Ryan Coogler’s X-Files casting confirms big change from the original

Deadline is reporting that Ryan Coogler’s upcoming reboot of The X-Files will include at least three pretty high-profile guest stars: Steve Buscemi, Ben Foster, and Amy Madigan, the last of whom is fresh off her Oscar win for Weapons. We don’t know who any of them will be playing yet, but generally, their casting points to a change in the way they did things in the original TV series.

The original run of The X-Files almost never cast big guest stars. Instead, the series usually relied on less well-known actors. Most likely, this was a budgetary choice, as the show had over 20 episodes every season and Fox was probably unwilling to pay a fortune to get big stars every week. Regardless of why, the effect was that monsters-of-the-week like Eugene Victor Tooms (Doug Hutchison) and Pusher (Robert Wisden) really seemed like real-life oddities, as their casting choices didn’t overpower their characters. This also kept David Duchovny’s Agent Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s Agent Scully front-and-center in the series, without them having to compete for the spotlight with their own guest stars.

That said, when watching reruns of the show now, it’s sometimes distracting just who shows up in small parts. Actors like Jack Black, Seth Green, and Ryan Reynolds all had bit parts on The X-Files early in their careers. Famously, Vince Gilligan wanted Bryan Cranston as Walter White in Breaking Bad from his experience of working with him on The X-Files.

Occasionally, The X-Files did cast a big guest star back in the ‘90s, and when they did, it was usually for a special occasion. For example, there’s a funny, charming Christmas episode in season 6 where Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner play ghosts. And when Michael McKean played a man in black named Morris Fletcher, it was for the big, two-part episode “Dreamland.”

To be fair, the Deadline announcement also pointed to a handful of other guest stars who aren’t quite as high profile, so perhaps Buscemi, Foster, and Madigan are outliers in the way the show is doing its casting. But if the new take on The X-Files is going to succeed, the focus should be on its two leads, Himesh Patel and Danielle Deadwyler, more so than whatever big star they got to play this week’s monster.