Christopher Rhoten
Were he still alive, it is entirely possible David Lynch would find discussing his career as an actor pointless. Cinema’s first “populist surrealist,” as crowned by Pauline Kael, Lynch displayed a career-long habit of letting the free association of his films speak for themselves, so it seems unlikely he would be more revealing if pressed on an even more personal form of expression.
With nearly three dozen roles quietly assembled over the years, that doesn’t mean everyone else feels the same about David’s penchant for drama. Prolific author and critic Brent Simon, former three-term president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, recently embarked on a years-long exploration of this very topic. The resulting The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks and David Lynch the Actor is an excellent book that chronicles not only Lynch’s acting credits but also his philosophy, ethos, and dedication to “the art life.” With so much literature already written on the films themselves, Lynch’s time in front of the camera has proven to be a natural fork towards walking a new path of understanding the filmmaker.
Sharing Brent’s passion for these projects, I was excited to sit down and discuss expectations, rabbit holes, his career interviewing Lynch, analyzing the filmmaker psychologically, and more. This article has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Thanks for discussing your new book, The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks and David Lynch the Actor. Where did the idea for a book about David Lynch’s acting career come from?
Brent Simon: The idea came a good number of years ago. Twin Peaks was the show that kind of melted my brain when I first saw it, and definitely set me on the path of becoming a writer—just because I was fascinated with the way it mixed genres and juggled different tonalities. It made me want to write critically and analytically about art and culture. I’ve been a huge fan of David Lynch and Mark Frost since then, and I had the good fortune to interview Lynch many times over the course of my professional career.
The seed of the book idea originated with the third season of Twin Peaks. I loved the way it incorporated the passage of time into its narrative, and it was during a rewatch that I was again really struck with the expanded nature of the role of Gordon Cole. It seemed not necessarily a skeleton key for “solving” The Return, but certainly hugely important and notable—this act of Lynch stepping back inside the world of his most popular mainstream creation, and taking on a part that really helped drive its investigatory thread. That made me reflect a lot on changes in the character of Cole from season two and Fire Walk With Me, and then also think about other Lynch performances, like Zelly and Me.
What were your expectations going in? Reminiscing with more than 70 actors, assistants, and collaborators must have been incredible.
Given the sheer unpredictability of his acting work—the fact that he’d popped up on Louie, The Cleveland Show, Robot Chicken, and then The Fabelmans—I knew there would be plenty of great stories. Going in, though maybe it sounds a bit mad, my expectations were to create something that could hopefully stand up as a definitive chronicling. An enormous amount has been written about Lynch, but this idea seemed to me original enough that I felt like if it was tackled with sincerity and dogged exhaustiveness, it would be something both wonderful and strange, very fun and yet still serious, that pulled together incredible anecdotes from collaborators while also providing enough informed analysis that hopefully readers came away considering Lynch’s life and work from a fresh perspective.
You venture quite far beyond the obvious Lynch performances and track down some incredibly obscure cameos. Was there a particular credit that proved difficult to find info on?
In 2008 and 2009, Lynch traveled internationally in support of translated versions of his book Catching the Big Fish, plus his art exhibition The Air Is On Fire. During this time, he appeared in a pair of Brazilian short films, plus a Russian arthouse film that never saw Western theatrical release, all of which I chronicle in a chapter called “David Lynch World Tour.”
Tracking down the filmmakers of those projects was quite challenging! I don’t believe the Russian film, The Way of Samodelkin, has ever been written about at all, and the full story of how Lynch came to be involved in the shorts hadn’t been told.
How many rabbit holes popped up while trying to determine what constituted a performance?
As far as rabbit holes, for some of his fine arts exhibitions, various festivals or awards with which Lynch was honored, instead of acceptance speeches he liked—when he had the time and an idea—to make bespoke short-form videos. A lot of these had a performance component. He either appeared in them or voiced an animated creation. Some of those videos eventually saw release on the internet, and some didn’t. So there was the challenge of trying to confirm the existence of some of those.
A couple other rabbit holes, as with this 90-second French short called Impressions From Another Plane, were more about trying to ascertain Lynch’s level of involvement—whether he gave his time to the project or it was crafted without his knowledge. There were also several other rumors I spent a lot of time chasing down. As one example, there’s a Swedish artist and filmmaker, Henrik Möller, who interviewed Lynch a couple times and made an animated short called Anxiety Dog and Malmö Underwater, on which Lynch was blurbed. It wasn’t quite clear if Lynch did voicework in it, though. Connecting with Möller allowed me to finally confirm he didn’t.
Another big rumor was of Lynch filming a cameo in a Canadian student film while traveling in support of Blue Velvet’s festival premieres. That one seemed unlikely but also potentially noteworthy and thus worth investigation just because of where it would fall chronologically, in relation to some of Lynch’s earliest forays into acting. When you’re asking people about unknown and sometimes even unnamed works dating back in some cases 40-plus years, and then trying to separate primary sources from hearsay—it definitely requires the creation of some spreadsheets! But it was fun, too—it reminded me of Lynch’s quote that we’re all like detectives in life.
