He will forever be known as the Cigarette Smoking Man, the creepy and sinister operative in the TV series The X-Files. While heroes Scully and Mulder were investigating the paranormal, the Cigarette Smoking Man was always there to thwart them. Although the show ended in 2002 (there was a short-lived reboot in 2016), X-Files fans have never forgotten their favourite bad guy. As a result, actor William B. Davis (the B is for Bruce), aka the Cigarette Smoking Man, still attends four to six fan conventions a year, signing autographs and posing for selfies. The X-Files, he admits, has been good to him, providing him with work and recognition.
“I played [the show] as if I believed I had the conviction to do what I had to do, and most of the fans didn’t want me to do what I had to do,” he recalls with a laugh.
Today, it’s the private lake he and his wife Emmanuelle share with six others south of Blaine, Washington that commands his attention.
“It’s a private lake owned by seven families for water ski training and water ski activities. It’s very small, 670 metres long and half as wide, so the water’s always calm,” he says.
Actor William B. Davis, one of TV’s most reprehensible villains, is a water-skiing champion attracted to the sport as a youngster and winning accolades for his tricks, balancing on one leg and on one ski while completing the prescribed course.
“I’ve held quite a number of national records in my age division,” he says, “but I think most of them have been usurped by now by younger people coming along. I was two years ahead of my grade, so most of my classmates were two years older than me,” he continues, “so when it came to team sports, I was always behind. Something like skiing wasn’t a team sport and once I put on the skis, I seemed to have a knack for it.”
He still skis and does tricks despite two artificial hips and a weakened knee. He and Emmanuelle try to get to the lake every weekend, weather permitting. Skiing on snow or water remains his No. 1 passion.
Climate change and how to deal with it is the other.
“I read a number of things in the early 2000s and it was evident this was a more serious problem than people were allowing,” he says. “We lost so much time. It would have been moderately easy to adapt if we started 25 years ago. It would have slowed things down and we would have gotten used to the kind of transitions we need to make.”
He continues to write letters and sign petitions, and takes pride in having alerted BC’s current Environment Minister George Heyman to the issue when they met years ago.
“At the time, he was the Director of the Sierra Club of BC and I got to know him quite well. I hammered him about climate change. He’s got the message,” he laughs.
As for other activities, William has just finished shooting Upload, a sci-fi series shot in Vancouver as well as The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, in which he played Methuselah. He has written and directed four short films and stickhandled a television series under his production company William B. Davis Productions. He will be directing Look Back in Anger next spring through a theatrical initiative called The Smoking Gun Collective.
“I’m preparing a script and we’re putting together the production crew,” he says.
He’s also developing a movie version of Homeward Bound, which he also intends to direct.
Born in Toronto, William credits his cousins with getting him involved in the arts. They ran an Ontario theatre troupe in the ’50s and whenever they needed a child on stage, they called on him to fill the bill. He went to university to be an actor but, in those early days, there were no theatre schools in Canada. Instead, the University of Toronto offered an extracurricular theatre program alongside its academics, and that provided an entrée into theatre-related activities.
“I’ve always primarily thought of myself as a theatre director,” he says. “That’s where my roots are and that’s what gets me going the most.”
“There was a real focal point for young people interested in theatre,” he says.
Like his classmates, William chose an academic that interested him – philosophy. Meanwhile, he and his pals perfected their craft, performing in campus productions, eventually running their own summer professional theatre company. And a realization: he decided at that point in his life he’d like to switch from acting to directing.
“Directing was more serious work. It seemed to fit my talents at the time.”
He enrolled in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and, in 1964, joined Britain’s National Theatre, working alongside major stars Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi and Albert Finney. Finney asked him to be his assistant on the first and only movie he ever directed, Charlie Bubbles.
“We both had to finish our contracts at the National and after that he would go into making the film. And then I get a phone call from Montreal asking if I would come and be the assistant artistic director of the National Theatre School of Canada, and ‘could you let us know on Monday?’ So, it was a very challenging weekend deciding what to do.”
William decided to take the Montreal position and was quickly promoted to artistic director. Then to Lennoxville, Quebec where he oversaw the Festival for 10 years, teaching at Bishop University and directing plays across Canada. In 1985, he moved to Vancouver as the artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse Acting School and, five years later, founded his own school, the William Davis Centre for Actors Study. The Centre was folded into the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, where he teaches and sits on the Advisory Board. Teaching, directing and administration; it was a full plate.
“There were 20 years where I wasn’t acting at all and when I got back into acting, I played a range of different characters. I certainly wasn’t typed as the bad guy.”
