The X-Files Cast Reunion Panel: 30 Years Later, Standing Room Only

When I stood up to open The X-Files panel at Monster Mania Con and I looked out at a packed convention hall and said "30 plus years later - look at this room, there's not a seat here," it said everything about what The X-Files still means to people. What followed was one of the most candid, hilarious, and occasionally haunting reunion conversations the show's cast has ever had - full of ghost stories, set disasters, love at first sight and a director who could motivate anyone with three words. Here's The X-Files Cast Reunion Panel: 30 Years Later. 

Nobody Thought It Would Last Seven Episodes

The first question hit right at the heart of it: did any of them actually know, when they started, that The X-Files would become what it became?

The short answer? Absolutely not.

David Duchovny apparently told people early on that the show would last only seven episodes. He was, as his castmates were happy to point out, wrong. Spectacularly, gloriously wrong, in fact. As Agent Dana Scully herself, Gillian Anders, put it, "I don't think any of us really knew what it was going to be or how far it was going to go. We didn't even know what an episode was."

William B. Davis - the iconic villain Cigarette Smoking Man - auditioned for a senior FBI agent with three lines. Three lines! He didn't get the part, and he spent his first episode silently leaning against a filing cabinet watching someone else speak those three lines - envying them. "I thought that was it for me," he said. "So anything after that was a bonus."

And then there was the panel moment that really puts the show's legacy into perspective: Mitch Pileggi, who played Walter Skinner, mentioned meeting 10-year-olds who are currently binge-watching the show. Not the children of original fans. The grandchildren of original fans. "It's like a third generation of fandom," he said. "That gives you a pretty good indication of the legs it's had."

Nobody anticipated it. Everyone is grateful for it. And the standing-room-only crowd in front of them was all the proof they needed.

Yes, Several Cast Members Have Lived in Haunted Houses

If you're going to spend years making a show about the paranormal, apparently the universe will find a way to make it personal. When an audience member asked whether any of the cast had genuine paranormal experiences, the room got a lot more interesting.

Laurie Holden, who played Marita Covarrubias, shared a story from her childhood. She grew up in a house in the hills where strange things happened regularly - her uncle claimed to have seen men walking through walls, and the hallway at the back of the house had a notoriously dark, chilly pocket of air that never quite felt right. They eventually called in the UCLA paranormal experts to investigate, and the verdict came back: the house had been built over an Indian burial ground.

But that wasn't the end of it. The strangeness wasn't contained to the house itself - the whole neighborhood seemed to carry something off. Mudslides. An unusual number of deaths over a three year stretch. "A lot of horrible things happened," she said. "I think that's pretty paranormal."

Then, completely unprompted, Pileggi revealed he'd had almost the exact same experience. When the show was shooting in Vancouver, he was renting an apartment where he'd brought his newborn daughter home from the hospital in North Vancouver. Every single day, he kept seeing things over his shoulder. Something nagged at him. Eventually, the truth came out: the entire condominium complex had been built on top of an Indian burial ground - not just any burial ground, but one connected to a smallpox outbreak where people had died and, as he put it, "not been actually buried. They were left unrestful."

When someone suggested that his daughter might still be picking up on things - the theory being that very young children, from birth to around age 3, can perceive things adults can't - he didn't exactly deny it.

And then there was Riverview, the old insane asylum where the crew shot multiple episodes. They would regularly film until 4 or 5 in the morning. "A lot of people saw strange things and heard strange things going on in the buildings," Pileggi said. "It sure added to the show."

Kim Manners and the Three Words That Could Wake Anyone Up

Every cast reunion panel eventually arrives at the stories that feel more like eulogies than anecdotes, and this one was no different. When an audience member asked about the late, great director Kim Manners, the room went warm.

Manners directed a huge number of the episodes across the show's run, and by all accounts, he ran a set the way you'd imagine a man named Kim Manners would run a set - with enormous energy, zero patience for mediocrity and a vocabulary that was colorful even by Hollywood standards.

The detail that got the biggest laugh was this: when David and Pileggi were deep into filming - 17-hour days, 150th episode territory, the kind of exhaustion that makes everything feel like moving through wet concrete - Manners had a method for snapping them back to life.

He would yell "Rock from Mars!"

"Rock from Mars!"

That was it. That was his motivational speech. The cast explained that it was Manners's way of saying "kick it in the ass" - or more precisely, his way of saying "come on, break something, because you are boring the shit out of me right now." It was direct. It was vivid. It worked.

Then came the other story, which captures a different side of Manners's directness. He was directing an episode, and a guest actor who didn't have much to do in a scene asked a crew member to go ask Manners what he should be doing in the background. The crew member relayed the question. Manners's response, delivered without hesitation: "Well, that doesn't matter. I just don't know how to focus a piece of shit in the background."

The actor was standing right there.

"That was Kim," Pileggi said with clear affection. "He was so ballsy. Just such a great energy." He also had the fortune of working with Manners again near the end of Manners's life, when Manners was running Supernatural. "It was a real blessing to see him that last time."

