I am standing outside the Soho House in Manhattan when I get a text from an unknown number. "Hey Tyler. Kyle here. I'm on the sixth floor at the end of the room. (Walk towards the light! ?) See you soon."
KYLE MACLACHLAN JUST TEXTED ME.
I stand in place for a moment. I take a breath.
Kyle MacLachlan just texted me a joke and he used an emoji.
My reply, which takes entirely too much time to compose, is simply to tell him I'll see him upstairs soon. He writes back: "Cool ?" And I immediately picture FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, the character he played on Twin Peaks (and is playing—sort of—on Twin Peaks: The Return) giving an ecstatic thumbs-up on the original iteration of the series.
I'm aware that I'm slightly nervous as I walk through the sixth floor restaurant. Meeting a famous person is nerve-racking! And MacLachlan is a big deal in my brain, maybe because I've been consumed all summer with Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch's revival of his cult classic TV series on which MacLachlan starred in its two-season run from 1990 to 1991. Maybe it's because MacLachlan is, let's face it, a very handsome man. He's also less foreboding in person than on television. His hair is a little messy rather than perfectly combed in place and shellacked with pomade; the collar on his navy polo shirt slightly popped in a breezily unkempt manner, as if he's on a late-summer vacation. (He lives not far from here in Manhattan.)
Coat by Acne Studios; toggle by Tim Coppens; shirt by Gucci.
And maybe my nervousness is why I immediately bring up Blue Velvet, his second movie ever, and his second collaboration with David Lynch. I mention that I saw the movie when I was 13 or 14, somehow convincing my dad to let me rent it. (My mother's theory: "He probably thought it was about Elizabeth Taylor and a horse.") That's when MacLachlan gives a slightly embarrassed laugh, and he says, "I bet that was...frightening?" There's an iconic scene in which he's completely nude and Isabella Rosselini, clutching a butcher knife, goes down on him after their characters first meet. So yes, I was possibly frightened. But I knew then—as I know now, having seen much of David Lynch's work, with and without MacLachlan—that it was something interesting, peculiar, scary, and absurd, and everyone involved was willing to take a major risk to fulfill this one guy's crazy artistic notions.
I settle in my seat, and I remember that I'm here to talk about David Lynch—and Twin Peaks—with the man who has been the face of those notions for many years. Lynch is big on avatars and doppelgangers, the nature of good and evil, and fucking around with our ideas of the American Dream and the horrors that exist just below the surface, hidden thanks to our willful ignorance. And he's put all of this into the world by telling a large, expansive story with MacLachlan's face—still handsome after all these years—at the forefront.
What's the allure of Kyle MacLachlan, anyway? There is the obvious handsomeness, an all-American look that the actor attributes to one feature in particular. "It's the chin," he says with a laugh. "It's hard to get away from that." But there's something about his personality, too, that offsets—and maybe works in tandem—with his looks. He has a kind sensibility, an inherent goofiness that makes one naturally comfortable around him. He seems to have heard this before, from people who have tried to describe him without being able to put their finger on it exactly. Back to his face, just for a second: MacLachlan tells me that it's got an edge to it, so he hears, that has served as a trademark of sorts. "There's something off—that's the thing," he says. "People would always tell me, 'Something about your face is a little bit off.'" (Writer Rich Cohen once described him, in an early '90s profile in Rolling Stone, as "the boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement.") Does he sweat the comments he's received about the indiscernible weirdness of his persona, his face? Not really. "Listen, if it gets me work, that's fine," he says.
Shirt by Gucci; arm warmers by Raf Simons.
Lynch gave MacLachlan his first big break: the starring role in Dune, the anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert's celebrated sci-fi novel. Most young actors dream of landing such a role, playing the hero in a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster helmed by a buzzy director (Lynch's previous film, The Elephant Man, earned eight Oscar nominations). But Dune was a disaster—both on the production side and once it was released, flopping with critics and audiences alike. It was a hard first lesson for MacLachlan: Expectations could work against you, and it was important to be a practical actor, not to dwell on the losses, and to always keep an eye out for the next thing.
