
Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer
Twin Peaks: Building the Most Groundbreaking Show of the ’90s
A Conversation with Kyle MacLachlan, Mädchen Amick, Piper Laurie, Michael Horse, Jennifer Lynch, Kimmy Robertson, Wendy Robie, Charlotte Stewart, Carel Struycken, Duwayne Dunham, and John Thorne
Jan 24, 2025 Issue #72 - The ‘90s Issue with The Cardigans and Thurston Moore Photography by Courtesy of CBS Photo Archive and Paramount+
[Note: This article originally appeared in Issue 72 of our print magazine, The ’90s Issue, which came out in 2024 and can be bought directly from us here. The article was exclusive to the print magazine but in honor of the recent passing of David Lynch, we are now posting it online. Lynch was not available to be interviewed for this article and all the other interviews were conducted long before his death.]
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A cloudy morning. Seagulls caw; a bell clatters in the distance. The lonesome foghorn blows.
On the beach, inches from the rolling water, lies the body of a young woman.
Dead. Wrapped in plastic.
And so begins the investigation into the mysterious death of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, and the saga of Twin Peaks: the first important TV show of the 1990s, and one that would pave pathways for countless television shows to come.

When it premiered in the spring of 1990, Twin Peaks acted like something of a Trojan horse. Its central murder mystery was what got many viewers hooked as details about the dead girl’s tragic, hidden life came to light, and the list of potential killers seemed to grow every episode. The famous question, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was one of the show’s greatest tricks: it was a mystery that its co-creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, had never intended to be solved. That query was only meant to be a launching pad for a series about the otherworldly secrets hidden in a small American town, and the unusual people who inhabited that place.
And oh, what a cast of characters they were! Nestled amidst mountains and forests just a few miles south of the Canadian border, Twin Peaks was a living, breathing community: vibrant, bustling, and more than a little bit strange. It was somewhere a woman who shared secrets with a log wouldn’t draw much attention; where a grieving father’s hair could turn shock white overnight and few would look twice. It was a place you might find a fish in the percolator, and where the owls were not what they seem.
The town of Twin Peaks shared many familiar qualities with places like Mayberry or Bedford Falls, but things were certainly off about it. For all of its wholesome, all-American staples, from the Double R Diner—home of the world’s best cherry pie—to the rusted pumps at Big Ed’s Gas Farm, the town of Twin Peaks was also a gateway to somewhere much darker: a parallel dimension known as the Black Lodge. From here some of Twin Peaks’ most beguiling mysteries spilled forth, particularly in the series’ famous “red room,” where the dead seemed to reappear, and a dwarf spoke not only in riddles—but phonetically backwards. Supernatural evils lurked in the majestic, coniferous forests surrounding Twin Peaks.
“It’s a different world…you’re not in Kansas anymore,” says Kyle MacLachlan, who played FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, a criminal investigator with kooky methods—and a man who lived for a damn good cup of coffee. “We’ve gone into a place that for some people is comfortable, but for other people is discomforting. Without question, it will take you away from what’s happening around you right now. It demands that, and pulls you in.”
“[Twin Peaks] was dripping in mysticism and magic,” says Kimmy Robertson, who played Lucy Moran, the receptionist at Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. “For anyone who was willing to delve into it, there was more and more of that, the deeper you wanted to go.”
“There was this sense of wonder, a sense of desire, and a sense of dread and fear,” says Wendy Robie, who played the eyepatch-clad Nadine Hurley. “There were questions without answers…there were these lovely characters, but you go deeper and deeper and there were monsters inside [them].” She continues: “All of the citizens of Twin Peaks—all of these people were all odd and singular. Many were crazy. Tortured, broken, beautiful. And to David Lynch, broken is beautiful. Anyone who sees [Twin Peaks], it moves right into their heart.”
Few involved in the creation of Twin Peaks seemed to expect that the show would even make it to television, let become a pop culture phenomenon. And to be fair to all of the doubters, there was little in David Lynch’s filmography to this point that suggested the surreal, artistic tendencies that his films were famous for would be a sensible fit for the small screen. This was doubly true for network TV, where advertising revenue drove decision-making. That business model demanded populist entertainment which catered to the largest possible audiences, and rarely challenged its viewership.

