Twin Peaks star Kyle MacLachlan looks back on his career: ‘It’s those dark times where we learn the most about ourselves’

Everyone has a character they associate actor Kyle MacLachlan with.

For many people, he’ll be best known for his collaborations with director David Lynch – including cult TV show Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet. For millennials, they might think of Charlotte’s impotent husband Trey MacDougal in Sex And The City, or Orson Hodge in Desperate Housewives.

The younger generation might know him best for his podcast and excellent grasp of social media – or perhaps the (flawed) father figures he plays on more recent TV shows like Overcompensating and Fallout.

For MacLachlan himself, it seems the deepest impact has been made by his work with Lynch, whose viewpoint he describes as “singular”.

“He was much more comfortable in a much darker world than I am – but I think that’s why we work,” he tells the Press Association of the avant-garde director, who died in January 2025.

“He saw me as the light that could traverse these darker worlds he created in a way that the audience would feel comfortable with me taking them on that journey. I think he saw a young man who was trying to make his way in the world and do the best he could, and he had a certain fondness for that.”

Lynch cast MacLachlan in his first movie, the critically panned Dune, when he was just 23 years old – with MacLachlan, now 67, saying they first bonded over a “common sense of humour”, and a similar Pacific Northwest upbringing (the director grew up in Missoula, Montana, while the actor is from Yakima, Washington).

Lynch has an outsized presence in Maclachlan’s memoir, Fictional Selves, which tracks the actor’s life through many of the roles he has inhabited. When Lynch died last year, MacLachlan said in his tribute: “I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision”, adding that their “friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met”.

While there are plenty of highs in the memoir – particularly the runaway success of the original Twin Peaks, which debuted in 1990 – MacLachlan is remarkably candid about the lows. He never quite made ‘leading man’ status, detailing how he turned down top billing Oliver Stone’s 1986 film Platoon (it went to Charlie Sheen), as well as missing out on parts in Top Gun, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, and Grey’s Anatomy (he auditioned for Derek ‘McDreamy’ Shepherd, which ultimately went to Patrick Dempsey).

MacLachlan says it was important he included the slumps in his career – particularly as he wrote this memoir with his 18-year-old son, Callum, in mind.

“It’s those dark times when I think we learn the most about ourselves – how we respond, and the things about ourselves that we’re proud of, and the things we’re not necessarily that proud of,” he explains.

“Going back to Callum, for him to understand that life is full of challenges, and full of times where you’re not going to feel like you know where you’re going and you’re surrounded by negativity. You have to muscle through this – you have to endure this – you will come out the other side.”

MacLachlan notes that “despair can creep” into the life of a jobbing actor, so as he’s gotten older, he’s realised the need to search for “balance, equilibrium”.

There was another reason he wanted to pen a memoir – despite his initial reservations.

“It’s an opportunity to put down in words from my point of view, my journey. My son – there might come a time when he’s interested in knowing a bit more about where I came from, because I certainly have that desire now.

“My dad has been gone for 15 years, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him, I wish how I could ask him a question, or learn something about who he was. When you’re younger you just don’t think about that – you don’t think your parents had a life before you were born and what they were all about. I thought, here’s a chance for me to put down my journey and let him – when he’s ready, when he’s interested – have a little more of an an understanding of me and maybe of himself.”

Writing about the people in his life who are no longer here – namely his parents and Lynch – proved somewhat painful.

“It’s difficult writing about my mum,” notes MacLachlan, whose mother died of ovarian cancer shortly before the 1986 release of Blue Velvet – a film she initially didn’t want him to participate in, due to its overtly sexual and violent nature.

“Thinking back on that – wishing things were different… [Thinking] was I there enough? You always ask that question – could I have done something? Could I have made that experience somehow less painful?”

Blue Velvet earned Lynch an Oscar nomination for best director, and has built up a cult following – what would MacLachlan’s mother think of its legacy now, despite her initial reservations?

“I think she would ultimately understand,” he reflects.

“Some of those sequences are very, very, very uncomfortable, so I don’t know if she ever would have been really OK with it. She would have appreciated it, I think she would have been proud of my performance. She was a very proper lady and a very sensitive woman, and I think some of those things were a little bit harsher than she would have been comfortable watching.”

Complicated characters have become MacLachlan’s calling card. In his memoir, he recalls that a Rolling Stone journalist once called his type, “The boy next door if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement” – but he’s since made his peace with that characterisation: “Everyone’s flawed, which is really the beauty of the roles.”

His personal life is much less complicated – while the book does dive into glamorous relationships with actor Dern and supermodel Linda Evangelista, he met his now-wife Desiree Gruber in the late Nineties and they’ve been together ever since.

As for finding that elusive sense of balance? “I’m getting closer as I’ve gotten older, and it’s really dabbling in social media that’s allowed me to find a sillier side, a funnier side of myself – which has always been there, I’ve just never really allowed it to be part of who I am publicly,” he says.

With 1.5 million followers on Instagram, MacLachlan often posts memes and lip-synching videos – often alongside the Gen Z creatives he interviews for his podcast, What Are We Even Doing? – something he jokes his son is “tolerant” of.

“That’s been really freeing, and it helps to relax me a little bit and take away some of the worry of the next job – what’s going to happen?” he explains.

“You come to the point where you really acknowledge that I am a good actor and I am where I’m supposed to be. I do work that I’m proud of – it took me a while to get comfortable with that.”

Fictional Selves by Kyle MacLachlan is published by Century, priced £25. Available now.