The next thing happened to come not long after, when Lynch came back to him with the script for Blue Velvet and offered him the role of the lead, Jeffrey Beaumont. Blue Velvet was the second big break—the real one, the one that propelled MacLachlan's career forward, and what solidified his connection to his director and friend.
Trench coat by Acne Studios; pants and sneakers by Balenciaga; mohair rug by RH, Restoration Hardware.
"David is not Hollywood," MacLachlan explains. "My sense of it was that people didn't know what to do with me." He'd done the post-Dune audition rounds, and he wasn't finding other jobs landing in his lap. "Somebody does a movie that makes a zillion dollars, he plays the young hero, and producers can plug him into a million other things," he says. "The smart ones obviously build a construct. Not everyone has that ability."
Blue Velvet introduced a regular theme that Lynch has examined throughout his work since, which MacLachlan describes as "flirting with that dark soul, getting closer and closer to it until you're faced with the ultimate evil." Despite the film's brutality, it has a somewhat happy ending—suggesting that triumph over evil is possible. "Jeffrey barely escapes," MacLachlan says, "but he's changed forever."
With Jeffrey Beaumont, MacLachlan displayed full-on naïveté, playing a young man who realises that the world in which he finds comfort is hiding sinister forces. His next major role, another created by David Lynch, would be a character who would find himself up against similarly dark factions—although this time of a supernatural quality.
MacLachlan admits that Twin Peaks was a bit of a fluke. The idea of David Lynch working in the realm of network television was absurd in itself. Blue Velvet, while earning Lynch his second Oscar nomination for Best Director, was met with a polarising critical response. (Roger Ebert's review in particular was a scorcher, and he branded Lynch a misogynist for the way he "degraded" Rossellini on film.) His follow-up, Wild at Heart, which premiered at Cannes a month after Twin Peaks debuted on ABC, was met with equal parts enthusiasm and derision. (It won the Palme d'Or that year, even though the film was met with boos by the notoriously vocal film festival audience.)
Pairing up with writer Mark Frost, who had spent three years as a writer on NBC's police drama Hill Street Blues, Lynch broadened his idea of Americana—specifically, the darkness that lies beneath the surface of a quaint and seemingly wholesome small logging town in Washington—into a series. MacLachlan, bolstered by the critical success of Blue Velvet yet still reticent of how Lynch's next idea would play, didn't have high hopes. "It was completely unexpected that it would be anything more than a Movie of the Week," he tells me. "That's why a lot of us were on board: to watch David Lynch do this—and the anarchy that would reign down. Yeah, okay. Why not?"
But ABC executives loved the two-hour pilot, which introduced the murder of the beautiful homecoming queen Laura Palmer, the FBI agent who was summoned to solve her murder, and the various cast of characters who may very well have had something to do with the crime. "Suddenly we were doing it," MacLachlan says. "They called our bluff and bought the show."
Turtleneck by Calvin Klein 205W39NYC.
Twin Peaks was a bonafide phenomenon, and its first season—consisting of the pilot and seven subsequent episodes—was a massive hit over the course of its eight-week run in the spring of 1990. Not only did it reunite MacLachlan with the director who introduced him to movie audiences, but it assembled a large ensemble cast of familiar and fresh faces.
The show was a mixture of television neo-noir and classic nighttime soap, but with a certain quirkiness that grabbed the attention of television audiences. There was a central murder mystery plot, yes, but there was also romantic intrigue, whispered secrets, a woman who communicated with a log. It often depicted its protagonist dreaming of a mysterious room, decorated with red drapes and a black-and-white chevron-patterned floor and populated by the kind of grotesque characters straight out of a Flannery O'Connor short story. It blended Lynch's dry humour and his absurdist non-sequiturs with the themes he began exploring in Blue Velvet—but with an entirely new style that filmmakers would spend years trying to replicate.
