Trivia: Rocketing from obscure bit player to TV's resident über-sex god thanks to his role as FBI agent Fox Mulder on The X-Files, David Duchovny can claim to have had one of the 1990s' more remarkable career metamorphoses. Although his initial attempts to translate his TV stardom into celluloid success proved less than memorable, the tall, classically handsome actor has continued to enjoy a great deal of popularity, evidenced in particular by the countless estrogen-drenched internet shrines erected in his honor.Born in Manhattan on August 7, 1960, to a Jewish father and a Scottish mother, Duchovny did his undergraduate work at Princeton and then went on to pursue a Master's degree in English Literature at Yale. While working toward his degree, he began commuting to New York to study acting, and he was soon appearing in a few off-Broadway plays. His interest in acting ultimately eclipsed his dedication toward earning his degree, and Duchovny dropped out of Yale to pursue a career as a performer. He got his first break starring in a beer commercial, and in 1988, he made his film debut with a breathtakingly abbreviated appearance as a party guest in Mike Nichols's Working Girl. Work in a number of diverse and usually obscure films, including starring roles in Julia Has Two Lovers (1991), The Rapture (1991), and Kalifornia (1993), followed, but the actor was able to command a more steady paycheck from his TV work. Before The X-Files debuted in 1993, Duchovny was best-known to TV viewers as Dennis/Denise, Twin Peaks' resident transvestite detective. As The X-Files steadily grew from cult favorite to mainstream success, becoming recognized as one of the most groundbreaking shows of the decade, Duchovny also began to enjoy both industry respect and huge audience popularity. Dubbed as the latest in a long line of thinking women's sex symbols, he would also appear in films like Playing God and Return to Me.Duchovny would The X-Files during the show's seventh season, much to fans' dismay, returning only for the series finaly. Post X-files, Duchovny would continue to act on screen, most notably in films like Trust the Man and another X-Files movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, as well as on the debaucherous TV series Californication.

Trivia: Joined the Tamahnous Theatre Workshop in 1972, where he worked as a resident actor, writer, musician, director and technician for six years. Appeared in The Portrait, a 1992 feature film in which both of his daughters are also credited with small roles. Stumbled serendipitously into the part of Melvin Frohike on The X-Files while working on the series as a first assistant director and during a casting session it was jokingly suggested they needed someone slimy "like Braidwood," at which point he was asked to do it. Goes by the nickname "Trudy."

Trivia: Worked as a librarian before his acting career took off. A founding member of the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival in Vancouver. Initially a recurring character on The X-Files, he was spun-off as a regular on the short-lived The Lone Gunman.

Trivia: Inventor of the Chill Pak, a cooling product for laptop computers, which also won him a silver medal at the International Inventors Expo in Geneva. Previously served on the advisory board Sci-Fest, a Science Fiction One-Act Play Festival in Los Angeles that began in 2014. Co-hosts a podcast with Phil Leirness called Chill Pak Hollywood Hour, in which he discusses happenings within the entertainment industry.