Twin Peaks formed at an odd junction in Lynch’s career. Blue Velvet (1986) had just earned him a Best Director Academy Award nomination, and helped put the critical and commercial disappointment of Dune (1984) behind him. However, Lynch was involved in a string of late ’80s projects that repeatedly failed to materialize. One was Venus Descending, a film about Marilyn Monroe that was commissioned and then dropped by Warner Bros.; another was the body-swap comedy One Saliva Bubble, which was slated to star Steve Martin until the studio behind it went bankrupt. Lynch’s screenwriting partner on both of these canceled projects was Mark Frost, who was best known at the time for his work on the acclaimed police procedural Hill Street Blues.
The duo tried their hands at one more project: a TV pilot about a small town and all of the eccentric characters who lived there. Lynch and Frost developed the setting of the series before they came up with their story. Only once the geography and locales of Twin Peaks were mapped out did they begin populating it with characters. The pilot would open with the murder of a young woman, and show the rippling effects that her death has on the people around her; future episodes could split off to explore these characters’ relationships and follow diverging storylines. Lynch and Frost pitched the idea to ABC, who ordered a feature-length pilot to test the waters before committing to a full series.
“[David] called me and he said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this pilot episode. It’s called Twin Peaks. Mark and I wrote it,’” says filmmaker Duwayne Dunham, who had edited Blue Velvet for Lynch and would cut the pilot in addition to directing several episodes of the show. “‘It’s kind of a teenage mystery set in the Northwest. ABC is gonna give us $3 or $4 million to make [it]. They will never air it. So, let’s just go have some fun and make this movie.’”
They approached the pilot episode as if it were a stand-alone film; if these 94-odd minutes were all anyone ever saw of Twin Peaks, they wanted it to be a satisfying experience. This decision freed its creators to ignore many of the long-established rules of television storytelling.
“I remember Dad was excited about things: he’d been able to shoot the way he loves to shoot, and to create something he believed in,” says filmmaker Jennifer Lynch, David’s daughter. “I knew once people saw it that it would change brains. It did. People’s brains opened in a different way to Twin Peaks. It was necessary and thrilling.”
The pilot episode would be called Northwest Passage, a name that had previously served as the show’s working title. Lynch and Frost co-wrote a script that contained a staggering number of characters. To fill this massive cast, they started by reaching out to actors who Lynch already had experience working with.
“I met David back in the ’70s. Dean Stockwell and Russ Tamblyn were my neighbors. Talk about stories…,” recalls actor Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. “They brought Lynch by one day, and Dennis Hopper was with them. Now, Lynch doesn’t remember this. I said, ‘Who’s that guy?’ They said, ‘He’s a filmmaker.’ They showed me his short film, The Grandma, which makes Eraserhead look like Disney. I was doing a few things [in movies], but I didn’t really want to be in the business. Then David called me to do a little [short film] called The Cowboy and the Frenchman with Harry Dean Stanton.”
A Native American actor, Horse’s biggest role prior to Twin Peaks was playing Tonto in the 1981 film version of The Lone Ranger.
“I asked David, ‘What are you going to do next?’ and he said, ‘a TV series.’ I asked, ‘For cable?’ He says, ‘No, for regular network TV.’ I thought, ‘Call me when that happens, you know?’” says Horse with a laugh, still sounding incredulous after almost 30 years.
Some Twin Peaks actors’ histories with Lynch stretched back a decade or more. There were even a few who had been working with Lynch since he directed his debut feature in the early 1970s.
“I met David when he was a student at the American Film Institute,” says actress Charlotte Stewart, Twin Peaks’ Betty Briggs. “[My roommate] came home one day and she said, ‘There’s this young filmmaker. He’s making a film and he needs an actress. I told him that my roommate is an actress, so he’s coming for dinner.’ So David arrived with his wife and had dinner with us, and presented me with this script called Eraserhead.”
Stewart already had credits on TV westerns such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza when she was cast in the role of Mary X in Eraserhead (1977), opposite her future Twin Peaks colleague Jack Nance. Nance’s wife, Catherine Coulson, performed many behind-the-scenes duties on Eraserhead, even helping finance the low-budget production from her paycheck as a waitress. Fifteen years later, she’d become famous for playing Twin Peaks’ beloved Log Lady.
“I said of course I would do [Eraserhead], thinking it would be like most student films: it would take five or six days and it would never get released, and nobody would ever see it. I didn’t know it was going to take four years,” laughs Stewart, who would shoot with Lynch and his crew from midnight to six in the morning, then rush off to Paramount Studios to film her role as Miss Beadle on Little House on the Prairie. “Once I was in it, there was no going back. And David turned out to be just one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, even though I didn’t understand it.”
