible and hard to refute because he had no personal invested need to make you believe his point of view.
So the more of these meetings that you had with these people, the luminaries of the world of ufology and other areas connected with that, presumably you started feeling that you were aligning yourself with these people.
Did you then start to believe, Dean, that your role in the X-Files and the work that you were doing was actually more important than just a dramatic gig.
It was getting some kind of message out there?
Well, yeah, I mean, there was a lot of, you know, in the early days, you sort of sit down with these guys and they would say incredible things and then you would try to refute it or you go, no, well, that can't be.
And then they would have a stack of research that they devoted their life to put in front of you.
And then, you know, these are people that have taken a lot of time to research these things out.
So it seemed that, you know, any sort of possible disbelief that you would have, they would have an answer for that sort of thing.
So at that point, yeah, as Langley, then you realized that this, the X-Files acted as sort of a conduit for a lot of these, what they called cult or subculture groups sort of to come together in these conventions.
And I actually thought that was kind of cool that that's, you know, how that culture all evolved through this TV show.
By the way, the name Langley, I know it's spelt differently, but is there some kind of synergy between the name Langley that you had in the series and Langley, the place in Virginia that is super top secret?
Well, you would think that there's also a suburb in Vancouver where the show was shot called Langley.
And there's also a hot dog vendor in downtown Vancouver by the name of Langley.
So it's hard to tell which the writers were doing.
Were they thinking Virginia?
Were they out in the suburbs?
Or were they buying hot dogs in downtown Vancouver?
One of the three is the right answer.
Right.
And, you know, again, the truth may well be out there and maybe we'll find it one of these days.
So there you are becoming a bit of an ambassador for all of this.
Did you start to feel the responsibility of it?
You know, I mean, your face is very, very recognizable.
So you would probably have found yourself, once this series began to hit, and we're talking about what, early to mid-90s, isn't it?
You would go places and people would recognize you.
And I guess they would expect you to tell them things.
Well, yeah, I guess they did.
You know, I would sort of just reiterate stories that I heard and stuff like that, not saying that this is what I believe, but this is what I've heard.
This is what's been told to me.
And invariably, once I did that, without judgment and without editorializing it, other people would tell me their stories and I would hear more and more incredible things that were going on.
Some, you know, hard to believe, like, you know, U.S. military is building a runway under my house or, you know, things like that.
So I would get a large cross-section of the population coming to me and relating their stories as I traveled the world.
And so it became kind of enjoyable and kind of fun, you know, a fun way to search for the truth.
And in fact, that's why we did this documentary called The Truth is Out There, which is sort of, I take a camera crew around the world with me and go to all these people who have all these stories and sort of let them tell the story and find out the person behind the story and see how it all interconnects because it's sort of a massive web of information and worlds out there that aren't normally presented in the mainstream.
And we both know there are two ways to do these things.
You can do it as woo-woo, wacky-wacky and do it with less than total credibility, or you can do it as a serious journalistic enterprise.
And I'm guessing you feel as I feel that the best way to do this with a light heart, you know, we've got to have some laughs along the way, but you've got to try and be fairly serious about this.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, as a comedian, absolutely, my life is around comedy and stuff like that, but not to be putting someone down or, you know, as you say, make fun of it or whatever.
So, yeah, you give them the space and the respect to listen to their story and have it in a lighthearted way and have fun doing it.
So, you know, this idea that everybody has their own truth, everybody's story, you know, deserves to be heard.
And even the, you know, the critiques we got on the documentaries, you're letting complete whacknuts get their voice heard.
Well, that's a matter of opinion.
So at no point did we ever go around presenting anyone as like, oh, look at this crazy guy.
What story does he have to tell?
So yeah, there was some responsibility that I felt for that for sure.
Like, you know, giving everyone the ability to say their piece and hear it and investigate it further if need be.
And I used to say on my radio show, which became this show that I'm doing now, and, you know, my background is serious journalism.
That's what I've done all my career.
But I'm magnetically drawn to all of this and have been since I was a kid.
I used to say, if only 10% of what you heard is absolutely true, that 10% will change the way we see our world.
Yeah.
Well, and in fact, think about it, the way we do see our world has changed a lot because I believe, you know, it seems that 10%, even 10% of the population are actually believing it.
So this is why bringing back the X-Files now seems to be even a more monumental task because already more people are already in tune with the ideas that the show presented in the first place.
