Gunman, Alone
By Melissa Perenson

Sci-Fi Flix, August 1998


It was supposed to have been only a one-shot gig for a nascent cult 
television series. Little did actor and comedian Dean Haglund realize 
that he would become a recurring character on one of the decade's most 
popular shows, The X-Files.

"Back then the show was at the bottom of the ratings. I didn't even 
watch the show," recalls the long-haired Haglund, who plays Ringo Langly 
on the series. Langly, of course, is part of the trio of paranoid 
conspiracy theorists known as the Lone Gunmen, a group of off-beat 
irregulars whom Agent Fox Mulder often turns to when he needs sources 
outside the official FBI framework.

Haglund was one of 30 people auditioning for the three available - and, 
at the time, interchangeable - Lone Gunmen roles in the first season 
episode, "E.B.E" "they were all friends of mine. You know, you've got 
the long hair, you audition for the same thing over and over again," 
laughs Haglund. "The audition was just to bring in alternative-type 
people. So there were bald-headed guys in military fatigues that were 
six-foot-nine. [The X-Files' producers] didn't know what they were 
looking for. I had to pretend I was on the phone in the audition with 
the other two casting directors. I thought, 'This is stupid.'"

That initial appearance by the Lone Gunmen may have not fulfilled the 
original vision of then-producer Glen Morgan, who based the characters 
on people he'd met at a UFO show prior to the start of The X-Files. But 
the Gunmen struck a chord with fans - particularly on the Internet.

"I don't know how many episodes later it was, but I got a call, saying 
'We want you guys back.' So I did it again, and went on and thought 
nothing of it," says Haglund, a Vancouver native. From there, things 
just snowballed. "Now we're part of the family of The X-Files. That is 
cool. And a big surprise."

With his animated manner, black-rimmed glasses, and long blond hair, 
Haglund's contributions to the Lone Gunmen is unique, and inspired, in 
part, by his own college days. "I had a lot of friends I went to 
university with and everybody I knew in the computer science department 
were the geeky, sleep-in-the-basement, living-with-their-parents types,
" explains Haglund. "They were all into cool bands and were rebellious 
kinds of guys. And they were into computers because that was like doing
something creative, where you could just be on your own. You could 
express your own individuality through the medium of computers. Since 
that's my experience of computer geeks, I based my character on that 
sort of thing."

Before the Gunmen became a regular staple on the show, it became a 
standing joke that every time we saw Langly, he was wearing different 
glasses. "Because we  weren't recurring characters, the proper guy just 
had this big zipped-up bag of glasses," explains Haglund. "I didn't 
wear them in the audition and then the first day on the set they said, 
'Let's do glasses. Just pick a pair. Here, put these on.' Afterwards, I 
threw them back into the bag. The next time the proper guy came back to 
me and asked, 'Do you remember what you were wearing/' I had more or 
less forgotten, so we were trying to match it. But it was like, 'That's 
close enough. Who cares?' Then the third time we couldn't find the last 
pair." He laughs. "That problem will never happen again; they now keep 
the glasses in a box, the Langly box of props. The watch and the glasses 
and everything is in there."

Not surprisingly, one of Haglund's favorite episodes to work on was 
this season's "Unusual Suspects", a humorous flashback piece which 
explored the origins of the Lone Gunmen. "I really liked 'Unusual 
Suspects' strictly because of working with Richard Belzer, who plays 
Detective Munch on Homicide: Life on the Streets. I do stand-up so I 
knew all of his stand up [routines]. I've seen him so many times, and 
I've rented the most obscure tapes that he was on. It was great working 
with him."

Getting into the history of the Gunmen was interesting, too. "Up until 
that time we were making up our own back-story. Bruce [Harwood], who 
plays Byers, thought he was a photocopier repairman. I thought I as two 
courses away from a degree in computer science at some university and I 
just dropped out. Then we find out that I'm selling illegal cable and 
he's with the FCC. It was a great surprise. A lot of fun."

As much fun as it was doing "Unusual Suspects," Haglund adds, "they've 
all been so much fun. 'Kill Switch' was a lot of fun to do because I'm 
a big William Gibson fan. The ice skating one, that episode when we had 
to go out in the field, was tough because I don't really know how to 
skate. I couldn't skate. So I had to go learn how to skate just for 
that episode. Which explains why I was so wobbly. When I got out on the 
ice, though, just about everybody was a bad skater. So we all looked 
like really bad skaters."

