David Duchovny stopped by the Late Show With David Letterman last night, where in between plugging his new album he told the outgoing talk-show host that two supporting characters will return for Fox’s six-episode X-Files revival: Mitch Pileggi, who plays FBI bossman Walter Skinner, and William B. Davis, a.k.a. “The Cigarette-Smoking Man.”
“Mitch Pileggi will come back, and the Cigarette-Smoking Man—if this means anything to anyone—will be coming back,” Duchovny told Letterman, underestimating how many Cigarette-Smoking Man jokes have been made on this very Newswire of late. The Cigarette-Smoking Man is one of the most shadowy characters in a show full of them, and it really seems like he died after being shot with a rocket out of a helicopter at the end of the series. Of course, he had been taken for dead before, but had in fact survived being pushed down stairs. (Skinner, on the other hand, was still alive and muscular at the end of the series.)
Production for the six-episode X-Files series event is set to begin this summer.