Filmed with a tiny crew over half a decade, Eraserhead became an underground sensation when it was finally released in the late ’70s. It was a staple of midnight movie programming, with years-long runs of regular, late-night screenings at arthouses in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Among the film’s early, famous fans was producer Mel Brooks, who saw it and hired Lynch to direct The Elephant Man (1980), launching his unlikely career as a Hollywood director.
As years went on, the cast and crew of Eraserhead retained the tight friendship they’d formed over that film’s lengthy production. Nance appeared in several of the movies Lynch helmed throughout the 1980s, and for a while lived with Stewart as a roommate. Years later, Lynch invited Stewart and Nance out to his birthday dinner at a LA restaurant, where they were joined by Mark Frost and Kyle MacLachlan, and would discuss Twin Peaks. They weren’t the only ones whose involvement with the show could be traced back to a dinner party.

“I had a friend [who] invited me for dinner, as she often did, and she had two guests. David Lynch was there, whose name I had heard before,” says actress Piper Laurie, one of several high-profile actors who joined the cast. “He was very friendly, quiet, and warm. A nice man. A year or two later, I was told he wanted to meet with me about possibly being in a thing he was going to be doing.”
Piper Laurie, who passed away in October 2023, only a few months after our interview with her, had already earned three Academy Award nominations for roles in The Hustler (1961), Carrie (1976), and Children of a Lesser God (1986). She was a vested veteran of the screen and stage whose career, like those of fellow Twin Peaks cast mates Russ Tamblyn and Richard Beymer, had begun as a studio contract player during the waning years of Hollywood’s Golden Age. You’d have been hard pressed to find many actors on television in the early ’90s with a longer or more celebrated resume.
“I went in for a meeting and I read the script, and there was just one scene for the character I thought I’d be playing. I think the one line in the scene was, ‘You bitch,’” Laurie says, laughing. “I thought, ‘David Lynch seems like such a nice person. I’m sure he has something more for me to do, and it would be lovely to work with him.’ On the basis of that, I accepted, not realizing I was signing up for a series. That turned out to be fine for me, anyway. He scrambled and managed to give me a character.”
That character was Twin Peaks’ scheming businesswoman, Catherine Martell. She wasn’t the only cast member whose role was vastly expanded once the filmmakers met the right actor. In the case of Mädchen Amick, who played Double R Diner waitress Shelly Johnson, her role was created from scratch.
“I had a very straightforward, nice conversation with David, because he’s just that way: very sweet and nice,” says Amick, whose young career to this point had included appearances on Baywatch and Star Trek: The Next Generation. “I read for Donna, Lara Flynn Boyle’s part, and I remember at the end of the meeting David just sort of said, ‘Do you want to do a TV show with me?’ I left the meeting thinking, ‘I think that went well, and I may have just landed a TV show? I don’t know.’”
“Mark Frost mentioned [in an interview] that Shelly Johnson hadn’t been written, and they didn’t have a part for me,” she continues. “They wanted to figure out how to work me into the storyline, and the town. So, they actually wrote Shelly for me. I never knew that. I just thought I auditioned for one character but was better for another.”
The role they created for Amick was quickly tied into many of Twin Peaks’ earliest storylines. A high school dropout, Shelly Johnson was married to the shady Leo Johnson, a long-haul trucker with criminal ties—but when he was out on the road, she was having an affair with high school quarterback Bobby Briggs, the boyfriend of the murdered Laura Palmer.
“It was interesting to play a teenage character who wasn’t in school, who wasn’t going through the halls and doing ordinary high school things,” says Amick, describing her character. “She was attracted to danger…vulnerable, optimistic…she had real-life grown-up problems, yet she was very young and had to go through them at an early age. I found it very interesting not to play a typical, high school character. Not that any of the characters were typical.”

While many of the roles were cast in Los Angeles, a second round of auditions was held in Seattle so that Lynch and Frost could find local actors to fill out smaller parts in the pilot. As it happened again and again, many of these small roles did not stay small for long.
“[The pilot] was cloaked in mystery, as you might well imagine,” says Wendy Robie, who landed the role of Nadine Hurley during a Seattle casting session. “We knew nothing except that it was called ‘Northwest Passage,’ so I assumed it was about Lewis and Clark! I brought a shawl to the audition at the local casting office. As I gleaned more clues in the waiting room, I stashed the shawl somewhere.”
“David described Nadine, and he said that her eye had been shot out,” says Robie. “I thought for a minute and asked him, ‘Which eye?’ and he thought that was a very funny question to ask. Like it would matter, which eye? He laughed, and you don’t know joy until you’ve made David Lynch laugh. So, that was my audition. It was supposed to be one day’s work, and it turned into two year’s work.”