And more people, if you look at polls, both sides of the Atlantic, more people believe that they are not being told the truth by the powers that be.
Yes, absolutely.
And Richard Dolan is always the one I go to on this one, who, you know, says, absolutely, if there has been a cover-up on UFOs and alien existence, two larger questions will then appear if that cover-up is ever said, is ever exposed.
One is, how did that cover-up happen for so many years?
And two, how is the press so manifestly in lockstep with the government on this one?
Yeah, why wasn't the question that we all find ourselves asking, and look, I've spent most of my career working in the mainstream media, but I've got a big toe in the alternative media now, is how is the media sometimes in these cases so impotent?
Yeah, and complicit, it even seems that, you know, the mockery, Stephen Bassett, who's with the Disclosure Project and does the panels and council things up in Washington.
Yeah, no, I met Stephen a few years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know his work.
So he has been very active in trying to get a lot of this classified information classified and get it out to the people.
The idea being that if there is another intelligent life trying to communicate with us, it's to forward the human species.
It's not for any single government to get anything like that.
So yeah, there's this idea that this cover-up has been hindering our own personal development as a species.
And you go, why was the press complicit in that?
And how is the press complicit in that?
And so these questions, Richard Dolem thinks that that would then bring that our civilization is so frail that it would collapse upon the release of that information.
But I'm not so sure now.
So you think that perhaps this new series will be a gateway to us getting more information out there?
Don't forget there are people who write academic theses.
I've interviewed a few of those as well who say that popular entertainment is the conduit for getting the truth to the people.
Well, yes.
And also the alternative is also true.
The, you know, Perry Farrell from Jane's Addiction refused to do the music for the soundtrack because he thought by popularizing aliens, you set back human-alien relations by 20 years because therefore anybody comes forward with some of this information, they will go, oh, you just watched too many X-Files and you could sort of dismiss them that way.
And of course, make it mainstream.
The X-Files were very much a pointer to the way that things work in the real world because there was a whole edition, Gethsemane, where we were told, Bulda was told that the alien stories that he'd been hearing and that he'd come to believe and had such a personal part in were a hoax.
Yeah, right.
And that's come forward even since that a lot of the secret spy planes and stuff like that were left as UFO stories because that was a way to determine where the secret spaceships were flying that they could determine by the number of news reports out there.
You know, this was in the 50s and the 60s.
So, but now that NASA is saying we are 20 years away from finding extraterrestrial life, you know, more and more government officials are coming forward with information they had while in government.
The Canadian Minister of Defense, the Brazilian DOD, a lot of the British ex-DOJ guys, they are all, you know, slowly each and every one of these people are coming forward with their bit of knowledge and information and sort of weaving it all together.
So I'm thinking that this next part of the X-Files would have to take all of that into account and move that forward too.
You mentioned the ex-Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellier.
I interviewed him on his 80th birthday recently, and the guy sounds completely credible.
I know.
And his information is so extraordinary.
And it seems to dovetail very well with a lot of other stories that I have heard.
You know, the Dolce New Mexico underground base, a lot of the systems that are out there, I've heard from other guys at Lockheed Martin and stuff like that.
So it seems that if he's making it up, he's doing it very well.
I can't imagine how he's making it up that works so well with so many of the other bits of information out there.
But yeah, he's quite the incredible resource these days.
You know, Leonard Nimoy, who sadly I never got the chance to interview and I always did and of course left us recently, terrible shock to the whole world.
He said, and a great quote that I keep passing on to people over here, because it works in acting, it works in media and broadcasting.
He said that because he's synonymous with Spock, of course he is.
He said, they said, do you feel typecast?
And he said, the only thing worse than being typecast is not being cast at all.
I suppose the question that flows from, are you worried about becoming typecast?
No, you know, I've never worried about that because I've always been, well, you know, my hair was long, now it's short.
So I have a different look, of course.
So I get typecast as people who are smart.
And because not necessarily being a conspiracy theorist, the loan gunmen were also, you know, a smart group of guys working together.
So being placed in front of a computer in other TV shows and movies and stuff like that has never been an issue.
And also once people see my stand-up comedy and my improv, then they sort of see a new light and a way to cast me.
So I've never worried about it.
And yeah, if I've been playing conspiracy guys in other short movies and stuff like that, it has never worried me at all.
And we come back to Robin Williams here, really, because Robin Williams played some of the most moving, serious roles that I've ever seen, but was also capable right to the end of making people laugh.
