For David Lynch, the return of Twin Peaks (9 p.m. on May 21) is not just a reunion with the denizens of the town he left behind some 26 years ago, stranded among dimensions and doughnuts and, in some cases, dead. Showtime’s revival of the cult series also marks a homecoming for the many faces from Lynch’s own past—what returning cast member Sherilyn Fenn calls Lynch’s “sacred family,” drawn from both the show and his long, uniquely strange film career. It’s a term that isn’t taken lightly: Everyone Lynch has ever worked with speaks of him with a combination of mystical awe and devotion that were they not all actors talking about showbiz, might merit a call to the FBI’s cult hotline.
From Elephant Man producer Mel Brooks to friend and frequent muse Laura Dern to cast members of the original Twin Peaks to new recruits like Michael Cera, Jim Belushi, and Sky Ferreira, everyone speaks of Lynch as a man with supernatural intuition and virtuosic skill, as well as a sort of spiritual sage who—for all the wonderfully creepy shit he puts out into the world—makes them feel safe and secure like no other. Here, the people of David Lynch’s life and waking nightmares describe the oddly comforting mystery that is knowing him.
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Naomi Watts ('Mulholland Drive', the new 'Twin Peaks'): When I met David, I had nothing of merit that anyone could recognize.
David Lynch: I don’t ever make them audition or read a scene. I feel that would be unfair, ’cause they don’t really know what I want. I would want to start directing and rehearsing with them, and we’d waste a lot of time. So I like to look at pictures first, and then either meet them or have them videotaped speaking. That’s what I go on—hearing their voice and having them just talk about whatever. And I get a feeling from that.
Sherilyn Fenn ('Twin Peaks', 'Wild at Heart', porcelain ideal of Lynchian beauty): I was quiet and kind of shy—David did most of the talking. I left, and the casting person told my manager that I should have been more positive. And a week later they called and said, “He’s writing your role.” It’s pretty amazing that somebody meets with you 15 minutes, sees right into your soul, and writes you a role that you’re remembered for 30 years later.
Sheryl Lee ('Twin Peaks'): I was a fan, and I was very, very shy and intimidated. I was shaking like a leaf, I was so nervous. But David immediately was so kind and so warm and funny and welcoming. He asked me questions about dipping me in blue-gray dye and wrapping me in plastic and cold water, and how would I feel about all that? And I said I’d be fine with it.
Sky Ferreira (the new 'Twin Peaks', Festival of Disruption performer): I might have just turned 18. My agent at the time is friends with him and said, “I arranged this meeting with David Lynch at his house.” It was a very surreal—I don’t know any other way to describe it. He was showing me furniture he makes and his coffee commercials and his weather report. [Twin Peaks was] not even something I could have worked up to or tried to be on because David Lynch is pretty particular about everything—not like you can really push him into wanting to do something.
Ray Wise ('Twin Peaks'): When I came in to meet with David for Twin Peaks, there was no audition. We talked about our first cars—I believe his was a Volkswagen bug.
Michael Cera (the new 'Twin Peaks'): I got a call from my agent that David had reached out. I don’t think I initially knew what the project was. But I didn’t really need to know anything. I just said, “Tell me where and when and I’ll do whatever possible to be there.”
Jim Belushi (the new 'Twin Peaks'): My agent just said, “Go to this place. I can’t even tell you what it’s for.”
I said, “Well, what’s the script?”
[Agent:] “There’s no script.”
[Belushi:] “What’s the character?”
[Agent:] “Don’t know.”
So I walked into a room. And a lady videotaped me. And we just talked about things. And then I left. I had no idea what it was about. I got a follow-up phone call saying, “You remember that meeting you went to?”
[Belushi:] “Yeah.”
[Agent:] “That was for David Lynch.”
Naomi Watts: David told me about Twin Peaks, and I had to go to his house and read the pages. The part looked great. But I wasn’t allowed to read anything else, including up until the very day I was filming—the other bits that I’m not speaking in are blacked out. You can ask all the questions you want—it’s not that he’s not open. It’s just he finds ways to dodge the question.
Sky Ferreira: Everything’s so, like, secretive. When I watch it, it’s going to be like you watching it. I only know the stuff that I did.
Robert Forster ('Mulholland Drive', the new 'Twin Peaks'): He does not give you all the script. What you see is your part that you must deliver without knowing and with trusting.
David Lynch: There isn’t really a need to have everybody read the whole script. So they get their scenes. And when we work together, they ask many questions and they get answers—at least enough to satisfy them.
