Special Agent Fox William Mulder (born
October 13,
1961), nicknamed "Spooky" Mulder, is a
fictional character played by
David Duchovny on the
1993-
2002 television series,
The X-Files.
FBI Special Agent Mulder believes in
UFOs and a
government conspiracy to hide or deny the truth of their existence. With his FBI partner
Dana Scully, the two work in the X-Files office, which is concerned with cases with particularly mysterious or possibly supernatural circumstances that were left unsolved and shelved by the FBI. Mulder considers the X-Files and the truth behind the supposed conspiracy so important that he has made them the main purpose of his life. During the series he lived alone near
Washington, D.C. but during the events of
the new movie he is living near Virginia with Scully.
Fox Mulder Affiliated with FBI First appearance "
Pilot"
Last appearance The X-Files: I Want to Believe (movie)
Portrayed by David Duchovny
Early life
Fox Mulder was born to
Bill Mulder and
Teena Mulder (maiden name Kuipers) on
October 13,
1961, presumably in
Massachusetts. It is later revealed that the
Cigarette Smoking Man is Mulder's biological father. He has a younger sister,
Samantha Mulder, who was born in
1965 and a half brother
Jeffrey Spender.
His first words, at 11 months, were "
JFK", and he grew up in
Chilmark, Massachusetts. The Mulder family had a summer house in
Quonochontaug, RI, where Fox and Samantha would play during summer vacations. He apparently had an active childhood, full of neighborhood baseball games (in the episode
Blood, Mulder mentions he played in right field), and tree climbing - where he once came face to face with a
praying mantis, an incident which terrified him and fostered an intense dislike for insects. He also developed an all-consuming fear of fire when his friend's house burned to the ground and they had to stay in the rubble all night to ward off looters. He had nightmares for years regarding that incident, but overcame his fear during the episode "Fire." Mulder apparently enjoyed
science fiction in his early years, dressing as
Mr. Spock from
Star Trek in childhood, and watching
The Magician. In his teenage years, Mulder was also very excited about space. Although he says he never wanted to be an
astronaut, he was delighted to meet an ex-astronaut during one of his investigations and admitted that watching a shuttle launch fulfilled one of his boyhood dreams.
On
November 27,
1973, Samantha disappeared mysteriously from their home in Chilmark, Massachusetts on Martha's Vineyard, an event which had a severe impact on the Mulder family, especially Fox. The subsequent investigation into her disappearance turned up no evidence. Soon after, Mulder's parents divorced.
Mulder's memories of the event are not necessarily to be trusted. In the pilot episode ("
Pilot"), Mulder told Scully that his sister "just disappeared out of her bed one night." Yet in a dream sequence in "
Little Green Men", Fox and Samantha are shown playing
Stratego and watching TV while their parents visit the neighbors, when flashing lights flood the room. Fox, frozen in shock, sees Samantha rise in the air and float out of the window, and an alien figure appears through the backlight.
This particular memory of her disappearance was recorded in a state of
hypnosis, under the direction of regression hypnotherapist
Dr. Heitz Werber in 1989 ("Closure"). In the season 5 episodes "Patient X" and "The Red and the Black", Mulder himself doubts the reliability of this memory, suspecting his recollection of the abduction may have been due to "an elaborate staging of events," or even entirely fabricated. Although he later regains his belief in an alien conspiracy, it is never made clear whether Mulder's memories under hypnotherapy were authentic or, indeed, who Samantha's abductors were.
[edit] Education and pre-X-Files career
The disappearance of Mulder's sister and his search for her soon after became the main consuming drive of his life. Mulder probably graduated from high school -- where his foreign language of choice was French ("
731") -- in spring of 1979 or 1980 (most likely 1980, as graduating in 1979 would have required him to skip a grade or start school before his fifth birthday-- although in Massachusetts a child started school the fall of the calendar year in which he turned 6, Mulder would have been 6 in October 1967, so could have graduated 1979). It is not known what he did between 1980 and 1983. In 1983, Mulder entered
Oxford University to study
psychology. He graduated
summa cum laude in 1986 (a blooper: degrees in the UK are classified as 'First Class Honors,' ' Upper Second (Class),' 'Lower Second (Class),' 'Third (Class),' etc., not Latin honors as in the United States).
Later that year, Mulder entered the
FBI Academy in Quantico,
Virginia. It is known that Mulder "joined the FBI" on
October 24,
1986, but it is unclear whether that is the date when he started his Quantico Academy course or finished it. On graduating from the Academy, Mulder started his work in the
Behavioral Science Unit (
psychological profiling) under Agent Bill Patterson, with whom he had a testing relationship. Around this time he wrote a
monograph on
serial killers and the
occult, which helped catch serial killer
Monty Props in 1988. This, coupled with his successful capture of such dangerous criminals as
John L. Roche and
Luther Lee Boggs, made Mulder something of an intra-Bureau legend.
At some point, Mulder started working as a field agent of the
Violent Crimes division under Agent Reggie Purdue. It is possible that Mulder did, for a short time, work both as a profiler and a field agent. During Mulder's first case as a field agent a fellow FBI agent died during a standoff with a suspect, and Mulder later blamed himself for sticking to the FBI protocol, which he felt didn't allow him to prevent the agent's death. His partner in violent crimes was Jerry Lamana, whose incompetence and self-serving agenda led to him misplacing evidence which resulted in the maiming of a federal judge ("
Ghost in the Machine"). In his later FBI career Mulder always showed varying degrees of disregard for rules.