The weird and wonderful worlds of Kyle MacLachlan

Kyle MacLachlan knows how to start things off on the right foot. The day before our interview, he personally emails me to discuss logistics. I tell him I’m looking forward to it and he replies, “Me too”, with a red heart emoji, before signing off with “Sent while being… Pursued by Bear!” – a reference to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and the name of MacLachlan’s winery. I’m speechless: this is Special Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks, Trey MacDougal from Sex and the City, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont, Dune’s Paul Atreides (one of them, anyway), and he just broke the fourth wall of celebrity.

One could say that MacLachlan has always acted as a guide to closed-off worlds. He is, after all, David Lynch’s guiding force, the actor who clasps the hand of the viewer and takes them into the underbelly of the American Dream. “I think there’s a curiosity of the darkness in the characters that I play,” MacLachlan says after dialling in punctually from his home in LA. “David sees me as someone who can take you on a journey from the real into the surreal. There’s certainly magic I feel on set with him. Somehow I understand what’s necessary in the course of filming.”

Perhaps it has something to do with his face. At 65, MacLachlan is still handsome – his perfectly coiffed hair is now white, but that all-American preppiness remains, as does his boyish exuberance. He has previously said that there’s something about his face that is “off”, but to me he has always looked like an ideal, and ideals are inherently safe – you could perhaps trust them to lead you to the depths of depravity and back again.

If we start somewhere near the beginning, Blue Velvet was the actor’s second movie with Lynch, who approached MacLachlan with the script during the making of 1984’s Dune. Blue Velvet is the film most associated with the director’s worldview that there is a seediness at the heart of our conceptions of safety – Dennis Hopper’s Frank, a rapist psychopath inhaling gas through a medical mask could well live in your suburban town. But more disturbingly, if someone like MacLachlan’s Jeffrey, an innocent, jumped-up boy next door, can be debased and corrupted, can’t we all? MacLachlan initially turned the part down. His mother, who was dying of ovarian cancer at the time, objected to the film’s violence, sadomasochism and treatment of women, but MacLachlan returned. The role, which remains his most “risqué” to date, now feels like it couldn’t have been played by anyone else.

Dark suburbia, for lack of a better term, is a recurring theme with MacLachlan. There’s Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, Twin Peaks, Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane – even the subject of his new podcast, Varnamtown, is a tiny community in North Carolina that harbours a dark past. I put it to MacLachlan: is he drawn to it or is it something that others see in him? “I think I have a natural optimism,” he replies, “and when we think of the [ideal of suburbia], the Fifties were an upbeat and positive time in American history. I think that’s part of who I am. It’s interesting to put that into a story that has shades of the opposite, to watch optimism come up against something that’s darker or ‘evil’. A lot of David’s work is about simple games of good versus evil, and when people think of people that can project that, I guess I’m on a shortlist.”

It’s time to bring up the role that made him a household name: FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. Lynch’s sweepingly surreal, neo noir-cum- soap opera of a television show ran for two series in 1990, centring on the beautiful homecoming queen Laura Palmer, whose murder upends a small logging town in Washington state. To say it became a phenomenon would be an understatement. I first watched the show in 2012, aged 16, and have rewatched it a half dozen times since – hell, I even went to an immersive Twin Peaks event twice because I love it so much. There’s something about it that crawls under the skin. Its iconography of sinister black and white chevrons and red drapes is indelible, as well as its sheer eclecticism: there is a dwarf that walks and talks backwards and a lady who communes with a log.

“Certainly, at the time, it was vastly different to anything [else] that was on,” MacLachlan says with a Cooper-worthy beam. “Murder mysteries are always compelling, particularly when the people involved are very young and attractive. Then there’s the whole surrealness of things. I think when you’re in your mid- teens, depending on how mature you are, you’re trying to figure the world out and understand your place in it. The world in some instances feels surreal – there are things you don’t understand and you’re in this cauldron of self-discovery. David’s imagery and storytelling doesn’t answer things – it asks a lot of questions and tells you that it’s about the search, the discovery, and that you can be who you are and that that’s OK. Where your brain and interests take you is OK, there’s no judgment – follow your heart and passion.”

Still, it remains a common misconception that Agent Cooper is based on MacLachlan. “When I first read the script, he was fleshed out. I got the sense that there was a lot of David in Cooper, and I felt comfortable adapting his mannerisms,” MacLachlan says. Lynch, then, was able to trust that he understood that he had to convey his Fifties-esque chirpiness and aphorisms – “damn good coffee” – with absolute sincerity. “I felt a kinship to him in understanding that he’s a very positive and enthusiastic person. I’m pretty positive and upbeat for the most part. I have a quirky sense of humour and I do really enjoy things like coffee.”

But where does one go after playing such a memorable character? MacLachlan has had his share of disappointments: Dune was eviscerated by the critics, and before Blue Velvet was reappraised, the reaction was incredibly mixed (both films garnered one-star reviews from the renowned critic Roger Ebert). Perhaps that’s why, post Twin Peaks, MacLachlan thought he would go down the leading man route. It was another failure, but to positive ends, I would argue – how else would we have got Sex and the City’s Trey or Desperate Housewives’ Orson Hodge?

“With age comes perspective,” MacLachlan mulls. “What I was hearing at that time was that if you’re pursuing a more traditional leading man there would be more opportunities and the chance of success would be greater. That was really appealing. I tried to go in that direction but there were other opportunities that seemed incredibly interesting. As I look back, I’m really happy that I made those choices – it has led to a very interesting and varied career that I would have never anticipated when I was younger. There were some crazy choices and challenging results. I have never stopped moving forward and I’m really grateful.”