Kimmy Robertson’s Lucy was another role that wasn’t very large initially, but grew as the show went on.
“It was in a small office, with one halogen light hanging straight down over a round table, and three chairs. David Lynch was sitting on the left, and Mark Frost was sitting to my right, and I sat across from them,” says Robertson, making her audition sound like the setting of a police interrogation scene. “Mark stood up immediately. David got this big smile on his face, and then he stood up and shook my hand. I adored him immediately because of his hair. I said, ‘Wow, you have the best hair!’”
“[David] asked me to sit down and we started talking about some boring stuff, and I got sidetracked as usual,” explains Robertson, a former ballerina who had made her screen debut in the classic 1982 teen sex comedy, The Last American Virgin. “They asked me to stand up and away from the table so they could take a Polaroid of me. David asked me to turn around, not thinking that he wanted pictures from the back and the side. I was just thinking as a dancer and, rather than turn around, I did a pirouette. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed. He said, ‘No, slower. We’re taking your picture!’ And that was it.”

The pilot was filmed in early 1989. For a network TV project, Lynch and Frost were given a relatively wide berth of creative control. Executives who saw the pilot seemed to agree that it was unlike anything that had aired on television to that point. Would primetime viewers tune in to a show that raised more questions than it provided answers for? Was there an audience for something this potentially off-putting, and so unabashedly weird? Despite reservations about its commercial prospects, seven episodes were ordered by ABC. When the 94-minute pilot was screened in advance for critics, buzz began to grow. “I was always drawn to television shows that I thought were taking advantage of the strengths of the medium: things like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere,” says John Thorne, author of two books on Twin Peaks. “It was in January of 1990 when I read in the Dallas Morning News the local TV critic, Ed Bark, had seen the pilot for Twin Peaks and was enthused about it…he said, ‘Mark your calendars. This is something unlike anything else.’”
Thorne was ready with his finger on his VCR’s “record” button when ABC aired the pilot as their Sunday Night Movie on April 8th, 1990. Audiences indeed tuned in: the pilot was the highest-rated TV movie of the season. When the first regular episode premiered in its Thursday night time slot four days later, it managed to cut into the ratings of its main competitor: NBC’s sitcom juggernaut, Cheers. While Twin Peaks wasn’t able to maintain those high viewership numbers, it easily became the most-discussed thing on television in that moment. Fans would compare notes after each weekly installment, recapping the show’s twists and turns and theorizing over its hidden meanings, and guessing as to what would come next.
“I remember people were talking about it…then it kind of became an obsession, because it was so powerful and it was so unusual,” explains Thorne, who teamed up with Craig Miller to launch Wrapped in Plastic, a Twin Peaks-themed magazine that published 75 issues over a dozen years after the show had already gone off the air. “I felt [Twin Peaks] was playing to the great strengths of television, which is that you could tell this long, ongoing story. You had to pay attention and think about what you’d watched the week before, and piece together all of those things. Television rarely took advantage of that, but Twin Peaks certainly did.”
“People would get up from dinners, or seats at restaurants. ‘Twin Peaks is on tonight,’ they would say. ‘I have to see it.’ People wanted to see it in real time,” says Jennifer Lynch. “There was a real special place for all the fans who were watching it play out moment by moment. There were conversations about things, I feel, that were different as a result of Twin Peaks. People were discussing the human condition, and people were having feelings that other television did not give them. It was like an awakening.”
“I was a major fan,” says actor Carel Struycken, who watched the first season from the comfort of his couch before joining the cast of Twin Peaks in season two. “It was so completely unlike anything else on TV or in a movie theater. It was more on the subconscious level. You obviously couldn’t make any sense out of it. It was an extremely intriguing thing.”
The excited speculation around the show extended to its crew, as well. The cast typically received their script pages just before they filmed their scenes, and only for the sections they appeared in. If they wanted to know how their roles fit into the bigger picture, they had to tune into the show just like everyone else. As the show’s popularity grew, so did the bubble of secrecy around it.
“Everybody wanted to know what was happening: who did this, and who did that?” says Charlotte Stewart. “We weren’t even allowed to be on the set unless we were working, so we had to watch the show to find out what was happening.”
“It was very common for the phone to start ringing after each and every episode,” says Duwayne Dunham, who directed the first regular-season installment. “It was the cast and crew calling [each other], saying ‘Hey, did you see that?’”