Laura Palmer's murder was solved in the early part of the second season—she had been raped and killed by her father, Leland, while he was under the influence of a demonic presence known as BOB—and the show began to shift into an unwieldy procedural drama. MacLachlan is honest about the missteps of the show's middling second season.
"I thought the first seven episodes [in Season One] were brilliant," he admits. "We had gone on a crazy tangent [in Season Two], and they were trying to pull it back. But it had already drifted too far off."
The series ended with a massive cliffhanger in a final episode directed by Lynch. Cooper, who had a new love interest in Heather Graham's Annie Blackburn, attempts to save her from an ex-FBI agent who has committed his life to terrorising Cooper's. The pursuit finds him entering the mysterious red room of his dream through a portal in the woods; caught in what is known as the Black Lodge, he comes face to face with his mortal enemy as well as the evil that is holding the town hostage: BOB himself. BOB overtakes Cooper, creating a doppelganger of our hero and entering our world in disguise—leaving Cooper trapped in this impeccably decorated limbo.
Once again: disappointment. As with Dune, MacLachlan took it in stride. After all, Twin Peaks had earned him two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe. He had had a steady job and got to work again with Lynch to craft a great role—arguably, in hindsight, the most vital of his career. "There was certainly a disappointment when it was cancelled," he tells me. "But I said to myself, 'Well, that's done. Time to find the next thing.'"
Coat by Hermès; turtleneck by Calvin Klein 205W39NYC.
Two things propel actors: Getting work that pays enough to stay afloat between jobs, and finding work that's compelling and challenging—roles that don't leave you typecast and stuck playing the same character over and over again.
Of course, MacLachlan did play Dale Cooper again in Lynch's big-screen prequel to the series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which was released a year after the show's cancellation. MacLachlan initially passed on playing Cooper again so soon after the show ended, although he eventually joined the production. But his role was small, and the absence of many other Twin Peaks regulars (and its bleak, darker tone) was off-putting for fans. The film was not a commercial success, and the critical response was mixed.
MacLachlan—who tells me that he had to find "a construct" for himself, a certain kind of figure he could play with slight variation—took a few odd roles in the '90s. There are a couple of forgettable indie movies on his résumé, plus Oliver Stone's The Doors, in which he played keyboardist Ray Manzarek. In what would be one of the biggest box-office successes of his career (that is until he leant his voice for a small role in the Pixar film Inside Out), he played Cliff Vandercave in The Flintstones, an insanely successful movie (it earned over $300 million worldwide) that feels like a lost '90s relic. (Do you remember anything about The Flintstones, other than it happened? I saw it twice, and I mostly just remember MacLachlan's biceps.) Yet he still proved he could play a different type: the sexy antagonist—even if that chance involved wearing a sleeveless double-breasted suit and playing the foil to John Goodman's Fred Flintstone.
But that led to his next role in what would be another infamous moment in modern film history: Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, one of the most notorious movies of all time and the first big-budget NC-17-rated film to get a wide release. MacLachlan has been vocal about how he feels about the film. (He told Esquire earlier this year, "What did I learn from Showgirls? I learned what not to do!") Naturally, he chuckles when I even bring it up. (It's an inevitable topic of conversation. You can't not mention Showgirls in the presence of Kyle MacLachlan.) And he's honest with me about why he took the role. "It was a deliberate attempt to change things up a bit," he says. "All actors do that to varying degrees of success and failure. And, to be honest, I was a big fan of Paul Verhoeven, so I thought, 'Well, this could be fun.' I just happened to pick the wrong one." (Every gay man I know would suggest otherwise, but hey: Everybody's a critic.)
