Part of The X-Files featuring David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, and William B. Davis.
Rise to Fame
Two failed X-Files auditions had him walking into the Skinner tryout in a bad mood. Chris Carter cast him on the spot, reading the surliness as exactly right for a morally rigid FBI bureaucrat. Before that, his path to Hollywood was genuinely strange: he fled Iran during the 1979 revolution while working as a defense contractor, spent years in Austin as a theater janitor and set builder, and got his first major film break as a Wes Craven serial killer in Shocker. The grumpiness that got him cast wasn't performance. It was the resume.
In the Spotlight
Skinner made him a genre TV institution, and he never really left that lane. Walker gave him 69 episodes as a Texas ranching patriarch from 2021 to 2024, the most sustained work since the X-Files revival. He's also the only actor besides David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to appear in every version of the franchise: the original series, both films, and the 2016 miniseries. The character arc helped: Skinner went from bureaucratic obstacle to surrogate father figure, and Pileggi played the whole thing without sentimentality. Whether an X-Files reboot happens or not, the character outlasted the show itself.
Side Notes
He's fluent in Turkish from his high school years in Turkey while his father moved the family across the Middle East for defense contracting. His wife, Arlene Warren, was a stand-in for Gillian Anderson on the set, and David Duchovny was their best man. The whole thing reads like someone scripted the X-Files into their personal life. He's said he based Skinner partly on his own father, a stern contractor who died shortly after the show premiered.