Kyle MacLachlan interview: ‘I’m drawn to the deep, dark and mysterious’

Kyle MacLachlan: I'm still trying to 'put my finger on' what makes my working relationship with David Lynch tick
Kyle MacLachlan: I'm still trying to 'put my finger on' what makes my working relationship with David Lynch tick - Matt Sayles/Copious Management

It is the only question on any self-respecting sci-fi lover’s mind. Who would win in a fight between Kyle MacLachlan, the original Paul Atreides in David Lynch’s 1984 film Dune, and Timothée Chalamet, who plays the warrior and mystic Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s recent reboots of the space opera adventure?

Over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, MacLachlan emits a hearty chuckle. “Well, you know, you’re talking about rules of the Known Universe,” he says, immediately launching into the geeky vernacular of the futuristic franchise. “So it would be a battle to the death.”

The 65-year-old actor – silver hair, silky baritone – has seen the first of the new films but not this year’s Dune: Part Two. He initially worried that the glossy remake would overshadow his 1980s version, which bombed at the box office, to become “the ultimate Dune”. But they’re so different – Lynch had no digital effects, while the reboot follows Frank Herbert’s original book more closely – that they can “co-exist quite happily”.

It is the future to which MacLachlan returns in Amazon Prime Video’s big-budget nuclear apocalypse TV drama Fallout. Set in the 2170s rather than Dune’s 10,190s, the series sees MacLachlan play a version of the character that has come to define his career: the inquisitive everyman for whom stuff gets weird. Very weird.

If the template found form in Dune, it was codified in the 1986 film Blue Velvet through his sleuthing student Jeffrey Beaumont (key line: “It’s a strange world”), and became fully established via his role as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, the popular early-Nineties TV drama about the disappearance of schoolgirl Laura Palmer in a sleepy Washington town.

Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in Dune (1984)
Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in Dune (1984) - Alamy Stock Photo/Allstar Picture Library Ltd

In Fallout, MacLachlan plays Hank, a pillar of the community in one of the sealed “vaults” in which survivors have lived ever since a nuclear attack on America in the 1950s. When the world outside encroaches on Hank’s family, life goes haywire. MacLachlan agrees that it’s a typical role for him in that Hank “looks normal but there’s always something else going on underneath, which is fun because you get to play with how much you reveal”.

Fallout is based on a video game (MacLachlan is no gamer but his teenage son Callum is; whenever MacLachlan senior plays he dies “within five seconds”). But the show isn’t one of those headache-inducing glossy CGI remakes. It’s lavish and cleverly set in a world where all the cultural reference points – fashion, music, signage – take their cues from the 1950s, the last time that society was “normal”. Think Mad Max laced with The Jetsons kitsch.

Fallout is co-executive produced and directed by Jonathan Nolan, younger brother of Oppenheimer director Christopher. The chilling opening scene sees nuclear bombs fall on Los Angeles during a children’s birthday party. So is Fallout an unofficial dystopian sequel to the Oscar-winning film about the invention of the nuclear bomb, as served up by some Nolan family creative fission? “Wow, I hadn’t thought about it before but there is a connection. I love that idea,” MacLachlan says.

He agrees, though, that we’re in the age of nuclear panic again. “If you read the papers you can see that there are a lot of people with a lot of nukes, a lot of different countries. And the stability of that is challenging.” He was struck watching Fallout by the cold casualness of the fictional apocalypse. I wonder if the MacLachlan family – he shares his son with wife Desiree Gruber, a TV producer – has a bunker stuffed with canned food just in case. They do not. “We’d survive for about two days, probably.” He’d no doubt miss his beloved coffee; MacLachlan is a renowned aficionado (Monmouth Coffee is his go-to place when in London).

Like Bill Murray and Wes Anderson or Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, MacLachlan will forever be inextricably linked with director Lynch. As well as Dune, Blue Velvet and the original Twin Peaks series, MacLachlan appeared in Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel film Fire Walk with Me and his 2017 TV sequel Twin Peaks: The Return. Lynch’s surreal, dreamlike, scary and violent works are now hailed as cult classics. But success was initially elusive. For a while after Dune, MacLachlan says his career was “in the wasteland” (a Fallout reference). “There were large gaps in the beginning when I was not even on the radar.” Blue Velvet, still disturbing and still Lynch but better received, provided a lifeline.

Forty years on, MacLachlan’s still trying to “put my finger on” what makes his relationship with Lynch tick. He ventures that they both hail from Northwest America (MacLachlan was born in Yakima, Washington, Lynch in Missoula, Montana). “You had to make your own fun in the small towns – it involves the outdoors and a lot of misbehaving,” he explains.

Also like himself, Lynch is drawn to places that are “deeper, darker, mysterious”. MacLachlan likes mysteries in general. There’s a lot of Special Agent Cooper in him in real life.

Sherilyn Fenn and Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks
Sherilyn Fenn and Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks - Alamy Stock Photo/Maximum Film

Although he admits that some of the Twin Peaks: The Return plot twists were lost on him. “But I sense where it’s going,” he adds. He even wonders if Lynch “completely grasps” all his plot lines. However one plot twist that viewers certainly grasped came in the chilling last scene of the series when character Carrie Page lets out a gut-churning scream on hearing Laura’s name in a darkened street. Does MacLachlan have words of solace for anyone still traumatised? It’s an apologetic no. “I guess there’s always wine,” he suggests.

Speculation constantly swirls about whether the pair will work together again. In 2020 rumours circulated that Lynch had a mysterious new project called Wisteria. The following spring MacLachlan posted a photograph of a wisteria on Instagram (he’s prolific) leading excitable fans to assume they were collaborating. But the wisteria hysteria was premature. “Sadly we are not working on a secret project,” he explains. “I have a wisteria bush outside my front door. It’s coming into season right now. I’ll probably take a picture and post it again. People will be, like, ‘Woah, Wisteria is happening.’”

There’s more to MacLachlan’s career than just Lynch. He appeared in 1994’s The Flintstones and had a recurring role in Sex and the City from 2000 to 2002 playing Dr Trey MacDougal, who was married to Charlotte. MacDougal suffered from erectile dysfunction; while filming, fans in New York would shout encouragement. “People seemed compelled to comment in a very supportive way. ‘It’s going to be OK!’” he says. MacLachlan was “oblivious” to any bubbling tension between stars Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall, who’ve since had a very public feud. “I didn’t see any cracks in the veneer.”

The actor recently co-presented a gripping real-life podcast called Varnamtown, about a small town in North Carolina through which Columbian drug-lord Pablo Escobar smuggled drugs in the 1980s. MacLachlan almost stumbled across the story, and he’s now looking to turn it into a drama series, with himself as a first-time producer. “It was such an unusual story. I was surprised that no one had heard of it before,” he says.

Hold on. Sleepy town, calm surface, darkness beneath. Varnamtown is Twin Peaks made manifest. It could just be the most Kyle MacLachlan thing he’s ever done.


Fallout launches on Amazon Prime Video on April 11