That was until producer Chris Carter and The X-Files came calling. His signature role almost didn’t materialize.
“When we first did [the pilot], I didn’t think anymore about it. It was nice to have that gig. That was that. Later, they brought me in again. And then a couple more.”
He was with the show for 10 years. In the seventh season, William wrote an episode called En Ami.
“My character had no interaction with Scully at all since the pilot, so I said why don’t we do an episode where they meet each other. The writing team was interested, so we developed it from there.”
Television is often dismissed as smoke and mirrors, an illusion that has no bearing on reality. It should come as no surprise then that the Cigarette Smoking Man neither smokes (he was given herbal cigarettes) nor believes in the paranormal.
“A lot of fans don’t understand how the business works. They think actors choose their material – and I guess a lot of A-list actors do – whereas we in the trenches do what we get. So, there’s no relationship between doing a paranormal story and whether I believe in the paranormal. People would come up to me and show me UFOs and bring me the latest information from Roswell and Area 51,” he says. “Finally, I said ‘I don’t actually believe in this stuff.’ They asked, ‘Why not?’ And I said, ‘The onus is on you to prove something exists. I can’t prove that things don’t exist. I can’t prove a negative.’ And they said, ‘But we have.’ So, I thought I better find out.”
He hooked up with psychology professor Barry Beyerstein and his Committee for Skeptical Enquiry, an investigative body using scientific experimentation to disclaim the claims of the paranormal. At one point in the 1990s, at the height of The X-Files’ popularity, William toured Canadian campuses clarifying his position, driven in part by his interest in philosophy.
“If you’re interested in philosophy, you try to find out what’s real, what’s not real, what’s true, what’s not true. All of those questions.”
Or as The X-Files was fond of saying: “The Truth is Out There.”
William’s biggest fan, then and now, is his wife Emmanuelle. Their fairy-tale romance began decades ago and has the trappings of well… a movie. In 1995, when Emmanuelle was living in Paris, she wrote the Cigarette Smoking Man a letter.
“I wrote to him not as a fan but as a femme, which means as a woman. In France, we are quite bold and determined as women,” she says of her early crush. “I wrote to him and we wrote to each other but, at the time, our lives were different, so we lost contact. Sometimes people enter your life and it’s not the right time but, eventually, if it’s important, it comes back and that’s when it’s working. In 2010, I got back to him and we reconnected.”
William invited her to meet him at a fan convention in London.
“It’s what we call in French le coup de foudre or love at first sight,” says Emmanuelle.
In 2011, they married but remained apart. Emmanuelle was the Director of Finance for the city of Heyres on the French Riviera. She loved her job and had responsibilities, so the couple met in Canada or in France for a month at a time. It worked for awhile, but separation took its toll.
“When you say goodbye at the airport, it becomes more and more difficult,” she laments. “There are many things you want to share together. When something nice happens, you want to be with your beloved.”
In 2014, Emmanuelle finally joined William in Vancouver. William’s two adult children from an earlier marriage and three grandchildren live in the US.
Emmanuelle is a former equestrian – she stables her horse, Helios, at the lake south of Blaine – and has taken up boxing. She spars at a Vancouver gym three hours a day, six days a week, preparing for her first amateur fight.
“You discover a lot about your personality,” she says. “You fight for victory, to be a better version of yourself.”
Given their athletic and creative pursuits, retirement isn’t in the cards.
“I don’t use the R word. I don’t say the word and I don’t use it,” William says emphatically. “As John Gielgud said, ‘actors never retire, the parts just get smaller.’”
At 81, William is still in demand for acting and directing gigs.
“One has more fluidity I suppose,” he continues. “I mean I don’t go to work every morning at a certain time and finish at a certain time. I have flexibility in what I do, but I don’t think of myself as being retired. I end up getting caught in TV work or other projects. For me, to stay active, to stay alert and to do what you want to do is critical and I find working is what keeps me going.”
Sidebar- A chat with William
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give him?
“I would say don’t worry so much. Things will work out.”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“I was very influenced by Michael Elliott, who was a theatre director at the National Theatre. His vision of what theatre could do – a depth of humanity – was so inspiring.”
What are you most grateful for?
“I’m grateful for good health, especially at my age. I attribute it to keeping my brain active, physical activity and good luck. For me, it’s not genetic. My parents didn’t live this long.”
What does success mean to you?
“Recognition helps, whatever that may mean. For a water skier, it’s a very small community and if the other water skiers recognize you, that’s good. In the TV world, I have a public profile and that counts for something for sure.”