Since several hundred actors made guest appearances during The X-Files' nine-season run, coming up with a top ten list was a daunting task. In order to eliminate the chance of being second-guessed, IGN Stars fed all 201 episodes into the IGN Super Computer (located right next to the IGN Rating Dartboard) and this is what it came up with – just in time for Mulder and Scully July 25 return to the big screen.
Since it came from the infallible Super Computer, and not a human mind that's subject to having its own personal opinion about stuff, this list is unassailable. But we were surprised that Tony Todd's turn in "Sleepless" didn't make the list, but there wasn't anything I could do about it (the Super Computer's results are also legally binding).
We did wind up having to rewrite the Super Computer's descriptions of the top ten, however, because its writing style tends to lean towards the technical and dense. In fact, it sometimes even slips into COBOL (it's very old, we're not exactly swimming in money at IGN). You're welcome, as always, to "tell us what we missed," for all the good it will do. The IGN Super Computer doesn't read the comments section because "insults do not compute," but the rest of us do.
10. CCH Pounder in "Duane Barry"
Airdate: 10/14/1994
- Fox Home Entertainment
"I don't even know what the 'CCH' stands for."
As Special Agent/FBI hostage negotiator Lucy Kazdin, CCH Pounder creates the perfect guest character; one we sense has a very interesting back-story, even though it's never told to us.
Intense yet subtle, she holds her own with David Duchovny's Mulder from the start, and effortlessly commands the respect of the agents around her, presaging her subsequent starring role on The Shield. Her deliciously dismissive delivery as she orders Krycek to fetch her some coffee is priceless but her best scene is her last. She had completely written off Duane Barry as brain-damaged kook, but when a medical exam reveals microscopic drill holes in his teeth and implants in his nasal cavities, she's befuddled, and reveals the findings to Mulder.
- Fox Home Entertainment
"So let me get this straight: There's black oil, aliens, eviler aliens - and Mimi Rogers?!"
Kazdin is intriguingly enigmatic in the scene, doling out information with a Mona Lisa smile and watching intently for Mulder's reaction. Wait a minute…is she really a mocking skeptic of alien abduction, or is she part of the conspiracy? Pounder's cagey performance still has us wondering.
9. Michael McKean in "Dreamland I" (11/29/1998) and Dreamland II"
Airdates: 11/29/1998 and 12/6/1998
- Fox Home Entertainment
Dana has no idea what he has in mind.
Morris Fletcher is a dissatisfied Man in Black, based out of Area 51. His wife and kids are almost as unhappy with him as he is with himself, so when a shared encounter with a spacecraft results in his switching bodies with the handsome and single Fox Mulder, Fletcher embraces it.
He looks at Mulder's stalled-out, basement-based career and sees a chance to become the fast-tracked go-getter he's always wanted to be. But when he starts slapping Scully's butt, and kissing Assistant Director Kersh's, Dana (as he calls her) becomes suspicious. Fletcher's just too lame and ordinary to pass himself off as Fox Mulder, even when he's wearing his face (not that there isn't some truth in his take on Mulder as an emotionally-stunted weirdo who could do with some bedroom furniture).
- Fox Home Entertainment
Fletcher takes it way past 11.
But the role isn't exclusively a comedic one. When he stumbles upon his heartbroken wife (Nora Dunn) crying into her wine glass at a bar, Fletcher is as surprised as we are at the pain and compassion he feels for her.
McKean is always great at playing oily jerks, and he's perfectly cast here; his scene with the Lone Gunmen is a perfect example of this. Here, he thanks them for believing all the many false stories about aliens he's created in order to protect the government's real secrets (Fletcher claims, for example, to have invented Saddam Hussein). We know he's a slick used-car salesman, yet we can't help but think he's offering us a great deal that we'd be foolish to pass up.
A small country full of actors have made their way into the ear-marked and red-taped records of The X-Files. With over 200 episodes across nine seasons to choose from, coming up with a top ten list was a daunting task.
In order to eliminate the chance of being second-guessed, IGN Stars fed all 201 episodes into the IGN Super Computer (located right next to the IGN Rating Dartboard) and this is what it came up with – just in time for Mulder and Scully July 25 return to the big screen. The Super Computer cannot be bargained with, or reasoned with. But it can process Vista and play a mean game of Snood, oh, and it dares you to disagree with the following picks in the Comments.
8. Lili Taylor in "Mind's Eye"
Airdate: 4/26/1998
- Fox Home Entertainment
The blind girl who lights up her cigarette by putting her face next to a gas burner is someone we want to know more about, even before she starts seeing murders through the eyes of a brutal stranger.
