A bottle of red wine sealed his entry into the cinema. David Lynch sent it to the hotel room where Kyle MacLachlan (Washington, 65 years old) was resting after a day in which his role as Paul Atreides in
Dune
seemed about to evaporate. His hair didn't fit, it was too straight, it wasn't that of a leader. The pressure was immense,
Dune
was a highly anticipated adaptation and MacLachlan was in love with the original work, but the powerful producer Dino De Laurentiis was not convinced that it was the right one. Yes, David Lynch was, the fashionable director thanks to the eight Oscar nominations for the extraordinary
The Elephant Man
(1980). Lynch was clear from the beginning, that was his boy and he was going to be that way for many years.
That monumental and failed film would mark the beginning of a friendship that still endures. In addition to
Dune
,
Blue Velvet
, and the original
Twin Peaks
series , MacLachlan has appeared in the Twin Peaks film,
Fire Walk with Me
, and its 2017 television sequel,
Twin Peaks: The Return
. Before
Dune
he had only appeared as an uncredited extra in the disturbing
At the Bottom of the Stairs
(1980). His experience was theatrical. A few months before receiving that bottle of wine he was on stage, playing the Damis de
Tartuffe
. A Dino de Laurentiis
casting agent who was scouring scenes looking for a new face to cast (something similar to what he had done to find
King Kong
star
Jessica Lange) saw it and the rest is history. He was 20 years old and that was the first in a long list of roles that have given him a place in the Olympus of cinema and television. Above all, Agent Cooper from
Twin Peaks
.
There are common traits in all his roles: they are beings with an appearance so pristine that it borders on parody, but with an exuberant inner life, “like a
boy scout
navigating the underworld,” they have written about him. “Kyle plays innocents interested in the mysteries of life,” said David Lynch. “He's the person you trust enough to go into a strange world with him.” There's a lot about him about the classic gallant: his perfect hair, his square jaw, his patrician air. It's easy to see in him a James Stewart who would have embraced the dark side of him. For Lynch he is a modern Errol Flynn and in
A Touch of Pink
(2004)
played Cary Grant.
Since yesterday, he has added a new cult role to his filmography: he is one of the protagonists of
Fallout
, the adaptation of the best-selling video game that has just landed on Amazon Prime Video. A series that also shows an idyllic world that is a mere facade, a post-apocalyptic future disguised as the peaceful fifties in which body parts fly across the screen.
A ship sinks
I wasn't going to be an actor, but rather a singer. It was his mother, director of a youth theater program, who instilled in him a love for the stage. MacLachlan, the son of a lawyer and a housewife, is the eldest of three brothers, the perfect middle-class Republican family. A good son and an impeccable companion for the students of the Seattle theater school, everyone celebrated the luck he had in crossing paths with
Dune
. His training directed him toward classical theater, but suddenly he found himself riding a giant worm alongside Sean Young and Sting in loincloths. His film debut was anything but peaceful. Dino De Laurentiis wanted to surpass
Star Wars
, but David Lynch had many of his own ideas regarding Frank Herbert's universe and
Dune
ended up becoming one of Hollywood's biggest flops. The final cut was five hours long, but the producers cut it in half and made it incomprehensible. It was a critical and public failure and was a drag on MacLachlan's career.
Blue Velvet,
also directed by Lynch and produced by De Laurentiis, was going to be his next project and was postponed after the failure of
Dune
. Perhaps only his mother was relieved; He was categorically opposed to his son accepting a role in a film that, in his opinion, trivialized the mistreatment of women.
When the phone stopped ringing he moved to Los Angeles, watching his career fade away. “It was like a ship, you could feel it sinking. I told myself: everything will be fine, I have money to live on and my work on
Dune
was good, I just need to make another movie.” But that second film didn't arrive. She went from audition to audition without any positive results. “I would get up, go to the gym, exercise, come home, floss my teeth, clean the apartment, talk on the phone. It was a bad time,” he would confess years later, already installed in success. “Actors have a dark sense of humor,” he confessed to
The Guardian.
“Whenever we finish a project we say, 'Well, that's it, I'll never work again.'” The joke almost came true. He was about to sneak into
Top Gun
(1986), but that never came to fruition. He had barely been in Hollywood five minutes and he was already damaged goods.
Oliver Stone did have him, and he offered him the role that Charlie Sheen would end up playing in
Platoon
(1986). But MacLachlan was not comfortable with the violence and darkness of the script and rejected the role. Then Di Laurentiis offered Lynch a tiny budget to film
Blue Velvet
and the friends got back together. “David Lynch brought me out of the darkness,” he admits, although if we look at purely cinematographic criteria, he really plunged him into it: Jeffrey Beaumont is the most disturbing role of his career. “Yes, the things I did with Isabella (Rossellini) were sickeningly erotic,” he admits.
The film received a strong blow from critic Roger Ebert, who considered it degrading to Rossellini. Recently the actress, who was Lynch's partner at the time, has claimed her role as the decision of an adult actress who knew what she was going to play. During filming, MacLachlan was also concerned about how a film about an abused woman would look. “I trusted David to do it in such a way that those scenes were really offensive and not erotic, that they were horrible. That was my only concern: that it would not seem that cruel treatment of women is good.”