Because the show’s success was never a given, Lynch and Frost had to be clever about where they left audiences at the end of those first seven episodes. In hopes that viewers would be clamoring for more, they left the show’s central murder unsolved—and capped off the season finale with what appeared to be the death of the show’s main character, Agent Dale Cooper.
“We would all meet occasionally at Dana Ashbrook’s house [to watch the show],” remembers Stewart. “At the end of the first season, when Agent Cooper opens the door and he gets shot? We were just speechless. We were all watching. We thought, ‘Oh my god, we’re out of work! The show’s over! How do you continue to show when the main character is shot dead?’” She continues: “David was going to make that the end of the show unless the network picked up the series. He was going to basically say, ‘Screw you, that’s the end of the show.’ But of course, they picked it up.”
“Season one ended on such a huge cliffhanger,” remembers John Thorne. “We all wondered what was going to happen. Who was going to survive? Who shot Cooper? All of those very fun things you do when you get involved in a television show like that.”
While the news hadn’t yet made it back to every member of the cast, ABC had already picked up a second season before that finale aired. Fan speculation around the show reached a fever pitch during the summer of 1990, thrusting many of its young, unseasoned stars into the media spotlight.
“That was not something I was prepared for at all,” says Amick, who posed for the cover of Rolling Stone with Twin Peaks co-stars Lara Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn. “Just to be thrown into this mayhem of fame was really bizarre. I learned pretty quickly that I didn’t like it.”
“We shot [the first season] and we all kind of went our separate ways,” says Robie. “Once the pilot aired, it was hard to deal with [the attention] in Seattle. I remember this frightening day I was in the public market, just living my life, doing my ordinary stuff, and suddenly people were pointing at me and saying, ‘It’s Nadine! It’s Nadine!’”
Not every encounter was frightening, however.
“People would come up to me in the grocery store and I’d be standing there, holding a head of lettuce, and they would ask, ‘When Agent Cooper was setting up those bottles and throwing those stones, what did that mean?’” Robie laughs. “We’re standing there in the produce section, and I would go, ‘Well, I’m not really sure. What do you think?’”
For Twin Peaks devotees, the four months between those two seasons were long ones. To help pass the time, the show’s biggest fans turned to tie-in merchandise in their hunt for clues.
“Twin Peaks ended at the end of May, and the second season didn’t come out until the end of September,” Thorne explains. “Back in those days there was no internet. There wasn’t a way to get information quickly. You basically looked at TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly to see what they were reporting on, if they were starting to shoot the new season.” He continues: “We knew there was going to be a tie-in book, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. We knew stuff was coming, and we were anticipating that.”
Published only a few weeks before the premiere of season two, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer was essential reading for anyone who wanted to dig deeper into Twin Peaks’ mysteries. Part of the show’s official canon, Laura’s secret diary offered a glimpse into her private thoughts, and provided a timeline of the doomed teenager’s final months before her death. A New York Times bestseller upon its release, the book was written by Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer, who would soon become a notable filmmaker in her own right as the writer/director of Boxing Helena, released in 1993 and starring Twin Peaks’ Sherilyn Fenn.
“I had told my father when I was about 12 years old that I wished I could find some other girls’ diary on the walk home. Just to take hold of it, and see if she felt and feared the same things I did. Did she want things she didn’t have words for? Did she doubt herself, and yet have a fearlessness in her?” says Jennifer Lynch. “Years later, Dad recalled this chat we had had, and asked if I would write Laura’s diary. It was a gift. A no brainer. Absolutely, yes.”
“I knew it had to be special,” she continues. “Different and specific to Laura, but universal enough that everyone could relate in some way. Youth is something we all get, and we get it in all shapes and colors. Laura’s experience was something I wanted people to understand, but to regret. I wanted the world to mourn her simple yearnings to be seen and loved. Teen angst, with a dark twist.”
As the author of Laura’s secret diary, Jennifer Lynch was the first person outside of her father and Mark Frost who knew the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer. She was charged with protecting one of the entertainment world’s most closely guarded secrets.
“People absolutely tried to pull it out of me, in daily life and on television,” says Jennifer Lynch. “I knew who the killer was, and it made sense to me. It was the darkest answer. The most potent option.”
Going into season two, the creators of Twin Peaks were feeling greater pressure from ABC to bring closure to the series’ inciting mystery. They would finally reveal Laura’s killer seven chapters in to the second season’s 22-episode run. The increased number of episodes, compacted with the resolution of that central storyline, meant that the show’s writers had to find new plot threads for its ever-growing cast. Many characters who played secondary roles in season one were given much more to do in season two.