Naomi Watts: It’s like a game of guessing and torture, but in a sort of pleasant way, and then not knowing becomes part of the fun.
Kyle Maclachlan (on-screen alter ego, 'Dune', 'Blue Velvet', 'Twin Peaks'): Well, you know David doesn’t use a lot of words, and the ones he chooses are pretty specific and unusual. He might say something simple, like “slower.” Or “There’s a wind.” Oftentimes we’ll stand after we finish a take and pause there for a minute without saying anything. And then I’ll just say, “Yeah, let me try one more.” Almost like we both feel there’s something else to explore.
Laura Dern ('Blue Velvet', 'Wild at Heart', 'Inland Empire', the new 'Twin Peaks'): If the lamp on the side of a table doesn’t look right, he makes a lamp. Literally—he did that on Wild at Heart, just sat and made a lamp while we were setting up. My dresser on Twin Peaks, someone who hasn’t worked with David, was like, “Do you want to pick an earring?” I’d say, “Let’s bring a tray of colors to David and let him paint.”
Naomi Watts (who, it must be said, does a damn fine David Lynch impression): There’s one scene that I have to go and chew out a couple of big, heavy guys in the park. He was screaming, “Ya go out there and ya grab ’em by the balls and ya just chew ’em out! Just chew ’em out like you’ve never seen any big grown men so scared in their lives!”
Robert Forster: You know that [the artist] is putting your color into that creation for a reason. You don’t know the reason, as the dot of red paint does not know why it is [in a painting]. But David Lynch knows why it’s there.
Justin Theroux ('Mulholland Drive'): There would be times where we’d be losing light, and he’d be like, “Oh, I guess we’ll just make it a night scene.” He’d just pivot, and without even sort of flinching. Whereas most directors would go, “Well, we’re going to have to come back and get this one when the sun’s better.” David’s very fluid—it’s like he’s a sort of jazz soloist.
Sherilyn Fenn: There was never a mistake—an accident was a gift. The day of the dance scene, he just re-wrote it! “Oh, you’re going to dance.” I’m like, “What?! What do you mean I’m dancing?” [in Lynch’s voice] “Well, you’re okay. We’re going to have a cup of coffee and we’re going to re-write the scene.”
Jim Belushi: I’m usually in thin kind of quarter-note eighth-note rhythm, but he told me, “Whole notes and rests.” There was a scene where I’m literally having breakfast. He said, “Jim. He does this every morning. He loves his coffee. He pours his coffee. He wants to make sure that the cream is the right amount of cream in his coffee. He wants to make sure there’s the right amount of milk to the cereal. He doesn’t want it too soggy. He wants it crisp.”
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Naomi Watts: We sit down and have some coffee, and I watch him smoke a bunch of cigarettes.
Laura Dern: He taught my son how to make a cappuccino.
Justin Theroux: Periodically we’ll have a coffee or something, ’cause he’s a wonderful guy.
Sky Ferreira: He makes furniture and coffee and films and music and leads Transcendental Meditation for the world.
Jim Belushi: He’s got this thing with coffee.
Sherilyn Fenn: I had probably been bugging him about it, anyway: “Don’t you want to come back?” And one day there was press going around saying we were coming back, and I was beside myself. I just e-mailed him and said, “I’m not believing any of this until you say something.” And he’s like, “It’s true, Sherilyn Fenn. We’re coming back. And it’s gonna be great and it’s gonna be all of us.”
Madchen Amick ('Twin Peaks'): I went to the Missing Pieces premiere when all of that lost footage from Twin Peaks came out, and we were sitting around at the afterparty. David just turned to me at one point and says, “Will you do something with me?” And I was like, “Well, yeah. Of course, David.” The answer’s always yes for David Lynch.” And I woke up the morning that it was announced to just a slew of text messages from all kinds of people, family, friends. And then I immediately sent a quick e-mail to David, and I said, “Is this true, all this talk?” And he just simply wrote back, “I’ll be seeing you very soon in the beautiful world of Twin Peaks.”
Ray Wise: They gave him a retrospective at the Orange County Art Museum, and I was invited down there to participate in it with him. And he talked about Twin Peaks the town still being there and that it would always be there, whether he chose to re-visit it or not. And I remember mentioning to him, “Well, if you do choose to re-visit it, don’t forget me.” And I remember him saying something like, “Well, Ray, you know, you’re dead. But maybe we can work around that.”