Once again, MacLachlan's career took another oddball turn. But these moments were still high-profile; he was still on the radar. And his early work with David Lynch continued to cast a welcome shadow over him as an actor, particularly as those who appreciated and found influence in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks began to rise in the Hollywood ranks themselves. At least that's MacLachlan's theory for his three major television roles of the last two decades: Trey MacDougal, the impotent Upper East Side mama's boy who served as a frustrating love interest to Charlotte on Sex and the City; Orson Hodge, a devious dentist on Desperate Housewives; and the Mayor of Portland on Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's hipster satire Portlandia, who could very well be Dale Cooper if he had gone into local politics instead of the Black Lodge.
"These things came to me because of my work with David," MacLachlan says. "Not because they were looking at the roles and saying, 'Oh, he'd be perfect for that.' The creators were people who had in some way been inspired by David, or affected somehow."
Two decades after Twin Peaks, as the show's cult following only grew larger and larger and its influence became more overt as dark, quirky mystery shows about the dangers hidden out of sight in small-town America became more and more popular, MacLachlan couldn't shake the series from his head. He and Lynch remained good friends, and Twin Peaks was often a topic of conversation when they saw each other. "Over the years, we'd get together and sit, chat, have coffee, catch up," MacLachlan tells me. "Occasionally I would bring up the idea of Twin Peaks. I recognized for me, selfishly, it was a great character, a great period of time. I was hungry to revisit that and to have the experience of working with David again."
Years later, Lynch called MacLachlan on the phone, and his tone was markedly more assertive than normal. "I need to talk to you," Lynch said to him, "but I can't do it over the phone." The two met in New York, and Lynch delivered the news: He and Mark Frost had figured a way back into the world of Twin Peaks. Was MacLachlan interested in joining them? "We've talked about this, David," MacLachlan recalls saying. "But if you need to hear it from me: Yes, I'm in." Nothing was settled yet. Scripts hadn't been written. A precarious deal with Showtime was in the works, and there were stops and starts, which naturally worried MacLachlan. But eventually everything fell into place, Lynch and Frost and MacLachlan signed their deals, members of the cast were coming back, along with some new familiar faces. The network handed the keys over to Lynch to direct a whopping 18 episodes. It was official: Twin Peaks was returning to TV.
Let's rock.
Where the hell do I begin with Twin Peaks: The Return? For one thing, as I write this, I still haven't finished it; Showtime is keeping a close guard on the final two episodes that make up its grand finale, and the network didn't provide journalists screeners throughout the season. Perhaps that's part of why it's been so fun to watch: Not only is every episode completely unexpected, with most of the theories surrounding its complex and meandering plot as indecipherable as the show itself, but no one is getting an early look at this show. We all have to wait to see what David Lynch has in store for us precisely when he's ready to give it away.
Shirt by Gucci; arm warmers by Raf Simons.
I'm chatting with MacLachlan on the Monday afternoon following the 16th episode of the series—the one in which Agent Cooper finally comes out of the catatonic state in which he's been trapped for a very long time (15-plus hours for us, but much longer for him). Before that, he was trapped in the body of Dougie Jones, a Cooper doppelganger who lives in Las Vegas, sells insurance, and presumably has a gambling problem; most of his biography before the events of the season begins is provided by his wife, Janey-E, through one of her regular screaming sessions leveled at her dim man-child of a husband. (Naomi Watts, playing Janey-E, is a master at the David Lynch monologue.) How he got into Dougie Jones is still sort of a complicated mystery. Some people have their ideas of how it works, but for me, well… I've simply watched the show and kept myself from asking too many questions for the sake of my own sanity. I've simply enjoyed the long, twisted ride.
MacLachlan hasn't seen the final two episodes, either, although he knows what happens. From the beginning, he was in possession of what he calls The Bible. "After a little bit of cajoling, they let me have the script," he admits to me, "as long as I absolutely swore never to show anyone." (He keeps that promise with me, despite any effort I make to milk a secret or two out of him. "We all felt an obligation, really," he says. "We wanted to protect this thing so that people could experience it in the proper sequence.")