Trivia: Launching his career as a standup comic, American performer Richard Belzer entered the 1970s as a member of an odd New York-based comedy troupe called Channel One. Anticipating the home video explosion by over a decade, Channel One staged satirical, scatological routines lampooning the banalities of television -- and staged them in front of TV cameras, which transmitted the routines to little TV monitors, which in turn were watched by the live audience. Some of the best sketches were assembled into an X-rated comedy feature, The Groove Tube (1970), which featured Belzer, Ken Shapiro, and a brash newcomer named Chevy Chase. For the next decade, Belzer played the comedy-club circuit, popped up as a talkshow guest, and appeared in occasional films like Fame (1982). He joined still another comedy troupe in 1983, which appeared nightly on the syndicated interview program Thicke of the Night. The host was Allan Thicke, and Belzer's comic cohorts included such incipient stars as Charles Fleischer, Chloe Webb and Gilbert Gottfried. Thicke of the Night was one of the more notorious bombs of the 1983-84 season, but it enabled Belzer to secure better guest-star bookings, and ultimately a hosting job on his own program, debuting in 1986 over the Lifetime Cable Service. It was on this series that wrestler Hulk Hogan, demonstrating a stranglehold on Belzer caused the host to lose consciousness -- which prompted a highly publicized lawsuit instigated by Belzer against the Hulkster. In the early 1990s, Richard Belzer could be seen as a non-comic regular on the TV series Homicide. His Homicide character, John Munch, would become one of the longest-running fictional creations on TV appearing in more than a half-dozen other television shows, most notably Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Trivia: When actress Gillian Anderson landed the role of Agent Scully for the Fox television series X-Files (1993- ) she could not have foreseen that within two years she would become an internationally known cult phenomenon. She was born in Chicago, but moved to London at age two and remained there until she was in her early teens. She and her family then moved to Grand Rapids, MI, where she rebelliously got heavily into the punk rock scene complete with spiky, brilliantly colored hair and body piercings with safety pins. When she was 14, she became romantically involved with a 20-year-old punk singer and occasionally sang in his band. Her punk period lasted through high school. Following graduation, she got involved in local theater and from there studied fine arts at the Goodman Theater School of Drama at Chicago's DePaul University. Following graduation, she moved to New York where she waited tables and appeared in off-Broadway plays, most notably in Absent Friends, in which she had a starring role that won her a Theater World Award. Anderson made her film debut in 1992 with the low-budget drama The Turning. She then appeared in a theatrical production of The Philanthropist and after that moved to Los Angeles. Though she was frequently courted for television roles, Anderson disdained the medium until the X-Files audition came along. Though the producers were looking for a brainy version of a Baywatch girl, the beautiful but more natural looking (having long passed her outrageous days) Anderson got the role thanks to the insistence of the show's creator Chris Carter. The show became a smash hit within two seasons and Anderson found herself an international star, as did her co-star David Duchovny, the subject of numerous pages on the Internet, and the recipient of such awards as a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In addition to continuing work on the X-Files, Anderson hosted a couple of television specials, including More Secrets of the X-Files and the BBC documentary series Future Fantastic. She also lent her voice as a documentary narrator on Spies Above and as animated characters on shows like The Simpsons and Reboot and films like the English version of Princess Mononoke.Anderson would spend the next several years working extensively in British television, starring in series like Bleak House, Any Human Heart, Moby Dick, and The Fall, as well as appearing in numerous UK films, like The Last King of Scotland and Shadow Dancer.

Trivia: A solid character actor whose balding head and craggy face are perfect for playing any number of stuffy bureaucrats, Mitch Pileggi gradually came to attention in the television world as FBI Deputy Director Walter S. Skinner, the man directly in charge of Special Agents Mulder and Scully in their investigations into The X-Files. At first played mainly as a brick wall for Mulder to run into periodically, Skinner has gradually taken on depth and nuance, as well as a certain mysterious quality -- he appears to be somehow involved with the mysterious Elders, yet has stood against them, and the Cigarette Smoking Man (William D. Davis) on more than one occasion. Skinner has also been the primary focus of several episodes, and has been tied directly into the mythology of the series. Neither Mulder nor Scully seem to have a firm idea of where Skinner stands and his position was supposed to be revealed in the 1998 X-Files motion picture.Pileggi is the son of a former Department of Defense contractor who took his family all over the world during Pileggi's youth. Pileggi himself also went to work, very briefly, for the Department of Defense, but abandoned that career track in favor of theater when he was 27 years old. He quickly graduated from the theater to parts in television and motion pictures, always playing relatively small, low-key parts. He had a recurring part in Dallas for a while. During his career he had lead billing only in Wes Craven's Shocker, in which he played a serial killer who manages to cheat the electric chair by becoming electrical energy himself. A couple of Pileggi fan clubs have been created since his first appearance on The X-Files, and his AudioBook readings of the various X-Files novelizations have done very well for HarperCollins. While Skinner's ultimate fate is unknown, he seems likely to survive the 1998 X-Files movie -- though one should be mindful of the ultimate fates of earlier characters Deep Throat and Mister X.