Opening X-file on Chris Owens

 Dogged by misinformation, pursued from shady quarters, shielded by people in high places -- Chris Owens' life has been a little like an X-Files episode lately.
 
 The rumors began in a supermarket tabloid, then moved to Howard Stern's radio show and the Internet, all variations on the same theme: That the Canadian actor is quietly being eased into that hit show to replace star David Duchovny.
 
 "It's amazing how quickly and easily things get twisted around," a somewhat bemused Owens, 36, was saying last week over lunch in the Annex, his home turf until he moved to Vancouver with his law student girlfriend two years ago.
 
 "I am not replacing David Duchovny," he says -- not for the first or, presumably, considering the naturally suspicious minds of the show's viewers, the last time.
 
 (Younger sister Shelly, also an actor, was in the fourth X-Files episode way back in 1993. "She paved the way for me," Owens jokes. "She's replacing David.")
 
 But evidence that something is in store for the actor, who plays X-Files' FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Spender, goes beyond Internet chatter. Fox-TV acted pretty squirrely about letting anyone interview him. And the producers have shown an unusually persistent interest in his acting services.
 
 Spender is Owens' third X-Files part. He appeared earlier this season as the peanut-butter-loving, good-hearted modern monster The Great Mutato in an homage to the classic Frankenstein. Before that, he was the younger version of one of the show's longest-running characters, the Cigarette Smoking Man, the sinister figure blamed for the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
 
 "Mother Teresa slipped through my fingers. I wasn't watching closely enough," Owens quips.
 
 A recent development suggests that Agent Spender is Cigarette Smoking Man's estranged son.
 
 "I'm playing my own son," Owens says, then pauses.
 
 "Is that right? Yeah, that's right."
 
 Only on The X-Files.
 
 He's due back on set April 20 to shoot the season's final episode and will find out in May whether the producers will exercise a contractual option for him to do another dozen hours next season -- an assignment that would take him to L.A. for the first time after 18 years of slogging it out on more than 40 TV series and movies.
 
 "Like they say, ride the wave. Having been in this business for years, I know that I've had ups and downs. I've been close to things and not close to things. Luck and fortune play a big part in it, of course. So yeah, I'll enjoy this for as long as I can," he says.
 
 Because as he knows, on The X-Files anything can happen.
 
 His friend Brendan Beiser played Pendrell, an FBI lab guy smitten with Dana Scully, in nine episodes -- long enough that people started to take notice. And then?
 
 "He said to me, 'Jeez, I can't believe it. They killed me.'
 
 "Why do you think I'm so nervous?"

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: Nobody, not even Chris Owens, knows whether his X-Files character will be a long-running one or not.