The world of the new Twin Peaks is massive. It expands beyond the borders of the small Washington town, with scenes taking place in Manhattan, Las Vegas, South Dakota, New Mexico in 1945, and in the Black Lodge. And while it brings with it a return of many of the beloved characters from the original series (with a few noted exceptions), it also introduces a wide variety of new characters in those far-flung locations. It is perhaps the most impressive cast of actors on television in recent history, and that doesn't include the musical guest that shows up every week at the Bang Bang Bar. (Whoever is booking for the Roadhouse is doing one hell of a job.)
MacLachlan asked for the complete script almost out of a necessity to understand where his role fit within the larger story. Well, I should say "roles," because at this point he's playing three: there's Special Agent Dale Cooper, trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years and then released into the world once again; Dougie Jones, the aforementioned dummy who's learning about the world almost like a child (or maybe he's actually Cooper, trying to remember who he actually is); and then there's Mr. C, the Cooper doppelganger who left the Black Lodge behind in 1991 at the end of the original series.
Coat by Vivienne Westwood; turtleneck by Calvin Klein 205W39NYC.
As much as the rest of us wondered how the residents of Twin Peaks would look and act after a 25-year hiatus, MacLachlan himself wondered how to get back into the role of Agent Cooper. But first he had to tackle the two opposite poles of Dougie and Mr. C. For Dougie, he looked to Peter Sellers for inspiration, also remembering Jeff Bridges's performance in Starman; for Mr. C, he thought of Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. Dougie, he admits, was the easier role to take on, while Mr. C was much tougher.
"It's hard for me to play that," he admits. "I can do it, of course, but I don't know if I really want to."
I bring up the moment when Mr. C murders his son, Richard Horne, steering him on top of a rock formation and watching as he is electrocuted. Mr. C shows no sign of empathy—that's in his nature, of course. But it was hard for MacLachlan to pull off. "Of all the things David had me do, that was the worst. But it's true to the character. As an actor, I want to show some humanity. It's so hard to be absolute." I can tell, through the calm and measured quality of the good-natured man who sits before me, that diving into the depths of his own potential dark side was no easy mission. He had to find that humanity within his director, who he says went along with him on both Dougie and Mr. C's journey. "David almost embodies the qualities of the characters," he says. "I can see it in his face. With Dougie, there's a certain energy. When I'm Mr. C, it's dark and he's in another place. It gave me the confidence to carry the character to its fulfillment."
He tells me another difficult task was to act as Mr. C with David Lynch as his character, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole. "I didn't like it at all," he says, definitively, and with a look of deep concern. It suggests that MacLachlan felt uneasy breaking out of the kind of figure that Lynch has pushed him to play so many times: the innocent who flirts with danger but ultimately controls it. Dougie, in a way, was his own release from that darkness: all joy and absurdity. When I ask him about his favorite scenes, MacLachlan immediately sports a big Dougie Jones smile. His sex scene with Naomi Watts comes to mind, and he imitates the look of perplexed ecstasy on Dougie's face as he sleeps with his wife. He flails his arms about a bit, not noticing that he's drawing some attention from some of the people sitting near us in the restaurant. But I suppose when you've taken the leaps that he has—flirting with the darkness that David Lynch has created, or even doing something so bold as acting in a sex scene in front of a film crew—you lose some of your inhibitions fairly easily. I'm much less nervous around MacLachlan by now, and much more impressed with the confidence he exudes, something he's learned from the fearlessness that his job requires.
MacLachlan knows Twin Peaks: The Return isn't for everybody. He knew this as soon as he saw the script, realising that fans of the original show might not embrace the revival with as much enthusiasm. I suggest that there are two different kinds of people: Twin Peaks fans and David Lynch fans. "Twin Peaks: The Return is for the David Lynch fans," I say, and MacLachlan nods.