Yeah.
And so he was, you know, a trained dramatic actor from Juilliard.
And yet that ability, I've improvised with him a number of times, both in Vink Coober and John and LA.
And, you know, a lot of his improvisation came from very dramatic moments that were just in context very funny.
But, you know, he could do, he could improvise Shakespearean verse at the drop of a hat and that sort of thing.
So yeah, he had his dramatic chops well intact.
And he used to do, you know, we have the comedy store in London.
He used to do the comedy store here.
And he would stand at the back watching the other comics.
Can you imagine what it would be like to be watched by Robin Williams?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I can because he did a thing.
You know, some comics accused him back in the San Francisco days that he would go to an amateur night and then just remember the best joke of all 10 comics before him and then go on stage last and do all of those 10 bits, but in his style.
And the people who came late and never saw the beginning comics would just think Robin Williams just came up with 10 new bits tonight, even though he was showing the other comics how to make their bits really funny.
And so, yeah, he had this amazing ability to not just do a lot of improv, but to remember everyone else's bits as well.
Now, you're going to have to recreate because I'm sure that offer is going to come any day now.
The phone call is going to come and they'll give you the contract.
You're going to have to recreate a role that you haven't done For 13 years.
Is there a problem there?
Is that difficult?
No, you know, it was playing Langley was fairly easy to do because, in fact, a lot of the wardrobe was my own.
Other than the t-shirt, I would just walk in with my own sneakers and jeans and away we go.
And the glasses were fake, but now I do need reading glasses.
So I guess I could just modify those.
But in portraying Langley, it was just connecting to a very sincere place, which a lot of, you know, which is sort of the fundamental thing of acting.
And of course, having a lot of dialogue, intricate dialogue, just memorizing all that and getting it out in one sentence.
That was the big trick for all of those scenes.
Well, listen, I admire, I wanted to be an actor and I was never going to do that.
I became a broadcaster in the end and I ad-lib most of the stuff that I do.
And then I have to write scripts and I read the scripts.
The idea of memorizing lines absolutely terrifies me.
I have no idea how you do that.
And when you're talking about technical detail, I just, you know, I don't understand how it's possible that a human being can do that.
So full marks to you for being able to do that.
But, you know, have you got any tips for those of us who would like to?
To memorize technical detail?
Yeah, well, difficult lines.
I often see actors and actresses in series like the X-Files, and they have lots of technical stuff that they have to deliver Patrick Stewart style with complete credibility and power.
And I wonder how the hell do they do that?
Well, yeah, for a lot of it, it was me going back to the writers going, okay, you know, what is this concept behind it?
Or what are we talking about?
And then when you say, you know, when you have comedy lines like I still remember, hey, Mulder, do you want to jump on the internet and nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2?
And I remember seeing that guy go, what's Earth 2?
Because I hadn't seen that series.
And so it was this kind of mocking thing of another TV show.
So once I got that, that line was easy to do.
But if you see that on the page, absolutely.
It seems a bit overwhelming and a bit of a tongue twister.
But with the rehearsal, it comes out easy.
And of course, one thing that can be done these days, we talked about people at conventions who know every detail of every episode and every bit of dialogue that they can recite probably as well as you can because they've seen it so many times.
But one thing that we have today that we didn't have 20 odd years ago is the ability to freeze frame, go back and check every single frame in a way that we couldn't do in the past.
Are you worried about that kind of forensic analysis of what you will be doing with all of these people out there saying, ah, well, it was really good this new series, but really it was better 20 years ago?
No, I don't think so because, you know, 20 years ago, Chris Carter was ahead of his time because he really insisted that every episode have the production values of a feature film.
And so he had every department swing for the fences and the lighting department to do the best movie lighting, to have the camera department, you know, put on cinematic lenses and the art department would put in very minute detail in the background.
You know, this is where 1013 shows up on filing cabinets and on doors and stuff like that, which is Chris Carter's birthday.
So this idea of like 1013 showing up all over the series is something fun to go back and look at.
And I'm sure they're going to do it again.
You talked about the production values.
One of the things I wrote down from re-watching that documentary is the production values are exactly that.
They are full cinematic production values.
This is no TV series.
This is something that is perfectly capable of being shown on the big screen.
They took a lot of trouble over it, didn't they?
They certainly did.
And it became a source of pride.
Like originally, I know that first episode, even I remarked it like, this is far above and beyond most TV shows that I had done up till that point.