The dedication of the cast and crew on The X-Files is just one thing 
that has set The X-Files apart from Haglund's other television acting experiences. "We work until 3:30, 4:30 in the morning. And Bruce and I 
just did a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids on UPN where everybody was going, 
'Oh man, it's 11:30! It's so late, I can't believe it!' And Bruce and 
I looked at each other - sometimes our call is 11:30 pm - are you 
kidding me? What's late about that?"

Haglund had enjoyed how the writers have inserted some real-life 
Internet humor into the dialogue of this trio of techno geeks. For 
example, in one episode, the Gunmen ask David Duchovny's Mulder whether 
he'd like to join them for a night Net surfing and nitpicking the 
scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2. "People often ask when they see my 
[comedy] show - where I improvise a brand new episode of The X-Files - 
whether we get a chance to improvise on the TV show. We don't, because 
the Lone Gunmen have to keep moving the plot forward so you can't 
really go off on tangents. But there are the odd nights that we do get 
to. After I ask [Duchovny] if he wants to hop on the Internet, he made 
up that line, 'I'd rather do laundry" or "I have to do laundry." We 
all cracked up in rehearsal, so we kept it in."

The comedy routine Haglund's referring to, of course, is his improv 
routine he's been doing for years on both the comedy club and 
convention circuits. "It's just a joy to improvise a brand new episode 
of The X-Files - it's a couple of hours at the comedy club as opposed 
to a seven a day on-set," he laughs good-naturedly. The act got started 
when his agent suggested he take the place of William B. Davis 
(Cigarette Smoking Man) at a convention in Fresno, California. "My 
agent said, 'You've got 45 minutes. Just do something funny. Do 
stand-up or do something crazy.' I think, 'Oh, my God, what has he 
done?' Because I had been doing stand-up and all that, I hadn't been 
watching a lot of the episodes. I had them on tape., but I hadn't a 
chance to see them. I thought people were going to ask me a bunch of 
questions about the show, and I wasn't going to know anything. I'd 
look like an idiot. So I came up with the idea to create a brand new 
episode so I don't have to answer questions about other episodes. There 
was a lot of pressure, but it went over really well. I haven't looked 
back. It's great."

With 16 years worth of experience doing stand-up comedy, Haglund now 
finds it tough to separate his two passions. "Each feeds the other, I 
find. I love doing film and television. But I find if I do that too 
long, I have to get the live response you get from theater and 
stand-up," says Haglund. "I like going back, just getting that 
[response] and sharpening my edge so when I come back to the camera I 
can still have that energy, which is great. I don't think I'll ever 
stop."

Comedy is just one aspect of Haglund's diverse background. Born in 
Winnipeg, as a child actor Haglund gained experience in Canadian 
theater. "When I was old enough to get into bars I started doing  
stand-up to work my way through theater school, instead of taking that 
waitering job. I did comedy instead to pay my tuition," recalls Haglund, 
who trained with the Prairie Theater Exchange in Winnipeg and received 
his multidisciplinary arts degree from Simon Fraser University. "That 
worked out great. So I got my degree in theater and I alternated between 
doing plays and stand-up and theater splits and television and film. 
So I've been doing all of that all of the time all along. I think of 
myself as an actor who does comedy. I'm a funny actor." Among his TV 
credits are appearances in The Commish, Sliders, Street Justice, and 
the TV movie Mask of death. For the past 16 years, Haglund's improv 
skills have shown him to be an integral performer with the Vancouver
TheaterSports League.

Like his character on the series, Haglund is on the technological 
cutting edge, having set up his own Web page to correspond with fans. 
"It's sort of a blurred line, I suppose, between where's the geek and 
where's the real me. Actually it's also so I don't actually have to 
write the fans back," confides Haglund. "I'm bad with letters. I want 
to save paper and stamps." He pauses, crinkling his brow playfully. 
"Exactly what is a stamp, anyway? I figured if all the fans are on the 
Internet already, I can just alleviate a lot of this paper traffic and 
standard mail by going directly, which is great for me. But I'm three 
months behind on my E-mail right now because I get such volume."

Although Haglund has his own Web page, his own Net surfing time is 
somewhat limited. "I don't get a chance to [surf] because I feel 
guilty if I'm wasting my time surfing," admits Haglund. Especially 
since "There are all these fans who've written me and are just waiting 
for a reply."