The X-Files’ David Duchovny looked back on nearly losing his then-infant daughter West, now 25, while appearing on SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa.
More than two decades after his eldest child a respiratory virus, RSV, the actor, 63, opened up about the traumatizing experience.
‘When my daughter West was nine months old, she got RSV,’ he began. ‘I’d never heard of it until my daughter got it and it’s very dangerous for infants and she went into the hospital and… nobody knew what it was.’
He continued: ‘They thought maybe she had meningitis. She was non-responsive. They gave her a spinal tap. It was really horrifying and this was her first cold, if you can remember as a parent, that first cold.’
The X-Files’ David Duchovny looked back on nearly losing his then-infant daughter West, now 25, while appearing on SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa; seen in 2023
RSV, short for Respiratory syncytial virus, infects the lungs and breathing passages.
According to the CDC, ‘infants and older adults are more likely to develop severe RSV and need hospitalization.’
Duchovny went on to reveal that West’s RSV battle ‘was truly a nightmare’ because he really thought he ‘could lose her.’
At the time, he was juggling being a first-time father and starring as FBI agent Fox Mulder on his hit series The X-Files.
He credited his then-wife, Téa Leoni, who he split from in 2014, for ‘staying in the hospital with West’ as he was on set.
‘I would go and visit after work for a few hours and then I’d go home,’ he explained.
Duchovny admitted that he would think in the shower about trying to ‘acclimate’ himself to ‘world without’ West.
‘This is a real possibility. I’ve got to think about it and I realized I would never get over it. Not that I couldn’t live, but just that life would, as it says in the book, it would have no meaning or joy,’ he told listeners. ‘I would go on, but I’d be a shell of something and West was fine.’
While he stated that his daughter had a successful recovery, he ‘had troubles shortly after that.’
‘I don’t know if the word is reattaching, but accepting her back in. I was so terrified,’ he confessed.
More than two decades after his eldest child a respiratory virus, RSV, the actor, 63, opened up about the traumatizing experience
‘When my daughter West was nine months old, she got RSV,’ he began. ‘I’d never heard of it until my daughter got it and it’s very dangerous for infants and she went into the hospital and… nobody knew what it was.’
Ripa said she understood how hard it much have felt to fear ‘getting too attached’ after possibly losing a child.
‘That makes sense,’ the talk show host, 53, replied.
He said the experience inspired him to write, direct and star in his 2023 film Bucky F**king Dent.
‘That’s the true heart of the story is really me as a father and not my father, and not my mother even, and not me as a son, but it’s really about, I’d say, me and my daughter,’ Duchovny concluded of the topic.
Duchovny went on to reveal that West’s RSV battle ‘was truly a nightmare’ because he really thought he ‘could lose her’
At the time, he was juggling being a first-time father and starring as FBI agent Fox Mulder on his hit series The X-Files; seen in 2024
During the interview, Duchovny also spoke about the end of his 17-year marriage to West’s mom.
‘Mark and I got sad when you and Téa got divorced,’ Ripa told him. ‘We got sad as though we had something personally invested in it, which is so ridiculous.’
‘Well that’s sweet to say, but, you know, I’m proud of the way we raised the kids afterwards and, you know, we all stayed very close together in the city and, you know, as a child of divorce myself, it was something that I never wanted to do, but of course, you know, I did and we did and just did the best that we could afterwards,’ he responded.
Duchovny added that he doesn’t have ‘regrets’ but understand it must have been painful for the two children West and Kyd, 21.
West ended up following her parents into showbusiness, and began acting in 2018 when she landed a role in The X-Files alongside her dad.
She has since appeared in Netflix’s series, s Painkiller, and Hulu’s Saint X as well as the film A Mouthful of Air.