Stone had not managed to convince him to be a soldier in Vietnam, but he had managed to convince him to be Ray Manzarek of
The Doors
(1991). The actor learned all the songs of The Doors and confesses that it was one of his favorite filmings. And then his friend David Lynch told him about
Twin Peaks
, an extension of the
Blue Velvet universe.
Everyone thought it would be a pilot that would end up becoming a movie (that would happen years later with
Mulholland Drive
). After all, what was a strange guy like Lynch doing on television? But FOX was excited about the project.
Twin Peaks
became a cult phenomenon and at the same time a groundbreaking audiometer. The chords of Angelo Badalamenti's hypnotizing soundtrack resonated halfway around the world and its actors, most of them unknown, became stars. And at the front was Dale Cooper, the dapper FBI agent fascinated by coffee, cherry pie and Douglas firs, someone who could hold a serious, respectful conversation with a woman cradling a log.
He gave himself body and soul to the character, although he claimed to be somewhat lost with the plot. "I do not understand everything
Twin Peaks
.
The fans understand it much more than I do! When David directs you, sometimes it is difficult to follow everything he is trying to say.” The actor acknowledged in
The Guardian
that in his most famous character there is more of Lynch than of himself. “There's a lot of me in him and he's absolutely my favorite character. I am a fairly positive person, I have a good character, I really enjoy simple things or moments, whether it is a coffee or a cake. But I added a lot of David's traits when playing him, whether it's vocalizations or particular phrases that David says. Actually, Dale Cooper is David, not me.”
Although in the series he maintained intense sexual tension to the rhythm of
jukebox
records and snapping thumbs with Audrey Horne, it was not her interpreter, Sherilyn Fenn, with whom he fell in love, but rather Lara Flynn Boyle, the actress who played Donna. They became the fashionable couple and the tabloids made a splash with the alleged tensions between Boyle and Fenn. It was not the first time that he had a relationship with one of her co-stars: during the filming of
Blue Velvet
he had fallen in love with Laura Dern. But none of his relationships were as high-profile as the one he had with the model Linda Evangelista. They met at a fashion shoot in 1992, he had just broken up with Boyle and she had divorced her after five years married to Gérard Marie, then head of the Paris branch of the Elite agency. The actor and the model became engaged, but when images of her with French national team goalkeeper Fabien Barthez emerged, the model's spokesperson was forced to acknowledge that the couple had "slowly drifted apart."
There are some dissonant characters in his career. He was the evil one in
The Flintstones
(1994) and the cocky Zack Carey in
Showgirls
(1995), one of his greatest learnings. He played a role intended for Dylan McDermott and during filming he felt that everything was working, that they were putting on a great show... until he saw her. “I went to see it and I was stunned. I said, 'This is horrible. Awful!' It's a sinking feeling when you're watching the movie and the first scene comes on and you think 'It's bad, but the next one will be better.' And somehow you try to convince yourself that everything is going to get better… and it just gets worse.” He had accepted the role in
Showgirls
because of his deep admiration for director Paul Verhoeven, but the result did not match what he expected. "I did not see him coming." he recognizes. “It was just the wrong material, the wrong director and the wrong cast.” There were also films that deserved more luck, such as
The Domino Effect
, one of the first films that showed the way to the cinema of everyday catastrophes of the present, in which humanity shows its true face without the need for a subhuman monster as a threat.
The return to television
The writers of
Sex and the City
, Michael Patrick King and Jenny Bicks, approached him as fans of
Twin Peaks
. They considered him perfect as a partner for Charlotte, Kristin Davis's character. On paper it's hard to think of someone more perfect to play Trey. It was the year 2000, the fashionable series, and at that time he was beginning his relationship with television producer Desiree Gruber (they are still married and have a son), who lived in New York. It was the perfect job, although her character was not so perfect. “I was hoping they were working on a virile guy, a sort of John-John Kennedy. But then they told me: we want him to have maternal problems and impotence.”
If he was the ideal husband for the perfect Charlotte, how could he not be the ideal husband for the perfect Bree Van de Camp? Marc Cherry gave her a wonderful role in another of the series that would define television in the 2000s:
Desperate Housewives
. He arrived for a couple of episodes and stayed until the end of the series. That half of those who wrote in the script rooms idolized
Twin Peaks
meant that his agenda was never empty. He didn't even know he was
Portlandia
, but when Fred Ardmisen and Carrie Brownstein called him he agreed to become the mayor of the
hipster
town on television. He also said yes to being The Captain in
How I Met Your Mother
. In every role he was offered there was something of Dale Cooper's irrepressible childish enthusiasm. He was the perfect candidate to play the kind of straight male who knows to apply toner before moisturizer.
And in 2017 the dreams of Twin Peaks
fans
came true: the series returned with new chapters and he found himself playing four characters, the biggest challenge of his career. “I was afraid, but David was there. David is not going to let you fail. “He will let you do what you have to do.” Followers of Lynch and MacLachlan continue to wait for a new collaboration and delve into the actor's many posts on his Instagram account looking for hidden messages. Nothing is planned, but when the director approaches with a proposal, MacLachlan knows that whatever it is, he will say yes.