And talking with everybody on set, they said, yeah, we are encouraged to make this as amazing as we can.
And so the, of course, they started paying for it because they had to shoot these in eight days.
And invariably, they would get farther and farther behind.
So towards the end of the season, you would be juggling three or four episodes at the same time as they were trying to complete one and get the next one in, which is often why you saw reruns during regular season.
Oh, really?
Because yes, they were falling behind.
And there was, you know, a couple episodes that just got to air with minutes to spare and that kind of thing.
Well, you know, making a good thing takes time, but I wonder how the network executives saw that.
Yeah, I think there was a yeah, there was a couple of stressful days for sure on a lot of that.
But, you know, Chris Carter maintained that this quality was worth it, that the cutting quarters wasn't the way to go, and that this show would have life beyond just a one season turnover.
And that's the test of it, isn't it?
Nine seasons, but if you look at that stuff now, even the early stuff, even the pilot episode, the production values are superb and it stands the test of time.
Even little things like that I revisited today, the way that they shot scenes involving the cigarette-smoking man, he was always shot in a particular oblique way that almost harked back to almost Hitchcock.
Yes, in a film noir kind of lighting where it was harsh lighting across the side and the cigarette smoke always backlit so that you could see it slowly rising.
These kind of details that you would only think of in cinematic pursuit where you have the luxury of spending hours lighting your character.
They would shorthand it and get it in there, knowing full well that was the look they wanted.
So that was very conscious on their part.
And again, talk about a show holding up.
You look at that now and it seems a lot of them were just, you know, it seems contemporary in their shooting style and not like when you see a TV show from the 70s that you can see that flat lighting or anything like that.
What about David D'Akovny and Gillian Anderson as professionals?
David D'Akovny came over to London and was interviewed by one of my colleagues on a radio station here.
And he knew what he wanted out of that interview.
And the first thing that he wanted to be got absolutely right, it struck me that the guy was a perfectionist, was that everybody in England called him Dakovny.
And the first thing he wanted to be made clear was that his name is Dakovny.
So once you get that right, you're starting to get there with him.
But, you know, you've got to get it right.
All right.
Yeah.
I guess I had never realized that.
But yeah, there is Dukovny and Dukovny.
No, he's definitely Dukovni because we Brits, we say Dukovny.
And he was, from my memory, when he came over, he wasn't having any of that.
But it was, you know, the series was at its absolute height then.
So can you imagine what a blast it was to get him in our studios?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And it's rare because he didn't, I, to this day, I think he's only done San Diego Comic-Con as the only convention he's ever made an appearance at because he didn't do a lot of the other conventions because of his schedule.
You know, he was very busy when the show was on.
It was 16-hour days every day.
You saw the sunrise Saturday because of Friday shooting almost from season one.
And then in his off time, he'd be offered movies.
So he'd be on set again, shooting movies and then coming back to set having, you know, I don't know how he refreshed himself, but he would be ready to go episode one, season two after, you know, a very busy shooting schedule all summer long.
That's the kind of perfectionism that makes success, I think.
Absolutely.
And, you know, and he continued that on through Californication and his new series that's coming up.
Oh, I've forgotten about Californication.
Of course, I remember.
That was great.
Just nine seasons of this, plus the movie, of course.
When you're like in season six and you're looking down the barrel of season seven, do you get, I don't know, you don't sound to me a man, like a man who fears anything, but do you start to think, well, you know, we were top of the charts last year, last season.
We've got to do that again.
Do you ever get that little creeping fear that we've got to repeat what was already great?
No, you know, well, for the gunmen, because we only showed up every few episodes, we felt just more excited to get another chance to be part of it and to explore our characters.
So you could recreate the role every time, really.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And it was always giving us more and more stuff.
Like each episode, the writers, you know, would listen.
Back in that day, the X-Files was one of the first shows to have immediate fan feedback through the news groups on the internet.
So that feedback then fed how they saw our characters and how they wrote for our characters.
And the ability then to come back and see rich new ideas and fun scenarios that the writers had put us in was always a real treat.
So it was exciting that each episode, each season wasn't really looking down the barrel so much more as a fantastic chance to explore more and more aspects of all the characters and the storyline itself.
Lovely way of looking at it.
You talked about feedback, and of course it was one of the very first to have that situation where you get almost real-time feedback from people watching.
Did you look at that?
Did you allow yourself to look at that?
Because some of it inevitably is going to say, don't like that guy with the long hair.
