David discussing Tea
"She's so-- smart and funny, and she's so loyal. She's honest and she's kind. The most gentle person I've ever met. And she really seemed to care about me. Which shocked me. I thought, 'I don't want to [mess] this up.' I ended up asking her [to marry me] every day until we got married. It was like our little thing. I still ask her. She'll say, 'Ask me,' and I'll ask her. She never said no."
-----"A Man and his X" Los Angeles Times, October 1997
"She's the best thing that's happened to me in my life. We dated for three months, then I asked her to marry me and to my utter surprise she said yes. She's the missing piece of puzzle in my life."
-----"Mr. X" German GQ magazine, October 1998
"I was the slow, trial-balloon guy. I said, 'What if, um, hypothetically, if you know, maybe I was, perhaps, to ask you to, kind of at some point in the future, the near future, ask you to get married.... hypothetically, what would your possible answer be?'"
-----Washington Post
Pulling up to an L.A. yoga studio for an afternoon class, David Duchovny is greeted by a very pleasant sight indeed: his wife, the impossibly lithe Tea Leoni, whose sunny presence makes immediately clear what it was that drew him to her. "First, it's her integrity," says the X-Files star wryly. "Second, it's her legs."
And what was it about him that snared Leoni? "Easy," she banters back. "First, it's his integrity. And second, it's his butt."
-----"Xtreme Chemistry" People magazine, July 1998
"I would never sing in public. Because I've got a horrible voice. It just sounds bad. I mean, Tea claims to like to hear me sing, and I think it's because I enjoy it so much. We sing in the car. She made me sing that song 'I'd Really Love to See You Tonight.' And I sing Bad Company's 'Ready for Love' and 'Feel Like Makin' Love.' And she air-drums. This is why we have tinted windows. A lot of people think it's because we don't want people to see us and follow us home, but it's really because we're making fools of ourselves."
Was there a specific moment [with Tea] when you knew?
"Well, I remember a first moment. It wasn't the moment where I thought, gee, I could spend the rest of my life with this person, but we started talking on the phone first before we went out on our first dates. We spoke on the phone for about three weeks before actually going out to dinner. And midway through the second week, I was at work and I had this thought: Gee, I can't wait to go home and call Tea. And then I checked myself, and I thought, you're excited about going home to call somebody that you haven't really met."
----"David in Love" US magazine, March 1998
"I used to ask her ten to fifteen times a day. I just liked asking. She'd always say yes. [laughs] I still ask her to marry me, I like it so much. She hasn't turned me down once."
-----"Scully & Mulder's Xcellent Adventure" Details, June 1998
"We've been married five, six months, and I like the feeling a lot. It's like, this is my life, this is who I come home to, this is who I tell the truth to. All those things are good."
-----Late 1997
"The only negative adjective I would associate with Tea is 'speculative.' She has a very rich, speculative imagination. It's part of what makes her a really good actress. She will go off on these tangents that, by the time she's done, have very little to do with reality. It's kind of fun to watch. It's like free association, and if you're not paying attention you forget where it started. We both laugh at that. But no nagging, and she's not possessive."
-----"An actor and a poet" Movieline magazine, July 1998
On getting acquainted with Tea:
"I wasn't able to come in from Vancouver for three weeks so we actually started to talk on the phone. We talked for about three weeks before we really went out to dinner. After like two weeks I would actually look forward to coming home from work and talking to this person that I barely knew.
"So I knew that something was going on and then we went out to dinner and we've been together ever since. I mean, we had these three weeks. It became an intense personal conversation without physical contact so it was kind of scary to actually go out because we'd gone further, you know, talking to each other about each other on the phone than you would normally."
On getting married to someone he'd known for just a short period of time:
"I was ready. I don't think that I knew that. It's like I was an accident waiting to happen, you know, in that way. I was ready, but I think also, I was old enough [36] and wise enough to know who wasn't right. I may have felt like I wanted to or that I was ready to get married, but I wouldn't have gotten married until that person came along.
"So I think that when I met her, I was ready completely. I mean, it was one of those moments in my life. It's one of the clearest moments in my life because I didn't agonize over it at all. It was just apparent to me that I wanted to marry this woman and that she wanted to marry me. So all the explaining was to my friends and family about, you know, why am I getting married after four months? I never had to explain it to myself and I never doubted it and I haven't had a day of doubting it.
"[Marriage] completely changes everything, I think. I mean I'm still susceptible to getting caught up in the madness of show-business from time to time, but its less pressing than it was. I mean, when you have somebody that you trust and somebody that you can tell your secrets to, it makes all the other things, not that they are superficial, but they kind of wash away at the end of the day."
---"Past and future" Xpose Special, July 1998
"[I]t was just like a great love story for me. Since I don't live in LA anymore I had a hotel. I came down and stayed in the hotel. She picked me up because I didn't have a car. We went to this [Italian] restaurant we still go to, so I'm not going to say the name. We went for a drive. I couldn't go back to her place, because I don't know her that well, and she wasn't going to come back to the hotel. We didn't want the date to end. What happened was my brother lives in the neighborhood that we ate in, and we went over there, but it was about midnight because we had stayed at dinner talking so long, and my brother was sound asleep, the house was dark, so he didn't even know who we were. I said 'Hey, Dan' And he said 'Dave?' I said 'This is Tea' Didn't even see her.
"She's going to kill me but she made the first move. She did it in a wonderful way. [T]here's a Woody Allen film where he's walking with Dianne Keaton and he says 'I know we're going to kiss later, and it's going to be really awkward when we say goodnight, so let's get it out of the way now.' And she kind of did that. It was in the restaurant, before all this. She said, 'nobody's looking, give me a kiss.' We have a waiter there that always waits on us, and he said that when we came there--he knew her because this restaurant she goes to a lot; he had never met me--he said when we came in that first night that he knew.
"Then we just drove; we got back in the car and we drove for awhile. The next morning I called her up and we went out to breakfast and ran into my brother and they didn't recognize each other because they met in complete darkness. We've tried to see each other every day since then. [W]e get one week a month together and then weekends."
-----Howard Stern radio show
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