What makes the cameo work so well is that, by all accounts, Duchovny is actually very proud of his past achievements in the academic realm and wants to be taken as seriously for his literary pursuits as his thespian ones. He's an actor-slash-rock musician-slash-sometimes novelist. The field has advanced since then he has not. She's (rightfully) offended that he thinks he can just waltz into Pembroke, complete his degree, and teach students when his rigorous work stopped sometime in the '80s. Ji-Yoon takes him to task for his blithe hobbyism when it comes to teaching.

He wants to use the position as a shortcut to finally finishing his studies, which he checked out of to become an actor. He's both a parody of himself, introduced swimming in his indoor pool in a tiny red Speedo and very straight-faced about his academic bonafides. In Episode 5, Duchovny himself finally appears. But the dean (David Morse) is drawn to Duchovny's celebrity appeal as a way to boost enrollment, even if the actor never actually finished his Ph.D. Sandra Oh's Ji-Yoon Kim, the show's protagonist, had already announced that the honor should go to her colleague Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah), the only other woman of color employed by the school in her field. But an episode of Netflix's new series The Chair features a surprise cameo from the actor which seeks to reintroduce him as: David Duchovny, Samuel Beckett scholar.ĭuchovny becomes a topic of conversation throughout the series about the overwhelmed chair of the fictional Ivy Pembroke University's English department when the dean's clueless wife invites him to assume a coveted distinguished lecturer position after meeting him at a farmer's market. To fans of improbably long running Showtime series, he's the dude from Californication. To most of the world, David Duchovny is best known as Fox Mulder in The X-Files.

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