Jason Beghe and David Duchovny's friendship began when they were in ninth grade at the Collegiate School in New York City. Duchovny was the new kid, and Beghe was immediately drawn to him. "I saw him, and I said, 'You know something? You and I are gonna be friends,'" Beghe recalled in a video interview with Mark Bunker. "And I was right." Per the New York Daily News, it was Beghe who convinced Duchovny to pursue an acting career.
The two remained so close after school that Duchovny received an invite to Beghe and Angie Janu's 2000 wedding at the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles. Beghe was a practicing Scientologist at the time, and Duchovny told the Daily Beast that other members of the church used a device similar to a lie detector to test him at the wedding, presumably to see if he was Scientology material. "I did a session on the E-meter, and I realized immediately, because they're asking very personal questions, that they were gathering information that I didn't want to give out to a stranger," Duchovny recalled. "So, the session didn't go well."
Duchovny revealed that he had observed a distinct change in the way Beghe spoke and acted, describing his friend's behavior as "cult-ish." Eventually, the two men became distant. "Scientology affected our relationship in that we didn't get to enjoy each other as much as we could have," Beghe confessed to the Daily Beast in 2017.
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