Robert Forster: My agent said, “You’re going to get a call from David Lynch.” Two minutes later the phone rang and David was on the other line. He said, “You remember how you weren’t in the first Twin Peaks? I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, I’d like you to be in this one.”
Laura Dern: I had no idea that he and Mark [Frost] were working. And he would give me hints about a world or a character, but I really didn’t understand that it was Twin Peaks he was talking about. So it was a real surprise when that all came together.
David Nevins (president of Showtime): I really don’t know why he chose now. Perhaps he’s just fulfilling the narrative promise that Twin Peaks ended with: “I’ll see you in 25 years.” I sense that David takes numbers and numerology very seriously, and that that kind of promise he feels some desire to fulfill. It’s clear that the characters in the world of Twin Peaks have been rattling around in his head for many years and he was happy to go back to it. But I don’t know how much it has to do with his own personal motivations as an artist and a creative person and how much has to do with the flowering of television as an artistic medium.
Mark Frost (co-creator of 'Twin Peaks'): We were like a couple that had a child together, and we wanted to see that child grow up and take its place in the world and thrive. So the way the show ended the first time was, I think, painful and disheartening for everybody involved. It was August of 2012 when I first brought up [returning to the series]. And David wasn’t necessarily against it, but he did need convincing. He wanted to know that there would be something there that would be worth pursuing. And that led to a series of long discussions that ultimately led us to the conclusion that, yes, this was worth jumping into with both feet. To be able to round it off at this point was a very healing experience.
David Lynch: You could say one puzzle is Season One, another puzzle’s Season Two, another puzzle’s the film. With a continuing story, there’s still much puzzle to put together.
Sheryl Lee: I will work with David on anything, anywhere, anytime, no matter what it is. He is an absolute thrill to work with. And I know that I’m in safe hands and that I’m going to grow creatively no matter what I’m doing with him. Any phone call from him, the answer’s yes.
Sherilyn Fenn: He would say, “Don’t be afraid to shine a light in the dark corners of your mind.” We’re all kind of weird. He’s just not afraid to show it. He thinks it’s beautiful.
Michael Cera: He was just radiating warmth and friendliness.
Justin Theroux: He’s got a very sort of sparkly persona. You want to be underneath that safety umbrella that he creates.
David Lynch: I like to make a feeling that’s very friendly and safe so they can go out without a lot of fear. I’d like to think [other directors] could get the same thing without being abusive. A lot of businesses are run on fear, and I think it’s really bad. People live in fear, and they carry that stress home. Their wife or husband feels that. The little kids trembling, worried that the father’s worried or mother’s worried. I think it’s money in the bank to get a good feeling going in the world.
Naomi Watts: I was back here in New York and it was seeming like it was going to be really difficult to make it work, for my family. If you’re bringing your kids and moving your life, it costs money. It just seemed like it was going to be too hard. Yet at the same time, I’m on the phone with David like, This is David Lynch. How often do you get to do this?
Questlove (Festival of Disruption performer): I was on the fence about meditation, and he convinced me that is the way to go. Best decision I ever made in life.
Michael Cera: I had done a four-day Transcendental Meditation course, and on the final day, a young woman named Pookie said, “Would you like to meditate with David Lynch sometime?”
Sherilyn Fenn: I’d visit occasionally and have some coffee with him, and was sobbing to him about all my issues, and he gleefully said, “Sherilyn Fenn, you’re a mess! You have to learn TM!”
Robert Forster: These are the important questions of life: “Where did I come from?” “Where do I go when I die?” “What is my purpose?” I’m sure that TM addresses some of those, and David Lynch is probably delivering those positive messages in his compositions.
David Lynch: We’re super-special beings! We really are! And we have a glorious future—if only we could realize that and grow rapidly toward that, it would be beautiful. The key to it is the transcendent—this deepest, eternal level of life, the big treasury within every human being. When any one human being experiences that deepest level, they grow in that—all positive—and life gets better. And they’re truly unfolding their full potential. The key to peace in the world is there. We’re special beings with a great future, great potential, and we’re supposed to enjoy life. They say the purpose of life is the expansion of happiness—beautiful description of what it’s all about. It’s real simple. We’re not meant to suffer. We’re meant to be blissful and enjoy life and enjoy all diversity.”
Mel Brooks (producer on 'The Elephant Man'): White shirt. Buttoned at the collar. No tie.
Laura Dern: How about a man who created an iconic style and has never let it go—I think that’s the ultimate GQ man story. He just has his look, what he appreciates, like loving a certain jacket that agnès b. made a certain number of years ago. He sticks to that. I’ve fallen more and more in love with just that piece of him.