“We never knew where my character was going, or who she was. I just filled her in as best I could,” says Laurie, whose Catherine Martell spent a portion of season two disguised as a mysterious “Japanese businessman” named Mr. Tojamura. “It actually brought me one of those great, great experiences as an actor when David said, ‘For next year, we’re going to bring your character back secretly, disguised as a man. You should think about what sort of man you’d like to be.’ I was given this great treat: being able to create a character. It was maybe one of the high points of my career.” She laughs, remembering the situation: “I was sworn to secrecy. David didn’t want anyone to know [about my disguise], even my agents, my family, my parents. My sister was so upset, thinking I’d been fired from the show.”
In the episodes, credit for her role was given to a made-up person named Fumio Yamaguchi. Her cast-mates were told that Fumio was a famous Japanese actor, who had worked for Akira Kurosawa. Given that this was before IMDB, there was little way for anyone to fact-check the ruse.
“David didn’t even want the cast to know who was under that heavy makeup. They did my makeup in a secret place, and I was kept in an office instead of a dressing room in between scenes. It was quite an elaborate thing,” Laurie continues. “People [eventually] realized, of course, that I wasn’t this Japanese person that I claimed to be. They all made guesses as to who I might be, and some of them thought I was Isabella Rossellini in disguise. That made sense…”
Wendy Robie was another actor who was essentially given an opportunity to play dual roles in season two. After waking from a coma, her middle-aged character believes herself to be a teenager again. She returns to high school and becomes the star of the Twin Peaks wrestling team.
“I don’t know if somebody saw me jogging one day or something like that, but suddenly Nadine had superhuman strength,” explains Robie. “They sent me to this circus school in Van Nuys, and I spent a few hours there over a few days learning how to do backflips, because I would have to do all of these stunts.” She laughs: “Nadine thought she was 18 years old, but Wendy knew damn well she wasn’t! It was like this crazed teenager would take over my body in the morning, and hand it back to me when it was time to go home.”
New characters were added to the cast as well. Carel Stuycken may not have had very many lines or much screen time on the show, but his character—a giant who appears to Agent Cooper in cryptic visions—was certainly a memorable one, having delivered several of the series’ most-quoted riddles.
“I was given absolutely no description of what my character was. When I did the scene, as I was preparing for it, I saw the character as a sort of psychiatrist from outer space,” says Struycken, who makes his first appearance in the opening moments of season two. “I met David Lynch for the very first time on the set. He walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, ‘Everything is going to be peachy-keen!’”
“The way [that scene] was shot, the first take took forever. I was getting worried because everything was so slow. David Lynch says ‘cut,’ and he walks up to us and says, ‘Whatever you’re doing, do it muuuuuch slower,’” Struycken laughs. “It immediately put you in the mood. There was nothing related to reality that you could hold onto…I think that was the feeling that everybody had: it was almost like David Lynch was putting everybody into some sort of trance.”
By all accounts Lynch’s directing style could be unorthodox, but he had a talent for putting his actors at ease, even when his suggestions didn’t always make sense.
“There was one defining moment where I was on the phone in the kitchen of my house,” says Amick. “As I’m talking and listening, David’s giving me directions, telling me to very slowly start raising my head and looking toward the ceiling. Very, very slowly, through the entire conversation, until I’m just staring up at the ceiling. I did it a few times, and it just felt so weird at the time. Finally I was like, ‘David, why? What’s my motivation? What am I doing?’ And he said, ‘Mädchen, it looks great!’”
“That’s when I realized, okay, I’m just going to let myself go and trust that he’s got something in his head that he’s going for,” she continues. “I don’t have to mull it over, and beat it to death with rational thinking. I just had to trust David and he’d make something beautiful. He doesn’t always know the meaning of what he does. He’s a conduit: something visual or artistic comes from the universe, and he’s sort of the channel that it goes through. He puts it out and lets other people take from it what they want.”
“Twin Peaks had a life of its own,” says Horse. “It wasn’t charted, like, ‘This is what’s going to happen, this is where it’s going to go.’ It was organic, and it kind of birthed itself sometimes. Things would happen and David would go, ‘Okay, that’s the direction this is making me go.’ Being in it was being part of that living part of it.”
Playful and open-minded, Lynch would follow whatever inspiration would come to him in the moment.
“I always think it’s so cute when people want to ask [David], ‘What does this mean? What does that mean?’ and he just asks them right back, ‘Well, what do you think it means?’” says Amick. “That makes him very, very unique. Most of the other experiences I’ve had with other directors, they’re mulling through it with you, trying to find reason, and figuring out all the rational things that make sense. David sometimes just does something because it feels good.”
