Ryan Coogler’s X-Files Reboot Is Officially Happening… With the Right Star Attached
Ryan Coogler has found one of his X-Files leads with Danielle Deadwyler.
Fans of The X-Files want to believe that a reboot could work. And believing has just gotten a lot easier, as The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Danielle Deadwyler will be one of the show’s two co-leads. Furthermore, Ryan Coogler will officially write and direct the pilot.
At this point, it’s still unclear how the new show will relate to the original series created by Chris Carter, about FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigating the unexplainable. We only know that the new series will follow the original show’s model of focusing on two agents, one of whom will be played by Deadwyler.
Danielle Deadwyler made her debut in the 2012 drama A Cross to Bear, and soon had supporting turns in Atlanta, Watchmen, and P-Valley before breaking out as Cuffee in the 2021 Netflix western The Harder They Fall. With her intense stare and piercing eyes, Deadwyler has strong screen presence, which has translated into critical praise for her parts in Till, I Saw the TV Glow, and The Piano Lesson. Befitting The X-Files, Deadwyler has also done genre work, appearing in the Jaume Collet-Serra films Carry-On and The Woman in the Yard, and she has done TV, playing Syd’s cousin Chantel in The Bear.
That screen presence will serve Deadwyler well in The X-Files, whether she’s taking the Mulder part as a true believer or taking Scully’s skeptical position.
Ryan Coogler needs no introduction, certainly not during this Oscars season. His film Sinners, with its own X-Files-style premise involving vampires at a Mississippi juke joint, has earned a record-breaking 16 Oscars.
Fans have no reason to doubt the creatives behind the new X-Files series. However, they may wonder about the wisdom of doing an X-Files show at all. As much as we all love the original series, which first ran from 1993 to 2002 on Fox, it was very much a product of its time. The End of History optimism that marked the close of the 20th century made the conspiracy theories that drove the show a pleasing pastime, something to distract us from the real world. However, as made uncomfortably clear by the two revival seasons released in 2016 and 2018, the current era of destabilization makes Mudler’s interests less charming and more dangerous.
Even though we don’t know much about his approach to the new series, Coogler seems uniquely suited to avoid those problems. Black Panther and its sequel delivered all the superhero action that one wants from a Marvel movie, but was also frank in its depiction of Western nations’ plundering of Africa. Sinners is a thrilling vampire romp with great musical set pieces, but it wastes no words in addressing American racism. If anyone can manage to make a new X-Files both a lot of fun and politically relevant, all while avoiding the missteps of the revival series, it’s Ryan Coogler. And with Danielle Deadwyler in the lead, the series is sure to be dynamic and dramatically rich.
At least, that’s what we want to believe.
The X-Files is now in preproduction.