Questlove: At dinner I was like, "Trump would kill to have a flip this cool.” I was trying to figure out how he hooked up the cool white-guy version of Bobby Brown’s Gumby with a flip.
David Lynch: Today is a torment—I had to get dressed up. I don’t wear a suit every day. So I gotta get all my stuff into these pockets, out of my regular pants. This takes the mind away from your work.
Kyle Maclachlan: I just drop by, which is a little unusual in Los Angeles. We get a cup of coffee, and we’ll sit, if he has time, and just talk about what’s happening in our lives and reminisce. I just find being in his presence, being around him, always makes me feel better.
Naomi Watts: The friendship is whenever I’m in town we go up there and just chitchat. When I say “we,” I actually mean Laura Dern and I.
Laura Dern: Kyle [MacLachlan] and I have spent our lives working with him—I didn’t realize as a 16- or 17-year-old that he would become the best male friend in my life.
Robert Forster: If he wanted me to socialize with him, I certainly would. But I have not. I don’t know too much more about David, except that somebody told me he used to do a weather show. I didn’t know quite what they meant. So there’s a lot of things about David I don’t know
Questlove: [We had dinner, and] he told me a humorous story of a failed investment in Michael Jackson’s soda company. I also discovered we share the same birthday.
Mark Frost: He’s not necessarily the guy next door. I don’t live in L.A. anymore—I’m a fair distance away. It means I don’t have to inhale secondhand smoke.
Jim Belushi: When you work with guys like Lynch or Woody Allen or Oliver [Stone] or Michael [Mann], those kind of men on a set whose vision you never interrupt. Their eyes are so focused, and they’re on such another level that you don’t bother them with any kind of chitchat.
David Nevins: He’s not a “hang out one-on-one” kind of guy—I think he’s probably a bit introverted by nature. But he’s easy to be with and he’s easy to hang out with. I would not characterize him as an “open book.”
Sherilyn Fenn: I take David homemade-tomato-soup baskets on his birthday. I love him.
David Lynch: I have a bit of agoraphobia.
Ray Wise: He’s regular guy. A creature of habit.
David Lynch: I’m a regular person. I do regular things.
Jim Belushi: He’s a straight-up workingman. There’s nothin’ ethereal. There’s nothin’ heady. There’s no big psychological discussions. He’s sunny and cheerful. There’s nothing sort of grim about him. He’s midwestern in that way.
Questlove: He's been portrayed as eccentric and mysterious. But really? [Eating with him] was two normal cats curious about each other's crafts.
Kyle Maclachlan: Warm, cheerful, welcoming, funny, great listener, intuitive. He’s the kind of guy you can sit in silence with for a period of time.
Sheryl Lee: He’s really funny—he’s got a fantastic sense of humor.
David Nevins: He’s very scary and very human and very funny at the same time.
David Lynch: Everybody loves to laugh. Larry David is great. Albert Brooks. Mel Brooks. I like girls that cry.
Naomi Watts: It’s definitely twisted, and there’s humor in it.
Kyle Maclachlan: Pure vision.
Questlove: A bit genius. A bit weird. A lot uncontested.
Justin Theroux: There are things that are Lynchian that you don’t know are Lynchian until he makes them—weird, stolen moments that happen. Like in Inland Empire, there’s just a guy creeping around a tree with a red Christmas bulb in his teeth. It was apropos of nothing really, but that’s Lynchian. When we were making Mulholland Drive, the people at ABC were just completely befuddled as to the dailies they were getting—they’d have four minutes of Laura Elena Harring looking off into the distance in darkness.
Sky Ferreira: Acknowledging all the bad stuff, you know, but seeing the beauty of it all.
Laura Dern: Something from the deepest core that holds mystery, humor, and truth, and a wind.
Ray Wise: David’s work is not literal. It’s not even reality as we see it. I look at it as kind of between two worlds. Between the reality of everything that we see in daily life, and the reality of what lies just below the surface of that seeming reality. It’s a kind of a honeycomb world—an underworld that exists simultaneously with the reality we see with our eyes every day.
Michael Cera: He must be very in tune with some kind of peak, unconscious state that lives inside of us.
Mel Brooks: “Lynchian” is the secret person we all are. He sees the grotesque joke of life. He feels it. And he wants to express it. He always wants to tell us who we really are. We need David to tell us. Who are we, really? Part animal, part businessman, part wacko. He knows.