“David Lynch is so open, and doesn’t want to cut off the possibility of new ideas,” says Laurie. “He leaves everything open, just like life is. Perhaps he doesn’t want to label things, or predict what’s going to happen. He just sort of goes along with the new experience, and collects ideas as he goes.”
“In all of the times that I’ve worked with him, I never really had a script. He would hand it to me just before we were going to shoot,” says Robertson. “Somewhere along the way someone said I improvised [some of my lines], and I didn’t. I never improvised anything with David Lynch: he puts it into your head, and you say it.”
“I think he’s got a very intuitive streak about him. He can read people, and he knows what’s inside them,” says Duwayne Dunham, who watched and learned from filmmakers such as Lynch and George Lucas before embarking on his own directorial career. “David, I think, does give people tremendous leeway—but he knows what he wants, too. He can very carefully influence to get it around, but he’s also a guy that lives in the moment, and the moment is something that really isn’t rehearsed.”
“I don’t use the term ‘genius’ very often, but he truly is,” says Robie. “He’s an actor’s director, because he could make a safe place for the actor. You absolutely knew, down to your soul, that he had complete confidence in you. There’s no doubt in him that you were absolutely the person to do this thing that he needed you to do…. So, you felt this marvelous freedom to be completely open-minded and open to invention, with no filter and no self-consciousness. He always got our best work, because there was never a false moment.”
“We’ve been friends forever and ever and ever it seems like now,” says Kyle MacLachlan, who had worked with Lynch on Dune and Blue Velvet prior to starring in Twin Peaks. “I think there comes with age a calmness, and it’s there when working with David. There’s no uncertainty. It’s like we’re working together and moving forward, and creating something. There’s still the excitement, and the joy, and the pleasure and fun [in that] discovery, and we both get a kick out of it, together…. Particularly on my side, as I’ve gotten older, done more, and matured a bit, there’s a comfort and an ease—maybe ‘ease’ is the word I’m looking for—in the process. It’s not fraught with uncertainty. There’s a confidence that I really welcome when working with David.”
“David has great trust in his actors,” says Horse. “One time he went to me, ‘Okay, Michael, can you do that again, but this time good?’” He laughs. “He’s like Jimmy Stewart with Salvador Dali’s intestines.”
“[David] was very easy to work with,” says Stewart. “I always just followed every bit of direction he gave me, even though I didn’t completely understand why he was asking me to do something. He had a vision, and I respected that. I think once everybody had worked with him for a while they got that, too. They kind of went with what he told him to do. That’s why you see so many quirky characters in the films that he does, and the TV series.”
“Working with David Lynch, he made me feel like I was creating my part along with him,” says Robertson. “I wasn’t reading lines while he was adjusting me, trying to get me to be something I’m not capable of being. He was pulling things out of me that I didn’t know were there.”
Because Lynch is among the most-studied and written-about filmmakers of the last half-century, the contributions of Twin Peaks’ other co-creator, Mark Frost, have a tendency to get overlooked. Those involved in its creation agree that both of their DNA is woven throughout the world and its quirky characters, and that Twin Peaks could never have happened had these two creative minds not come together.
“Their understanding of the world of Twin Peaks is in sync, but it’s completely different,” says Robie. “It comes from two different directions. Mark is a writer and novelist, and he really understands television. David is an artist, a painter. He tells stories visually and mythically, like he uses magic. You bring those two different sides of the art of storytelling and filmmaking together, and it just enhances [them both].”
“There’s no doubt that both Lynch and Frost brought strengths to the work,” says Thorne. “Obviously we know what Lynch can do with mood and music and the power of cinema. Frost has an amazing storytelling sense, and the ability to move a story forward from scene to scene and act to act. He knows how to plot it out and where it should go.”
“[Mark Frost] was like the anchor that kept the David Lynch ship in the building,” says Robertson. “Mark is very kind and very curious, and very well-educated and open…I always felt that he had a good handle on what they could do on television in 1990, and what they couldn’t do.”
“I couldn’t tell you who was the more imaginative of the two,” says Stewart. “I think Mark went more by the book, by the scripts—which he probably wrote half of. But they were both very easy to work with and very agreeable if you came up with an idea…. I imagine they got a lot of laughs working together.”
“You had these two creators who bring their own sensibilities to it, sometimes in sync and sometimes not,” says Thorne. “But even when not [in sync] it introduced a magic to it that perhaps couldn’t have happened if someone sat down and just tried to map it all out from the beginning.”