Yeah, well, you know, it's so funny.
I had a lot of friends in computer science when I was in college.
And so I distinctly remember just hearing about this newsgroup thing.
I had an internet account in 1991 before even the World Wide Web existed.
And so I was at a party and somebody tapped into Alt TV X-Files newsgroup.
And it was a, you know, this is how far back it was.
It was a black screen with amber lettering.
I remember that.
Yeah, you remember that?
And you had to use your old RN read news coding, all that stuff.
That was all, that wasn't even Windows.
That was DOS, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
It wasn't even a DOS language.
It was Cobalt or something like that.
I know.
This is how now listen to old computer programmers talking.
There was a thing called Cobalt.
Remember Fortran?
Do you go back as far as Fortran?
Exactly.
Working on my Commodore 64.
Oh, my BBC Micro, it was over here.
Oh, is that right?
That's hilarious.
So anyway, the aspect of it was that they showed me all the chatter going on and how everybody was doing that.
And then using search parameters to Langley, then it was like, oh, you see all this feedback.
And what that feedback was was clearly the group was excited because they had heard that the writers and producers were lurking in the newsgroup to read all of this information.
And then when the lone gunman showed up, it was a reflection of the culture of the newsgroup, a validation of what they were doing and that it was a direct symbiotic relationship with the makers of the show that they loved.
Well, these days, this is good.
These days, it's all a little bit more organized and stage managed, isn't it?
So the producers may put you in a chat room on the night of the first airing of the first show of the first season.
Are you ready for that kind of stuff?
Totally.
Yeah, I love that sort of stuff.
And having, you know, traveled the world and done all the conventions and met the fans and the new generations of fans that are coming out now.
I'm meeting, you know, teenagers and stuff like that that are discovering the show through Netflix and that kind of thing that are loving it.
So I am ready to, as always, chat with all my fans around the world.
You have a very good attitude to it all.
It seems to me that you're very relaxed about it.
You know, there's a to be at that kind of level, I can't imagine what that's like.
And It's very easy, I think, you tell me, having known people who've known people in Hollywood, to get a little carried away with yourself.
If you're on a big show and it's doing well, the temptation must be to kind of read your own publicity.
That doesn't sound like that would ever be you.
Well, yeah, and you know, this is what I always think is great about improv and stand-up is that it will always keep you honest because you think, you know, if you read your own publicity and start believing it, the moment you step on stage, you're given five minutes a grace period where they're, you know, they will laugh at your things.
But if you are not funny or if you are head up your own butt sort of thing, all your jokes are going to fall flat and you're going to be sitting in silence.
Yeah, you get about seven minutes here.
They start throwing things.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So therefore, that quickly eradicates any of that puff shirt mentality that you might have got just sitting in your luxurious hot tub in Hollywood.
And when you're doing the live stand-up thing, and again, I know a few people who do this and I have massive admiration for those people because I couldn't do this to save my life, as we say here.
How do you size up a room when you walk into a room?
Because I know there's a way to do it.
You have a little look around and you see who's there.
Absolutely.
And I often watch an act or two before to see, you know, I always equate it to surfing, believe it or not.
If you imagine waves of laughter like waves of water, you can sort of see the ocean and you can determine where you want to place your surfboard based on incoming waves in about two or three minutes.
So if that works as a metaphor for you there, Howard, I think that's exactly how you size up a room.
You imagine yourself, you're going to surf the laughter and you're going to determine where the waves are.
And so you're going to place yourself accordingly and what your jokes are technically your board.
So you know how you're going to, what you're going to open with, how you're going to structure your act and all that sort of thing.
So good is that metaphor.
I am going to adapt it if you don't mind.
And I'm going to use it in my own fields because it's brilliant.
Okay.
Thank you.
I suppose the only thing you've got to watch out for are sharks.
And what I mean by that is hecklers.
How do you deal with hecklers?
Well, because my show is improvised based, I encourage hecklers.
And often, you know, hecklers, the last thing they want is a spotlight on them.
So if there's one who is heckling and often they just heckle just to yell, they're not hearing the feedback or, you know, not hearing me respond.
So I often will drag that person on stage.
And once they're under the bright lights and everybody's looking at them, their tone changes quite abruptly.
And then you are back in control of the show.
You know, it's easy to sit in the dark and just yell random things, but it's quite different than to be on stage performing with me and having to, you know, make a whole show of the evening.
