by David Lynch
“Big Ed was always a joyous thing for me, and that was such a moving moment when Norma puts her hand on my back and the two of us kiss,” added McGill of a scene in season three when the two star-crossed lovers finally get together. “It was just a beautiful feeling, and David did that in one take with no reshooting.”10
“When we shot that scene, David had the Otis Redding song [‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’] playing on the set,” said Lipton, “and when I looked over at him after he said cut, he was crying like a little baby.”
The resolution of the Big Ed/Norma love affair was one of many changes in the town of Twin Peaks. “As a young lad playing the young Bobby Briggs, I had free rein to be an asshole, so that was fun,” said Ashbrook. “I knew season three would be different and I wasn’t shocked when I found out Bobby had become a cop, because a scene between my father and me in season two kind of set that up. Back in the day my direction from David was a little more out there, but this time he wasn’t as ethereal with me as I’ve heard he was with some other people. My scenes were very specifically written out, and I just wanted to jump in there and not mess it up.
“Every job I’ve ever gotten has had something to do with Twin Peaks, and David’s the reason I can still be an actor,” Ashbrook continued. “He’s like the greatest teacher you ever had and is the truest artist I’ve ever met. When we were shooting the pilot, Lara Flynn Boyle and I once ran into him in the hall at the Red Lion hotel, where we all stayed, and he invited us into his room to see a poster he was working on. After twelve hours of shooting, he was going back to his room and making more art—I love that about him.”
Ashbrook’s character matured over the twenty-five years that passed since the close of season two; James Marshall’s character got moodier. “I think David approaches each character as a different aspect of himself. He’s attracted to characters with innocence, and I think that’s what James Hurley is about for him,” said Marshall. “James is a deeply tormented character, and I think David enjoys it when the soul rises to the surface as a result of sorrow or joy. He’s a master at moving energy around, too.
“There was a scene in season one where Lara Flynn Boyle and I were sitting on the couch and were supposed to kiss. David wasn’t getting the vibe he wanted, though, so he’d come over and talk to Lara, look at me and say nothing, then go back to his chair. He did this several times but he still wasn’t getting something, so this time he comes over to me and squats down and his hands come up and he starts closing his hands then opening them and extending his fingers. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing but we weren’t there yet, so he opened and closed his hands for two or three minutes without saying a word, then stood up and said, ‘Go for it,’ and walked away. He’d basically shifted the energy completely by making us be still with him for a few minutes. He just turned up the gas and left us to light the flame.”11
Inevitably, the original cast suffered signs of attrition. Several actors—Frank Silva, David Bowie, and Don S. Davis—died before the shoot began. Others—Warren Frost, Miguel Ferrer, and Harry Dean Stanton—died after it wrapped. The presence of all of them in the show underscores how porous the line separating the living from the dead is for Lynch. A particularly poignant figure is Log Lady Catherine Coulson, who almost didn’t make it onscreen. She died on Monday, September 28th, 2015. The previous Tuesday, a friend visited her at her home in Ashland, Oregon, and discovered that on Sunday she planned to fly to Washington to shoot scenes on Monday and Tuesday. Coulson was under hospice care by then and advised not to travel, but she was determined to be in the show and had hidden from Lynch how ill she was. The friend contacted the director and advised that if he wanted her in the show he should get to Ashland immediately and shoot her there in her home. The following day, Noriko Miyakawa traveled to Ashland where a local film crew was pulled together, and Coulson shot her scenes that night with Lynch directing by Skype. She died five days later. One week earlier, Marv Rosand, who plays Double R Diner employee Toad, had passed on, as well. On October 18th of 2017, Brent Briscoe, who played Detective Dave Macklay, died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-six of complications after a fall.
The show included actors from other Lynch films—Balthazar Getty, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, and Robert Forster—and marked the acting debut of a handful of people in key roles. “One day during a recording session David looked at me and said, ‘I think there’s a role for you in my new project,’ ” said Chrysta Bell, who plays FBI agent Tammy Preston. “It wasn’t until he gave me my pages that I realized Tammy was a significant role. I doubted whether I could do it, but when I expressed my reservations David said, ‘It will be fine, trust me.’ I asked if I should take some acting lessons and he said, ‘No! Don’t you dare!’