“[Together] they created something that was magical,” says Dunham. “Something enduring. It’s hard to do something that holds up over the test of time.”
Like so many other great creative runs, it wouldn’t last. Viewership plummeted after the show revealed Laura’s killer and viewers weren’t given a strong enough narrative hook to replace it. The season was put on hiatus several times, and shuffled around between time slots. Although Lynch and Frost tried to get the show back on track during its last episodes it was too little, too late for their network bosses. ABC aired what would (for a long time) be the final installments of Twin Peaks as a double-header in June of 1991.
While the show had been cancelled, the story of Twin Peaks and its inhabitants was far from over. David Lynch directed a prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), which expanded on the events in Laura Palmer’s life leading into the show. But the story wouldn’t pick up where it left off until 2017, after Lynch, Frost, and many members of the original cast reunited for Twin Peaks: The Return, a Showtime limited series set two-and-a-half decades after the show’s original run.

During its 25-year absence from television, Twin Peaks continued to captivate audiences as new generations of fans found their way to the original episodes, first through cable reruns, video tapes, and DVD sets, and more recently via streaming services. Although that original run was short-lived, Twin Peaks never truly died. It’s a rare show where its fanbase grew after it went off the air.
“I think what happens with Twin Peaks is you start to find yourself in it,” says Thorne. “There are large, philosophical questions that are part of Twin Peaks, and they’re not evident at first. Once you get into it, you start to see those things surface.”
“It doesn’t go to the lowest common denominator,” says Robertson. “It reaches toward your highest self, and it makes you feel a little bit enlightened after you’ve watched it. I think it stimulates the consciousness of a human being to connect with humanity’s consciousness.”
“Good cinema makes you feel something, and Twin Peaks turns you inside out,” says Dunham. “By the time it was over, you were thinking, ‘Whoa! What was that?’”
“There was something about David Lynch on television that was so brazenly against the grain and broke all of the rules,” says Amick. “It paved a completely new path for filmmaking on television. There are so many shows I still see that are following that mold. We broke open a chasm.”
“Everything out there has Twin Peaks’ DNA all over it. They don’t even try to hide it, they pay homage to it,” says Horse. “If I never did another thing in my life, I’d be pleased.” He continues: “Just to have been a small color on David Lynch’s artistic palette is just something I can’t explain to other actors.”
“I’ve always felt that I was one little sliver, or shard, in a kaleidoscope,” says Robie. “But all of the shards mattered.”
“I do believe that David Lynch is our modern day genius: our Amadeus, our Da Vinci,” says Amick. “We’re lucky enough to be living in a time when he’s making art, and I think his art will become even more appreciated and revered decades from now. I think that’s why people keep finding it: because it’s such a beautiful, pure art form.”
“It was so timeless,” says Stewart. “[Twin Peaks] was completely unmoored from the general vibe of its time. I think that’s attractive to people: it’s not in fashion or out of fashion. It’s just completely beyond.”
“When my father leans forward and whispers something, you listen,” says Jennifer Lynch. “He’s sharing something, and inviting you into a world. [It’s] enough like yours to keep you there, and different enough to keep you interested. He’s a master storyteller.”
“I think we had a secret that the fans were in on, and that’s what made it so popular,” says Stewart. “There were some people you’d talk to and they would go, ‘Twin Peaks? Oh, man, I couldn’t understand anything about it.’ And then you have the avid fans…they caught on to everything.” She continues: “They just got David Lynch and they were proud of it…. The fans became a real, select group. It wasn’t like everybody liked [the show], and I think the fans loved that there were people who didn’t get, it or didn’t want to get it, or didn’t try—because that made it special.”
“Fans will come up and ask, ‘What did this mean?’ and I’ll go, ‘I don’t know,’” says Horse. “I’m still learning! Every now and then the fans will explain something to me and I’ll go, ‘Oh, wow, yeah.’”
“I’m sure there’s stuff that I’ll never know [about Twin Peaks], and that’s what David Lynch gets so much glee from. There are so many secrets, inside secrets, inside more secrets,” says Robertson. “It only takes one person to say, ‘You’re going to sit down and watch this.’ That person isn’t going to want to stop watching it.”
“It’s David Lynch,” says MacLachlan. “It’s something that’s going to be around for a long time. He’s an artist of the highest level, I feel. Whether you see it now or in five years, you’ll see it.”
(Twin Peaks is streaming on Paramount+ and is available on Blu-ray and DVD via Paramount Home Entertainment.)
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