Duchovny was 4 when the Yankees ended their run of 22 World Series trips in 29 years and embarked on an 11-year postseason drought. He was 8 when Yankees great Mickey Mantle retired and, as Duchovny put it, “the dreaded Danny Cater years” ensued. By the time owner George Steinbrenner had steered the Yankees back to prominence in the late 1970s, Duchovny was a Princeton-bound teen whose fandom had cooled.
“I philosophically and spiritually and emotionally related way more to a Red Sox fan than I did as a prototypical Yankee fan,” Duchovny said during a recent video chat from Greece, where he’s filming a series for Prime Video. “My childhood Yankees were terrible. They were not even contenders — they were cellar dwellers. So I love the losers. I understood the Boston mind-set, I thought, and actually related to it more than the Steinbrenner win-at-all-costs, proto-Trumpian blustering, losing-is-not-an-option bulls—.”
When Duchovny began writing a screenplay in the early 2000s about a terminally ill father whose health ebbs and flows with his favorite team’s results, the decision to focus on the 86-year title drought of the Red Sox was an easy call. Starring Duchovny as that long-suffering Red Sox fan and Logan Marshall-Green as his estranged son, “Reverse the Curse” hit theaters and on-demand platforms Friday.
The darkly comic drama is set against the 1978 American League pennant race, which culminated with light-hitting Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent powering the homer that sent Boston to another titleless fall. By tethering a dying man’s fate to a famously doomed team, “Reverse the Curse” wields defeat on the diamond as a metaphor for mortality’s inevitability.
“What drove David, more than trying to make a baseball film, was trying to explore grief and how absurd and funny and lovely and messy it is all at once,” Marshall-Green said. “We’re all losers in the end. You have to give over to an L.”
Duchovny’s baseball bona fides run deep. He fondly recalled learning to hit and catch from his father, a second-generation Ukrainian immigrant who played softball across the boroughs on a team mostly composed of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. While Duchovny obsessed over the Bronx Bombers, stepping into Yankee Stadium was an evasive luxury. So to get his major league fix, Duchovny would cut coupons off the back of Dairylea milk cartons, trade them for tickets to Shea Stadium and head to Queens to root against the hated Mets.
“If I went to a game,” he said, “it was by clipping milk coupons.”
“Reverse the Curse,” however, was born not out of his affinity for America’s pastime but a harrowing parental experience. When Duchovny’s daughter grew dangerously ill at 9 months old, the “X-Files” actor acknowledged briefly becoming “gun shy” about reattaching himself to his child. The anxiety passed, but the idea lingered. In forming the characters of “Reverse the Curse,” Duchovny imagined a father who never stopped blaming himself for his son’s childhood illness and kept his distance for decades — except when it came to bantering about the Red Sox.
“There are many men that still have trouble talking about their emotions,” co-star Stephanie Beatriz said. “But sports? It’s easy to talk about sports. You can talk about sports with a stranger. You can connect over stats and players and teams. For these two men, sports is the thing that they are able to talk about.”
But as Duchovny framed his father-son story against Boston’s 1978 campaign, he embarked on a losing streak of his own. First, the Red Sox’s 2004 championship led him to shelve the project before he figured out a way to work that curse-breaking title into the narrative. More frustratingly, production companies played hardball when it came to financing the movie — then titled “Bucky F*cking Dent” — out of concern over the international box office.
“The stupid wisdom in Hollywood is that baseball movies don’t travel,” Duchovny said. “Other cultures aren’t interested in baseball. And I would always say, ‘It’s not a baseball movie.’ But you call your movie ‘Bucky F*cking Dent’ and you have a lot of baseball in it, and people are going to think it’s a baseball movie.
“So I think that was always the — no pun intended — strike against it.”
Entertaining the idea that the movie may not happen, Duchovny expanded on the screenplay and turned it into a 2016 novel. Incorporating fresh details from the book into the script, he continued to pitch the film around Hollywood until, at long last, indie studio Yale Productions gave him the green light in 2022.
Although Duchovny had long envisioned himself as the son, even as he entered his 50s, he conceded he had aged out of the role and instead cast himself as the cantankerous cancer patient Marty. Marshall-Green then boarded the project as his son, Ted, a flailing writer with a side gig slinging peanuts at Yankee Stadium.
Beatriz, meanwhile, joined the cast as a palliative nurse caring for Duchovny’s character. It was a poignant undertaking for the “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” actor, who lost her father to cancer shortly before filming and spent his final months serving as his caregiver. As she read the novel to prepare for the role, Beatriz took to reciting Duchovny’s words at her ailing father’s bedside.
“He loved baseball,” Beatriz said. “So in his last couple weeks, I would read it to him.”
Shooting a microbudget film over three weeks is a tricky task for any director, let alone one also starring in the movie and overseeing the screenplay. On some days, Marshall-Green recalled, Duchovny had so many balls in the air that he wouldn’t memorize his lines until five minutes before filming. Marshall-Green would then marvel as his director calmly put on his costume, helped set up the shot, perused the script and promptly delivered the scene all the same.
“No matter how stressful things were for him,” Marshall-Green said, “he never let that show.”
Shortly before the film’s release, Duchovny made one concession to his vision: The distributor deemed the title “Bucky F*cking Dent” a liability because of search and marketing concerns around profanity. After nixing “Curveball” and “The Long Game” as alternatives, he gave the go-ahead to “Reverse the Curse.”
Whatever the title, Duchovny is glad that, after a decades-long journey around the base paths, this tale has at last crossed home plate.
“Even when it would fall apart again and again and I wasn’t able to make it, I never thought it was because the movie doesn’t work or the book doesn’t work or the story doesn’t work,” Duchovny said. “I just thought they don’t see it. When I get to make it, they’ll see it.”