“David had a vision of the character, and I had several fittings to get the outfits right,” she added. “He looked at every picture [costumer] Nancy Steiner sent and he’d say, ‘No, it’s not that,’ or ‘You got that part right but you gotta work on this other part.’ He kept honing in until he had this Jessica-Rabbit-as-an-FBI-agent look.”
Lynch visualizes his characters in his mind’s eye long before he walks on set, but he fleshes them out with the actors he casts. “The dialogue alone shapes the character of Diane pretty definitively and there were other parts of her that were already in place,” said Dern of her character. “David wanted a lip color for Diane that didn’t exist. We tried everything from every makeup line we could find, and finally he just created his own lipstick palette and mixed colors until he found the one he wanted. Every day I was on set, he spent fifteen minutes mixing lipstick colors until he got this pink that was almost white, but it had to have a lot of gold and yellow in it.
“He’s very specific. But at the same time, David loves watching actors find things for themselves,” Dern continued. “Whether he’s playing Shostakovich over loudspeakers on the set of Blue Velvet for Kyle and me, or sending Nic Cage and me on a road trip together and telling us what music he’d like us to listen to while we’re becoming Sailor and Lula for Wild at Heart—he cares deeply about helping you discover that mood and mystery for yourself.”
Among those making their onscreen debut in the show was Jake Wardle, a young British actor who caught Lynch’s eye with a 2010 YouTube video titled The English Language in 24 Accents. “In 2012, Sabrina Sutherland emailed me and said, ‘Hi, I work for a director who’s interested in casting you in one of his projects and he’d like to Skype with you,’ and David and I had our first Skype,” said Wardle, who was just twenty years old at the time. “He was really easygoing and he told me how impressed he was with my video and that he liked my sincerity, and we continued Skyping every few months. We’d talk about random things, just getting to know each other, like he’d ask me what I had for lunch or what kind of dog I had. Then in 2014 he said, ‘Have you ever seen Twin Peaks? We’re making a new one and you’re gonna play a Cockney guy called Freddie who has a magic green glove that gives him super strength.’ He wrote my part in Cockney rhyming slang, which he’s very interested in. He actually knows more about it than I do.
“I finally met David on March 1st, 2016, when I went in for my costume fitting. I was invited to visit the set and David was filming the scene from episode eight with the Fireman and Señorita Dido. He gave me a massive hug and let me sit next to him and watch him direct for several hours. If David hadn’t found me I don’t know if I would’ve had the confidence to act, but I know now that it’s my destiny. David changed my life because he helped me get on the right path. I’m a lot like Freddie: Freddie was chosen by the Fireman, and I was chosen by David. The Fireman gave Freddie the glove, and David gave me the role.”12
At the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of experience was Don Murray, a seasoned veteran who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance opposite Marilyn Monroe in the 1956 film Bus Stop. “I’d never met David, so I was surprised when I got the call that he wanted m
e,” said Murray. “Originally the part was written for a forty-five-year-old man and I was eighty-seven, but he said, ‘I really like Don Murray so I don’t care.’ I have no idea what David saw in me, but he has a strong vision of what he wants, and when he casts someone he’s already seen something in that person that’s exactly what he wants to see on the screen. You get very little direction from him, and nobody has to struggle to play the characters he casts them as.
“David’s was the happiest set I’ve ever been on,” Murray added. “There’s a thing he does I’ve never seen another director do: Even if somebody has a very small part, when they complete their work he stops production, gathers the cast and crew around, and says, ‘That was a wrap for Miss So-and-So’s last day, and I’d like to thank her and give her a round of applause.’ There was an atmosphere of joy on that set that was unique.”13
The cast also included a handful of young actors who’d been scuffling around the industry for a while and will probably look back on Twin Peaks: The Return as their big break. “I don’t know how the audition came about, but I drove deep into an industrial section of the San Fernando Valley and went into a waiting room full of the kind of people you’d expect to run into in David Lynch’s casting office,” said Eric Edelstein, who plays a giggling police detective named Fusco. “I didn’t get the part I went in for, but I was later told that David was trying to find something for me, and a few months after that I got a call and I was doing a wardrobe fitting the next day. When I got to the set, David walks in and says, ‘Okay, you three are the brothers Fusco and, Eric, you’re the baby of the family and your brothers just love you.’ Then he used my laugh like a musical instrument and choreographed it in while we were shooting—I’m guessing I must’ve giggled in the audition and that’s why I got the part.
