Kyle MacLachlan still feels “lost” without David Lynch – admitting the death of the director who discovered him and transformed his life remains a “tremendous loss”.
Kyle MacLachlan still feels ‘lost’ without David Lynch – admitting the death of the director who discovered him and transformed his life remains a ‘tremendous loss’
The 67-year-old forged one of modern cinema’s most distinctive actor-director partnerships with David, who died aged 78 in January 2025 after suffering from emphysema.
Their relationship stretched across four decades and included Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Twin Peaks: The Return, with Kyle now reflecting on their friendship as he prepares to publish his memoir Fictional Selves on 29 September.
Speaking to The Sunday Times Magazine, Kyle said: “It’s been the most tremendous loss. I still feel lost without him, to be honest with you, because he was such a singular person in my life. Someone who marched to his own drummer.”
Remembering David’s distinctive way of greeting him, Kyle said: “When I’d go over for a visit it was always, ‘Hey, Kale, how you doing, buddy?’ That’s how he pronounced my name, like kale.”
He added: “He is the most adorable person. Was the most adorable?”
Asked whether he ever considers what his career might have looked like without David, Kyle said: “I don’t dwell on it because it’s too depressing. But it would have been a completely different path. David changed everything for me.”
Kyle’s relationship with the filmmaker began when David took the extraordinary gamble of casting the then-unknown actor as Paul Atreides in his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
The epic proved a commercial disappointment, temporarily leaving Kyle struggling to secure major roles, but David subsequently cast him opposite Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern in Blue Velvet.
Kyle said their shared roots in the Pacific Northwest helped create an immediate connection.
He said: “David knew about the darkness and density of the forests, the way anything can be hiding in the fog and the moss.”
Describing his place inside David’s surreal cinematic universe, Kyle said: “I was like his Martian Rover. He would send me out into these weird worlds that he created, and because I was just this kid from Yakima, Washington, the audience felt comfortable coming with me.”
He added: “David is more than a mentor to me. Was more than a mentor.”
Their defining collaboration arrived with Twin Peaks, in which Kyle played eccentric FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, the coffee-loving investigator dispatched to discover who murdered Laura Palmer.
The series became an international phenomenon and remains the role most closely associated with Kyle.
Kyle said he consciously incorporated elements of David into Cooper.
He said: “I distilled a lot of David into Agent Cooper – his mannerisms, his vernacular, his cadences.”
Kyle added: “And he knew it and thought it was amusing because he knew it was flattery, which it was.”
The pair eventually returned to the strange world they had created with 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, which also reunited Kyle with Laura Dern. Two years later, Kyle, Laura and Isabella presented David with an honorary Oscar.
Kyle’s career outside David’s work has included Zack Carey in the notorious 1995 film Showgirls, Trey MacDougal in Sex and the City and Orson Hodge in Desperate Housewives, as well as more recent appearances in Fallout and FX drama The Lowdown.