We have a stand-up comic over here called Bernard Manning.
I don't know if you ever came across the work of Bernard Manning, very big guy, very, very earthy comic.
You've heard of Bernard Manning?
I have, yeah.
I saw him.
I think I saw his act up in Edinburgh Festival, I'm going to say six years, seven years ago.
Well, we lost him, you know, within the last few years, but this guy had the most incredible put-downs.
I can't even repeat the things he would say because they were rude.
And I would be, you know, I'd never be able to go on the internet, let alone the radio again, if I repeated them.
But they were absolutely on the money and they did exactly that thing that you were talking about.
They put the spotlight on the idiot out there who thinks that he can be better than you by screaming insults or comments about your material.
Bernard Manning could put these people down and leave them in flames.
Yeah, and see, and that's a thing.
But then sometimes you get into a real hostile pissing match back and forth, which then escalates to the point where there's no comedy going on anymore.
And I've seen comics who are really good at put-downs, but then their emotions get the better of them.
And then it just becomes sort of a screaming match with a stranger, which then devolves not to a stand-up show, but to some sort of parking tussle, as it were.
So, you know.
There's another reason why I couldn't do stand-up and I have massive admiration for people who do.
I suppose your ultimate sanction is the burly guys in the security uniforms.
Yes, but here's the problem when you do improv and you're getting people to shout stuff out.
The burly guys in the uniforms assume that it's all part of the show.
So they tend to do nothing when you are an improviser as opposed to a stand-up who has a set material.
My material is never really set.
And because I'm basing it on audience suggestion, they just assume that the super drunk guy is just adding to the show.
So it's invariably always been up to me to handle that.
I don't think I've ever had the burly guy in the suit ever toss anybody from my show.
Well, I hope you never have to have that experience, Dean.
Let's get back to, in our last few minutes, and thank you very much for giving me all of this time.
Let's get back to X-Files, the new series.
Is there a part of you, I know it's a limited run, is there a part of you that would like it to be longer and to go for another, not necessarily nine season, but to go for another nice long run?
Yes and no.
The yes part is, you know, it's always fun to work on a series because it's such a family event and you feel so close to a large group of people for so long.
And that's a, you know, that camaraderie is always great to have.
At the same time, it's a huge commitment and eats up big chunks of your life.
So I'm glad it's a limited run.
At the same time, content-wise, I think that I'm not sure what the new storyline is going to be, but I know that they want really to connect the old show to an ender.
So for it to go on then and make that ender go for three or four or five seasons is sort of negating the whole idea.
I really like that show to have a strong beginning, a strong middle, and a strong end.
So, even if it is something that has brevity to it, it'll be done in a nice, tight way.
And you know that three decades from now, just like the final episode of Cheers, they'll still be running it.
Absolutely.
And it'll be, you know, it'll be something that you could still enjoy time and time again.
So I look forward to watching it in my retirement.
And I'm sure it'll be a very nice pension scheme for you, Dean, which is a long, long way away for both of us.
Okay, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So talk to me briefly about the process that happens when you get that offer, you get the contract.
What happens then?
When do you get the scripts and when do you start rehearsing?
Well, this is the weird.
I'm now, and if they're listening, they're going to be surprised as much as I am.
I've actually told all of my representatives in Los Angeles that I am relocating to Sydney and will be represented over there.
So I've ended my contracts with my representation in America.
And so the first thing they're going to have to do is contact my Australian agent and negotiate how to fly me back and forth from there.
At which point, once that's worked out, generally what happens is the scripts are sort of kept top secret to keep it off the internet.
So only on a need to know basis do you get your scenes without much context of what's going on before and after.
So I imagine that if we have questions of what's going on, it'll be like the old days where you just pick up the phone and you can call the writer directly and have a quick chat about what's the context, what's the thought process of the gunmen, what happened before and why are we going into this scenario.
And then generally we show up on set.
And with the lone gunmen, it was often the least effects heavy scenes that the crew had to do.
So often they were exhausted from floated UFOs over bridges or having submarines come up through ice or all that sort of thing.
So they were just thankful that everybody could just sit around a computer room and just have a bunch of guys, you know, say a bunch of lines in English and nothing had to blow up and there were no aliens that had to run around or anything like that.
That sounds good, actually, because it means that you get more of a chance to do your thing your way.
Absolutely.
There was a lot of freedom to, you know, sit wherever we wanted to, block it however it went.