“Prior to Twin Peaks I kept getting cast as bad guys, and I thought, Am I going to be messing with this dark energy from now on? In Twin Peaks not only was I not playing a bad guy, I was playing myself, and now I’m getting offered stuff for the giant giggly guy. The path of my career changed entirely because of David seeing that in me.”14
Actors make their way to Lynch down different avenues; George Griffith, who plays hired assassin Ray Monroe, got there through a family connection. “Catching the Big Fish had a big impact on me, and in 2009 I suggested he be a guest on an episode about meditation for The Dr. Oz Show,” said Griffith, who’s married to Oz’s daughter. “David agreed to be on the show and I did the interview, then afterward they invited me to lunch with them. I managed to get seated next to him and I couldn’t believe I was sitting there with him. David’s kind of a patron saint for a lot of people, and that lunch marked a huge shift in my life. I told him about a movie I was working on and sent him a copy after I finished it, but I didn’t expect him to watch it. Then two weeks later I got an effusive email from him telling me that he loved the film. Tears were running down my cheeks after I read that.
“When I heard Twin Peaks was coming back, I thought, Maybe I can make coffee or something, so I wrote him and told him I was available to do anything,” Griffith continued. “Then Johanna Ray asked me to come in and I thought it was just another kindness from David. I met with Johanna, who didn’t know anything about me and was probably wondering how I got there, and afterward I thought, There’s no way I’m going to get on the show after the way that went. Then I got an email from them saying, ‘Welcome aboard.’ I couldn’t believe it!
“I didn’t see David until the day I shot my first scene, which was meeting Mr. C. at Beulah’s house. When I walked on set David said, ‘George Griffith, I love your movie,’ which was such a cool thing for him to do, because nobody knew who I was and it allowed me to arrive with some kind of weight. All my scenes were with Kyle, and he and David have such a history together, and I was nervous, of course. But on my first day Kyle said, ‘The boss always gets what he wants,’ and that was exactly what I needed to hear.”15
Also new to Lynch’s world was celebrated comic actor Michael Cera, whose nutty cameo as motorcycle guy Wally Brando is one of the funniest sequences in the show. “In 2012 I went with Eric Edelstein and another friend to do the introductory TM training at the center in L.A.,” Cera recalled. “On the fourth day a woman who works there approached us and said, ‘Would you guys like to meditate with David?’ We were stunned and said that would be amazing, but we kind of took the invitation with a grain of salt. Then a month or so later she called and said, ‘How about Thursday at David’s house?’ It was just him and us, and it was so open of him to have strangers into his home. He was so kind that I lost the sense of being an intruder and we meditated together and it was one of the most special things that ever happened to me. And then getting the chance to work with him? That I was even on his radar in the slightest way was incredible to me. My greatest hope was that I wouldn’t waste his time and he wouldn’t regret hiring me.
“We didn’t really discuss the character,” added Cera of Wally Brando. “I’d been watching a Dick Cavett interview with Marlon Brando and was trying to copy that as best I could, and David told me to adhere to the grammar in the script, which was helpful. He has a very light touch. It was two in the morning when we shot the scene, and we finished the whole thing in about forty minutes.”16
Things moved quickly throughout the shoot. “David’s always been efficient, but he took it to a new level with this,” said MacLachlan. “I was like, jeez, you just want to do one take? We all knew he wouldn’t go forward if he didn’t have it, though, and he was absolutely clear about what he wanted. I remember the day we were doing the conga-line scene through Dougie’s office, and Jim Belushi ad-libbed something. After David says cut, there’s always a moment where you’re waiting to hear what’s next, so there’s a pause, then David said in the megaphone, ‘Mr. Belushi? Do I need to report you to the principal’s office?’ Jim said, ‘Nope, got it.’ David handles things like that in such a charming way and makes his point without embarrassing anybody.”