"It was going to be the Lynch fans who would have the most fun," MacLachlan says. "That was obvious to me as we were traveling on that journey. It was going to be darker, visceral, and have the same kind of surreal elements that David loves to mix in with the ingredients. Who's to say how the Twin Peaks fan base and the David Lynch fan base would find common ground? David Lynch fans were in for it the entire way, and the Twin Peaks fans who made the leap might find something special, too."
Coat and shirt by Dolce & Gabbana; jeans by Tom Ford; shoes by Gucci; mohair rug by RH, Restoration Hardware.
As one of David Lynch's regular players, MacLachlan has learned not to parse the material for meaning—just as he's learned not to demand too much explanation from his director. This, he admits, he learned the hard way. "On Dune, I was rabid. I drove David to madness," he says. "And finally he closed the door on me." He offers no detailed analysis of what has transpired over the show's 16 episodes so far, and I get the sense that my intuition—to focus less on the meaning and more on the form—is the best way to experience it.
Instead, he accepts that there's a purpose to everything he's done, simply because Lynch has created it. He offers an explanation for the director's working relationship with Mark Frost, who is certainly more grounded in his craft. "Mark is the kind of writer who says there needs to be reason and process," he explains. Lynch, on the other hand, pays closer attention to theme and ideas—particularly where evil comes from, how it corrupts innocent men and women as it spreads like a virus, and where to put it in order to keep it contained. "I don't think David feels compelled to resolve everything by any means, maybe because of the idea that it's ongoing and we'll pick it back up if we have to," he says, pointing to the differences in the way Lynch and Frost attack the material. "Maybe that's why they get together once every 25 years," he laughs.
At the end of the day, the return of Twin Peaks is almost enough of a treat for MacLachlan as much as, I'd suggest, the people who are tuning in each week. "It's like a weird high school reunion," he says, and I think that the people who either watched it when it first aired or throughout the years on DVD or streaming on Netflix might say the same thing.
Working with Lynch again has been a delight, MacLachlan says, as has acting for the first time with fellow Lynch muse Naomi Watts. And, naturally, he speaks with visible exuberance about seeing Laura Dern on set again 30 years after they starred in Blue Velvet together. Dern plays Diane, the previously unseen assistant to Agent Cooper who would receive his daily briefings in the original series; she steals every scene with a sharp, bitter tongue and a platinum blonde bob wig. "Laura and I have traveled this road together a long time," MacLachlan says. "We love David very much, and we get a real kick out of each other."
But seeing Dern interact with Lynch, who directed her in Wild at Heart and Inland Empire, showed MacLachlan a different side to his friend and director. "They tease each other a lot—David and I don't really tease each other!" he laughs. "I mean, we get along, we have fun, we have a laugh. But I never felt that comfortable, you know? I wondered, how does she do that?" MacLachlan says that he and Dern aren't unlike siblings, realising that their individual relationships to their father is surprisingly different.
Coat by Acne Studios; turtleneck by Calvin Klein 205W39NYC.
Ultimately, MacLachlan is grateful for the opportunity to play this character again, and he's grateful for the fans for keeping the spirit of Twin Peaks alive. ("I think the fans played a big part of this," he says of the revival.) He feels like he's a part of something bigger, a piece of moving art that is ripe for interpretation and inspiration as much as it is entertaining. And, as always, he guides me to understanding how it falls within David Lynch's worldview, as well: "David tells me, 'Everything is Twin Peaks. It's all Twin Peaks,'" he says. "These stories continue—that's the whole thing. Everybody kept living and going on and doing their thing. It never stopped. Now we're picking it up again, 25 years later. Who knows if we'll pick them up again down the road, I don't know."
Before I'm even able to ask the final question—either because he knows it's coming, or simply because his answer is so obvious for him—he gives a sly smile when he responds.
"Would you do it again, down the road?"
"Oh, yes. In a minute."
Photography by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello • Grooming by Jennifer Brent for Chanel and Kerastase L'incroyable Crème • Stunts by Hollywood Stunts • Special Effects by J&M Special Effects • Special Thanks to Fast Ashley Studios
