The X-Files Best Villain Showed Up First As A Monster Victim

The X-Files episode that Nicholas Lea first guest starred in has a premise that would likely keep it off any screens today. In “Gender Bender,” Agents Mulder and Scully pursue a serial killer with the ability to change their gender at will.

Sharing a night of passion with the suspect is all it takes for one of their victims to quickly fall ill and die.

The agents track the killer to a secluded Amish-like community, where Scully encounters a man who is inexplicably able to inspire passion merely with the touch of his hand.

The episode ends with a strong implication that the killer and their friends and family were all aliens who have since gone back to space–but not before this early X-Files bad guy takes a chunk out of Nicholas Lea.

When The X-Files first brings us Nicholas Lea’s Michel, he’s a victim, but he’s a lucky one. His passionate encounter with the killer is interrupted by a police officer before the couple can finish. So, like the other victims, Michel falls sick, but unlike the rest, he survives.

Mulder and Scully interview Michel in the hospital, and he takes some prodding to admit what they seem to already know–that before they ran away, the killer transformed into a man.

Watching this early The X-Files episode, and this scene with Nicholas Lea in particular, is kind of strange in that–assuming you’re an invested fan of the series–you know it’s the single friendliest conversation these three will ever have on screen.

The X-Files producers were impressed enough with Nicholas Lea’s performance in “Gender Bender” that he was allowed to audition for the role of Alex Krycek in spite of his previous appearance.

Lea first plays Krycek in “Sleepless,” working with Agent Mulder on a case involving a Vietnam vet–played by Tony Todd–who claims to have been subjected to tests that have taken away his ability to sleep.

At the end of the episode, Krycek reports to The X-Files‘s most notorious villain–the Smoking Man–making it clear that Nicholas Lea’s character is not one of the good guys.

While on The X-Files Nicholas Lea’s character starts off as one of the Smoking Man’s operatives, by Season 3 he becomes the very definition of a wild card. He seemingly murders Mulder’s father, and shortly afterward he just barely escapes a car-bombing set up by the Smoking Man.

In many of the appearances that follow, Krycek is an independent agent on the run, no longer seeming to have any allegiances but still with a head full of the Smoking Man’s secrets.

Some of his more memorable The X-Files appearances find Nicolas Lea possessed by an oil slick alien and trapped in a nuclear bunker, in a Russian gulag with Mulder, and of course there’s “S.R. 819,” when Krycek nearly kills A.D. Skinner with nanite technology.

The X-Files alum Nicholas Lea hasn’t been the most active screen actor lately, but if you’re a Mike Flanagan fan you probably enjoyed his performance in Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Lea played Judge John Neal, overseeing the case against Bruce Greenwood’s Roderick Usher.