Just how streamlined the production was is reflected in how the musical performances at the Roadhouse were handled: There were approximately two dozen of them, and they were all shot in a single day at a location in Pasadena after a preliminary test shoot of Riley Lynch and Dean Hurley’s band, Trouble. Audience members were rotated for variety and shot on another day. Everything moved fast.
This isn’t to suggest that the shoot was a breeze for Lynch. “He had fun, but it was hard on him,” said Barile. “He had his seventieth birthday during the shoot and we worked at least twelve-hour days—many days went for seventeen. He got sick several times, and there were a few days when he had crap in his lungs and a fever and could barely get upstairs when we dropped him off. But there he’d be six hours later, up and back at work. One day we were shooting in the Red Room and he fell and banged up both knees pretty good, but he just got up and walked it off. Before the show I hadn’t known how tough he is.”
Given how consuming the entire undertaking was, it’s no surprise that it took a toll on Lynch’s marriage. “It was challenging because he basically just disappeared,” recalled Stofle. “And he was exhausted. Eighteen hours of content? That’s like making at least nine feature films and is a massive undertaking. His schedule was grueling, he was flipping back and forth from day shoots to night shoots, and Sunday was his only day off. He always had a production meeting on Sunday night, though, so he never caught up on sleep. At one point he told me, ‘Puff, I was in my trailer meditating and I fell asleep and when I woke up I didn’t know where I was. Everybody on the set is younger than me and I’m so tired.’ He got really sick but he never stopped working.
“Not long into the shoot he said, ‘When I come home at six A.M., you and Lula are starting your day and running around, and I need silence and blackout curtains,’ ” Stofle continued. “We looked into getting him a room at the Chateau Marmont but it was too expensive, so I turned one of the guest rooms in t
he gray house into a room for him with blackout curtains stapled over the windows and he loved it. When he came back from shooting in Washington, he moved over there, and one night I visited him and he was watching TV and smoking, and I thought, This is permanent. Because of the smoking. For two years he’d been complaining about having to smoke outside and he was able to smoke inside over there. Smoking is a big piece of this puzzle.”
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Twin Peaks: The Return employs a much broader canvas than the preceding seasons did. Set in New York City; Las Vegas and a neighboring suburb; the fictional cities of Twin Peaks and Buckhorn, North Dakota; Philadelphia; the Pentagon; Odessa, Texas; and, of course, the Red Room, it’s a sprawling story with multiple plots. There are personal touches embedded throughout the story, though. That bronze statue of a cowboy installed in the plaza outside the Lucky 7 Insurance Agency? It was based on a photograph of Lynch’s father taken when he was nineteen years old and working at a forest lookout station. There’s nothing random in the show, and things have multiple layers of meaning, yet it all came together fluidly. “I’d see David sitting over in a corner writing,” recalled Struycken, “then somebody would walk up to me and hand me a slip of paper torn out of a notebook with the lines I’d be saying in the next scene.”
“My favorite scene in the show was completely improvised,” said Chrysta Bell. “One day Laura and David and I were sitting together on set waiting to do something, and it was nice watching Laura and David together—they have such a sweet thing between them. David was making an effort to include me in the conversation—he’s always so considerate—then he looks at us and says, ‘We’re gonna do a scene that’s not in the script. We’re gonna go outside and stand on the steps and we’re just gonna be there and at some point I’ll take a drag of Laura’s cigarette.’ The whole thing was awkward and I was basically just holding space in this long scene, but David was using the dynamic between the three of us and taking it to another level. He’s always creating. We were just chitchatting and he thinks, Wait a second, this is cool, let’s put this in Twin Peaks. So he told Peter Deming, ‘We’re going outside,’ and they had to move the porta-potties.”
