Local man lives actor's dream as X-Files' villain

"It's raining! It hasn't stopped raining for two days!"

Like Ulysses returned from from the sea, Chris Owens is home in Vancouver, reflecting on his ongoing 11-episode odyssey on The X-Files in Los Angeles. He is peering darkly at the rain outside, waxing poetic about James Joyce -- his author of the moment -- and saying that he likes to keep a dog-eared volume of Charles Bukowski handy for those long breaks between scenes.

It's late at night at BoJangles Cafe in the West End and most of the patrons are huddled inside, away from the wind, hunched over a cup of hot java, trying to ward off the cold outside. "This is a neat place to do a little work, isn't it?" Owens says, looking around.

"They serve good sandwiches here." If his past California experiences have taught him anything, it's that there is no such thing as a free lunch in Tinseltown.

Owens has returned to Vancouver for a brief visit with his girlfriend, a law student at the University of Victoria. "It's challenging," he says quietly, reflecting on the difficulty of keeping a relationship going in two different cities. "You really have to make sure the lines of communication are open all the time, because otherwise you miss those daily 'What did you do with your day?' conversations. We go out of our way to make sure we do that."

Owens admits he caught a lucky career break -- "I'm living every actor's dream" -- drawing the attention of X-Files svengali Chris Carter after he was cast in a 1996 episode as a younger incarnation of the show's recurring villain, the so-called Cigarette-Smoking Man (CSM or Cancer Man to his legion of followers).

Owens, who had moved to Vancouver just three years earlier from his home town of Toronto, didn't think he'd be given more than a cursory glance for the role. With his slender build and long, sensitive face, he bears about as much resemblance to Cigarette-Smoking Man William B. Davis as Brad Pitt does to Keith Richards.

"If you ask Bill, he'll tell you I'm too short," Owens says, breaking into a wide grin. He is six feet tall to Davis' six-foot-three --not exactly midget proportions.

Carter saw something he liked in Owens' technique and cast him as a latter-day Frankenstein, buried him in special-effects makeup -- courtesy of Burnaby makeup-effects artist Toby Lindala -- for last season's Emmy Award-winning episode about a disfigured, misunderstood misfit ostracized by his uptight neighbours.

"Chris said, 'Okay, think of the Elephant Man, think of dignity.' He said, 'Try some physical ideas,' so I did. On the first one, he said, 'That's the idea -- but he's not autistic. Try it again, with less autism.' "

Owens laughs as he recalls the moment. " 'Physical but not autistic.' Right. He seems to know subconsciously the right thing to say to me as an actor. I'll be in a scene and he always has that one line that steers me in the right direction, that puts me on the same page as he is. It's very rare, as an actor, that you get to work with somebody who has a singular vision, and who can communicate that vision in absolute terms."

Last March, Owens was cast in a recurring role -- he will appear in half this season's episodes -- as Cigarette-Smoking Man's son, FBI Special Agent Jeffrey Spender. He's the new agent in charge of the bureau's "X-Files unit," which investigates claims of the paranormal.

Spender is a true unbeliever, which has naturally brought him into conflict with Fox Mulder, the show's resident UFO chaser, who believes elephants can fly and who once had a poster in his office that read, "I Want to Believe" -- that is, before Cigarette-Smoking Man's minions burned his office the ground and the poster with it.

Off-camera, Owens enjoys an easygoing rapport with David Duchovny, who Owens says seems relaxed and comfortable in his new home. Owens is convinced the actor who plays Mulder had a key role in helping him land his part.

"My impression when I'm on set is that David is every bit as ready to work now as he was every time I saw him up here."

Before last spring's announcement that the show was moving to Los Angeles, Owens had no idea what the future had in store. The day after he convinced himself the show was not moving after all, he was told to pack his bags.

Because he is pencilled in for so many episodes this year, 20th Century Fox Television wanted him within hailing distance of the show's new home on the Fox lot in Century City and paid for his relocation costs. Owens now has a work permit that allows him to test for roles in the U.S. when he is not working on The X-Files.

Coincidentally, an actor he knew, Lori Triolo, had just leased an apartment in West Hollywood. Triolo landed a job on Cold Squad back in Vancouver but was committed to her apartment in Los Angeles. Several long-distance calls later, they reached a mutually beneficial arrangement: Triolo would return to Vancouver for Cold Squad while Owens would squat in her Hollywood digs during his gig on The X-Files.

He is easing comfortably into the L.A. lifestyle, even finding time to play pick-up hockey with friends. He has managed to negotiate his two-door black Honda Civic on L.A.'s notorious freeways without once been shot at or carjacked.

"I have to lift the drink-holder cover so no one can see [the CD player] in there," he says, only half-jokingly. "You get the odd person who might cut you off in traffic, but for the most part everybody instinctively knows that if they cooperate they'll get there faster. So, begrudgingly or no, they cooperate."

During his off time, Owens likes to read scenes with friends; later on this night, he's going to burn the midnight oil with some Vancouver acting acquaintances, reading 10-minute playlets -- "just throwing the ball around, getting the juices going."

"I once had an acting teacher who said, 'If there's anything you can do that can fulfil you that is not acting, do it!' He's right. The odds are incredible. You really have to want to do the work. When I started, I did a lot of 40-seat theatres and church basements in Toronto. It has to be about the work. It can't be about fame or recognition. If I'd only wanted money, I could have taken any number of other jobs."

The X-Files' Los Angeles crew is filling out nicely, Owens believes. Carter put any start-up butterflies there may have been to rest with an ambitious episode early in the season about a rip in time in the Bermuda Triangle. The episode -- called, oddly enough, Triangle -- airs Sunday (9 p.m. on Global and KCPQ-Fox).

"Triangle" was filmed aboard the Queen Mary with 170 extras in 1940s costumes and will be shown in continuous time, in one seemingly seamless take, not unlike Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 classic Rope. Filming such a complicated script forced the crew to gel in a hurry, Owens says.

"Crews keep the underwear industry going because they're constantly having to buy it every weekend -- they don't have time to do their laundry," he says with a laugh. "After five years, the crew up here was like a family. But the crew in L.A. has been hand-picked. They're all professionals.

"I would expect no less, and they have delivered no less. It's not just another job to them. The exposure of something like The X-Files is incredible, and you can't afford to be cavalier about it."

An acquaintance from Owens' acting days in Vancouver spots him in the cafe and strikes up a casual conversation. He wants to know what Owens has been doing lately.

"I'm doing The X-Files," Owens replies. "In L.A."

The man blinks at him uncomprehendingly.

"It's a good gig," Owens adds.

Later, he can't stop laughing. So much for fame and recognition.

Quote: "You don't want to be playing the same notes all the time, or you begin to feel like a musician with only one song. I've been fortunate so far to play four different characters with The X-Files. I trust the scripts will continue to surprise me.... That allows for a real ambiguity that, as an actor, I find very refreshing."