PEAK TV

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER ITS DEBUT, DAVID LYNCH'S TWIN PEAKS STILL EXUDES PARANORMAL COOL. FOR ITS OBSESSIVE FANSINCLUDING MANY BORN AFTER IT FIRST AIRED-THE MYSTERY IS THE MESSAGE

- MIKE HOGAN

ON THE MORNING of January 16, Kyle MacLachlan was working out in his home gym high in the hills above Los Angeles when his wife came to the door and said, “I have some terrible news.”

David Lynch, the director who discovered MacLachlan and made him a star, was dead. “I didn’t collapse,” MacLachlan says, “but every-thing went right out of me.”

Everyone knew Lynch was battling emphysema, but MacLachlan didn’t think he was dying. Just a few weeks ear-lier, he and Laura Dern had visited Lynch at his house down the road. “We always kept a distance because he didn’t want to catch anything—his lungs were so fragile. But he was chipper, and we were talking about the next thing we might want to do and trying to figure out how he could direct from a remote location.”

In 1983 Lynch plucked MacLachlan from obscurity and cast him as Paul Atreides in Dune. After it bombed, Lynch stunned MacLachlan by casting him again, in Blue Velvet. Then came his role as Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, the TV series that Lynch cocreat-ed with writer Mark Frost. MacLachlan knows that’s the one he’ll always be remembered for. Even Lynch tend-ed to conflate him with his character. “Whether it was Kyle or Coop, some-times it was blurry,” MacLachlan says.

Not that he minded. They were friends and colleagues both off-screen and on.

Lynch cast himself in the show as FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, Coop’s boss and secret sharer. “Twin Peaks in David’s mind was a living, breathing thing,” MacLachlan says. “And I think part of why he enjoyed being Gordon Cole was he could actually enter that world.”

Lynch may be gone, but the world of