Mulder is immediately drawn to Lili Taylor's uncooperative Marty, even as he calls her on all that false bravado and "angry blind girl comedy routine." He wants to help her, but she's been fending for herself her entire tough life, and doesn't know how to trust anyone. When she learns the horrible truth, that the eyes she's been forced to look through are those of the father that she never knew (who murdered her mother) she again refuses the agent's plan to trap the man.
- Fox Home Entertainment
"Seriously, can you explain to me what happened to your career?"
Instead, Marty uses the cursed eyes one last time: To line up a kill-shot that lands her in prison. Mulder doesn't want to leave her there, and neither do we. Marty is so compelling she could have her own series. Of course, since the character was created by Tim Minear (Firefly, Wonderfalls, The Inside), it would probably have been cancelled after only a handful of intriguing episodes.
7. Nick Chinlund in "Irresistible" and "Orison"
Airdates: 1/13/1995 and 1/9/2000
- Fox Home Entertainment
A proud owner of a windowless van, no doubt.
Donnie Pfaster is the kind of villain that keeps us up at night, because his brand of evil is so familiar to us. A barely-disguised take on Jeffery Dahmer, Pfaster collects fingernails and hair – preferably off dead girls, though he'll settle for rummaging around a bathroom trash can for whatever's in there.
The series was never really clear on whether Donnie was an actual demon or just a really sick, sorry excuse for a human being, but it doesn't really matter. What we remember is the creepy way Pfaster runs his fingers through the hair of a deceased girl, how he can make something as clean as shampoo seem so dirty, and that weird "I'm-a-bug-with-antennae" (hey, you explain it) thing he does with his hands when he's captured at the end of "Irresistible."
- Fox Home Entertainment
What makes him all the more frightening is how downright passive and polite he is up until the moment he's going to kill; the perfect camouflage for a modern-day monster.
A small country full of actors have made their way into the ear-marked and red-taped records of The X-Files. With over 200 episodes across nine seasons to choose from, coming up with a top ten list was a daunting task.
In order to eliminate the chance of being second-guessed, IGN Stars fed all 201 episodes into the IGN Super Computer (located right next to the IGN Rating Dartboard) and this is what it came up with – just in time for Mulder and Scully July 25 return to the big screen. The Super Computer cannot be bargained with, or reasoned with. But it can process Vista and play a mean game of Snood, oh, and it dares you to disagree with the following picks in the Comments.
6. Bruce Campbell in "Terms of Endearment"
Airdate: 1/3/1999
- Fox Home Entertainment
"No, no, not my boom stick!"
Campbell plays Wayne, a polygamous demon desperate to have a non-demonic child in this creepy stand-out from season six. Tender with his sweet wife and slick with his bitchy wife, insurance salesman Wayne seems like a concerned father. Campbell is so convincing that you kind of feel bad for the guy – until he frames his devoted wife for murdering their child. When she figures out that he's the killer, he goes all dementor on her and sucks out her soul. But it turns out Wayne's other wife is an even worse devil than he is – a serial baby-killer who's been killing her normal children and stealing away with Wayne's demon seed because that's exactly what she's been waiting for.
- Fox Home Entertainment
"Hey She-Bitch? Make with the letting go."
Campbell's heartbreak as he digs up the sickening evidence of his wife's depravity is genuinely moving. It's not often that Bruce Campbell is given a role that allows him to completely shed his trademark snark, and he makes the most of it here.
5. Veronica Cartwright (Various Episodes)
- Fox Home Entertainment
The CSM has interesting taste in women.
The less said about Mulder's lame-ass half-brother Jeffery, the better. But Jeffery's mother (and Cancer Man's Ex) is a different story.
When we first meet Cassandra Spender, she is wheelchair-bound and zealous in her beliefs about alien abduction. She claims to have been taken numerous times and believes herself to be a sort of prophet of the coming arrival of aliens en masse. She's disconcertingly giddy about the whole thing, going so far as to say she now welcomes being taken again, and eventually she is.
- Fox Home Entertainment
"Black oil my ass."
Cassandra shows up a year later in a train car, healed of her paralysis. Cartwright is spellbinding as she transitions from gleeful fanatic to bitter, terrified doomsayer but we're not quite certain if her dire warnings about a coming black-oil apocalypse are true. Maybe she's just been driven to insanity by decades of government-sponsored torture. Mulder believes her enough to come this close to killing her, when she insists she must die if humanity is to live, though it's rogue, anti-invasion aliens that ultimately grant her request. The grateful smile she gives as she awaits being burned to death is a haunting conclusion to Cartwright's tragically unforgettable arc.
Tags: Top 10 X-Files Guest Stars