And then often it was just like done in one or two takes and they went, was that in English?
Yes, it was.
Okay, let's move on.
And that was and that was the extent of it.
So I'm looking forward to being that smooth and easy again.
How massively exciting.
You must be.
Well, I can tell just by talking to you.
Absolutely thrilled.
I mean, I'm catching it from you.
So absolutely.
Yes.
Well, it's still not official.
Like we still haven't heard anything.
So, but I'm just saying that there may need to still be a Twitter push.
I know the writers haven't even all been hired yet for all the episodes.
So there's still lots of room for the fans to get involved, put their two cents in, I'm sure, on Twitter and have their say heard.
And by the time we get to see it in England, it'll probably begin 2017, I would have thought.
No, I think it's going to be one of these day and date things because I believe a lot of this push is coming from Netflix that wants to buy the entire run of the show.
It'll be out there for everybody at one time.
Absolutely, right around the world at the same time.
So there'll be no pirateing.
There'll be no ability to BitTorrent it or anything like that.
So I think that's the plan for this last six to be included as an entire package of the entire X-File series.
I don't even need to do this because I know it will be.
I wish you every success with it, Dean.
It's been a pleasure to have this conversation with you and to lift the lid on it all.
If people want to know about you, you've got a great website.
Tell me what that website is.
Sure.
I have my website, DeanHagland.com, myfirstnameandlastname.com.
It's got a lot of my artwork on there.
It also has a link to our free podcast that we've been doing every Monday for eight years now.
Me and my co-producer of my production company, we have taken our production meetings and turned them into on-air.
Our production meetings are now our podcast, basically.
Wow, fantastic.
I saw on your website podcasts.
I didn't realize that's what they were.
Yeah, yeah, that we basically we've been meeting once a week to talk about our projects, documentaries, films that we're doing, and movies that we've seen, interesting tidbit, you know, as our conversations go off on tangents, our assistants always said, you know, this is really fascinating.
You should record this.
And so eight years now, we've been recording our production meetings and they've been available.
Now all of them are available at my website and also chillpackhollywood.com, which is what we call our show.
And then you can also follow me on Twitter at just DHagland.
Super easy.
And I sort of update that with things I'm doing, shows that I'm in, where I'll be performing live, that kind of thing.
Dean, a pleasure to talk with you.
And when you get to Sydney, one of my favorite places on earth, give my love to the Opera House.
Oh, I love the Opera House.
That and somebody recommended Arthur's Pizza.
Those are the two that I'm going to have to do.
And you've got to go right to the end of the harbor, and they have an area where there's a, I can't remember its name, but there's a great fish restaurant there.
I know if Sydney's got loads of them, but there's this, we went to this great fish restaurant.
When I was doing a radio show there, I had the greatest fish, and I'm not a big fish eater, the greatest fish of my life there.
When you get there, somebody will tell you where it is.
And it's at the end of the harbor by the opera house?
Yeah, and I remember we got one of the, they have these water taxis, and the water taxi took us all the way to the end, and that's where it was, and then took us all the way back.
Wow, okay.
It's a long time ago.
When were we there?
1999, 2000.
So it's a way little way back.
Absolutely, but I'm sure it's still there because a lot of the classic restaurants seem to still hold up there.
Lovely people, lovely place.
I'm very jealous.
And do the Sydney Harbour Bridge climb.
Oh, yes.
Well, I'm a bit scared of heights, but that looks very exciting.
I think I'm going to have to try that and get a little selfie of myself up there.
Put that on the old Twitter feed.
As we say here in London, it's got to be done.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Howard.
Thank you, Dean, very, very much indeed.
Take care.
Best of luck.
You bet.
Thank you.
The amazing Dean Haglund, a man of many parts.
What a fascinating guy.
And we look forward to the new series of the X-Files, in which he will be playing Lang Lee, one of the lone gunmen.
And I'm really excited, as I'm sure you must be, about this.
I'm going to try and re-watch as many of the old shows as I possibly can before the new series comes out.
And thank you very much to Roger Saunders in California for making this happen.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for maintaining the website, getting it out to you, and for doing all the stuff that he does.
If you want to connect with me, send me a message you can through the website www.theunexplained.tv, which is also the place, if you possibly can, to make a donation to the show.
More great shows coming soon.
Stand by for edition 202.
We're rocking and rolling.
Thank you so much for all of your support.
Please keep telling your friends.
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
Please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
This has been The Unexplained.
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