The Love Story That Started on Set in Season Three

Not everything that came out of The X-Files shoot was eerie or exhausting. Pileggi told what might be the most straightforwardly romantic story of the whole panel.

He hadn't met his now-wife Arlene until the third season. She had been on the show before - working as a photo double - but he simply hadn't crossed paths with her. Then series creator Chris Carter asked her to play a waitress in a scene that also featured David and Gillian, and that was the moment everything changed.

He saw her. She was a little redhead. He turned to David and said, "Who is that?"

David told him: "That's Arlene."

And then, as he told it, something shifted completely. He described it as a thunderbolt. "I was smitten immediately." He says he looked at her and knew exactly what was going to happen next - though he acknowledged David claims he didn't actually say the words out loud, so maybe it was more of a thought than a declaration.

But whether said or merely thought, the feeling was unambiguous:

"I said, 'I'm going to marry her.'"

And eight months later, they were married.

The audience responded the way audiences always respond to that kind of story - with a collective "oh, shiiiii" that was equal parts delight and disbelief. Eight months. From "who is that?" to married. That's a thunderbolt.

Maggots, Monologues and the Chaos of Everyday Filming

The paranormal stories are great, but the on-set stories are what remind you that making a beloved television show is, at its core, an exercise in organized chaos performed by people who are barely holding it together and finding that hilarious.

Gillian Anderson recalled doing an autopsy scene. The "body" she was working on wasn't a prop - it was a real actor. The maggots on his head weren't fake either - they were real maggots. While the scene's dialogue was being delivered, the maggots were crawling around, doing what maggots do, while the actor underneath them had to lie completely still and pretend to be dead. "It was a bit distracting," came the understatement of the panel.

Then there was the story about one of the show's recurring challenges: Scully's technical monologues. Pages of dense, scientific-sounding dialogue that had to be delivered with complete conviction even when the words themselves meant nothing to the person speaking them. Anderson, after completing what her scene partner described as an amazing take of one of these speeches, apparently turned to him immediately afterward and said: "Rob, I have no idea what I just said, man."

Which is maybe the most honest thing anyone has ever said about television science.

When Science Fiction Starts Looking Like a News Headline

One of the more unexpectedly thoughtful moments of the panel came near the end, when an audience member pointed out something that had clearly been on a lot of people's minds: how much of what The X-Files depicted as paranoid fiction has quietly become documented fact.

The government organization that investigated aerial phenomena? That came out. The CRISPR gene-slicing technology, the cloning storylines, the genetic science that ran through the show's later seasons? All of it is now part of mainstream medical research and regular news coverage. The interstellar object making the rounds right then - had the whole panel nodding.

One cast member said he'd recently asked **Chris Carter** directly: "Who were you talking to back when you were writing this show?" Carter's answer: "I'm not that smart." The response to that answer: "Dude, you are an X-File yourself."

The point landed because it's genuinely strange. A show that was filed under science fiction is increasingly being rewatched as something closer to documentation. As one cast member framed it, for the original audience, this was speculation — but for the new generation discovering the show now, "this is happening right now." The fiction has been overtaken by the timeline.

Not everyone on the panel was ready to go full believer, though. William B. Davis - staying completely in character for where he sits in the show's mythology - made it clear he remains a committed skeptic. He mentioned his membership in the Committee for Scientific Inquiry, his friendship with paranormal investigator Joe Nichol, and his general position that there's "a lot of superstition out there." His prescription: look for scientific evidence. That's all.

The cast's split on the question felt, honestly, exactly right.

Why Three Generations of Fans Keep Coming Back

So what is it, actually? Why does a show that premiered more than 30 years ago still fill a convention hall - standing room only, still hook 10-year-olds who weren't alive when it aired, still bring this particular group of people into a room together where the energy is immediately warm and chaotic and funny?

A few things emerged across the panel that feel like actually real answers.

The show's paranormal elements work because they're grounded in something emotionally true - not because aliens are real (or are they), but because the experience of seeing something over your shoulder that you can't explain, of living in a place that doesn't feel right, of feeling like the official story doesn't quite cover what happened - those are human experiences. The burial ground type stories from multiple cast members weren't just fun anecdotes. They were the panel demonstrating exactly why the show resonates: the spooky stuff feels real because sometimes it actually is.

The characters work because the people playing them brought a genuine dynamic - humor, exhaustion, affection, frustration - that came through on screen. When someone yelling "Rock from Mars!" at 4 AM is the thing keeping your performance alive, and you laugh about it decades later with obvious love, that feeling of genuine human connection is what audiences feel too.

And the science keeps catching up. Every news cycle that produces another headline about gene editing, classified government programs or unidentified aerial phenomena is, in effect, a piece of X-Files marketing. Chris Carter was writing something that felt prophetic, whether he intended it to be or not.

Pileggi summed it up best when an audience member asked what stuck with them from the show after all this time: it made their career. It was a big part of their life. It helped a lot of them. And 30 plus years later, the room is full.