One of the book’s more surprising revelations is just how reticent Lynch could be about acting. There’s the anecdote about his hands shaking while filming an early role, as well as his insistence that he didn’t consider what he did “real” acting. And yet, your book reveals someone who meticulously memorized his lines and was fairly selective about the roles he took.
It’s interesting, right? Because he could’ve walked away from acting entirely, or kept it limited to occasional appearances in his own work. Or, since he was beloved by so many creatives, he could’ve leaned into and reaped benefit from his offscreen persona, and scored a few nice, easy paydays in cameos playing variations on a rascally, lovable eccentric. And yet he did none of those things.
Why do you think Lynch kept putting himself in front of the camera when he was so reluctant to think of himself as an actor?
In the book I posit four “buckets,” basically, which aren’t mutually exclusive, for why I think Lynch kept acting. One very obvious category is things rooted in personal relationships with his collaborators, including family. Second, some roles can be viewed as a way to either reconnect with the essential spirit of “the art life” or boost that impulse in others—I see his Brazilian and Russian cameos as evidence of this. Third, curiosity was a huge animating motivation in his life. When we’re kids we learn by doing, but as we get older we tend to worry about failure or not being good at something, and outside opinions about that. Lynch would push through those feelings.
Finally, I feel acting also helped serve as a way to showcase his sense of humor—to cut loose or be irreverent in ways that run counter to the fixed and stuffy impression we have of how “auteur” filmmakers are supposed to behave. I think a good number of Lynch’s acting performances check several of these boxes at once. But with the benefit of having lived with this book project for so long, I really think more and more about the last two reasons—his curiosity and innate tinkerer’s instinct, and then his sense of humor.
When he became interested in the internet, for example, he taught himself Adobe Flash to animate DumbLand, and then voiced all the characters, including the abusive and repellent lead character Randy. I think Lynch was just a doer—he never lost that experiential desire, and in conversation he’d light up at the words “project” and “experiment.” So to me it’s not a coincidence that in some of his voicework and DavidLynch.com material he’d let loose with these outlandish and profane characters. I think art was the way he processed and tried to make sense of the world, and he came to view acting as part of that too—just like making music—while rejecting the formal labels of “musician” and “actor,” mostly out of respect for those who applied themselves more rigidly in those fields.
Gordon Cole is obviously a focus here, as the cover implies. It’s always been interesting to me how an almost cartoonish self-caricature becomes so poignant in The Return. Do you see that transformation as simply being necessitated by the role becoming more important 25 years later, or did something change in how Lynch used himself as a performer?
That’s a really interesting question. While he and Mark Frost conceived and jointly crafted the third season, I think it’s legitimate—and no disrespect to Frost—to assume that Lynch was the driving impulse behind Cole’s inclusion, and certainly how to present him. I don’t think anything necessarily changed in terms of how Lynch saw himself as a performer, but I do think he viewed the character of Cole differently and wanted to explore that.
In the first season of Twin Peaks there’s his voice cameo as Cole, and in the second season, as I cover in the book with some of the disagreement over the Shelly Johnson kiss, you can see Lynch asserting himself as the show’s co-creator in shaping Cole’s voice—literally, in tweaking dialogue. In Fire Walk With Me, he places Cole closer to the franchise’s expanding mythology and mysteries, both with the blue rose and the Philadelphia FBI office scene.
So with season three, I think he and Frost saw the narrative utility of using Cole, along with Albert, as a bit of an audience stand-in, since the Cooper viewers knew wouldn’t be as fully present. Cole is also a good and interesting way to explore regret and even, in subtextual fashion, legacy. But two things can be true, and I think Lynch probably also had a strong desire to just physically be back in that world, even if it wasn’t really strictly the town of Twin Peaks, because that was part of him further manifesting “the art life” and folding into the show elements spanning some of his interests and entire creative existence—from the frog-moth and snippets of Ronnie Rocket to things more explicitly connected to Cole, like the character’s antlered-creature sketch or the Eraserhead callback of the Operation Plumbbob photo over Cole’s desk.
You mentioned how Lynch would consistently reject these formal labels. Across many of these shorts and more comedic roles, it becomes difficult to tell whether Lynch is really “acting” at all, or simply giving the camera an amplified version of himself. What would your response be to the idea that Lynch’s acting was an afterthought, or that Lynch is a non-actor who happened to be naturally compelling onscreen?
I think for sure he was naturally compelling, and just a great storyteller. He had this easygoing charisma that didn’t ever wear out, because he was just so comfortable in his own skin. And I think that’s a big part of what younger viewers and fans of Lynch—people who maybe have no frame of first-run theatrical moviegoing reference for him as a director—respond to: his incredible authenticity and sincerity.
That’s one reason the book was so much fun—exploring how, as you correctly mention, there seems to be a canny self-awareness and referential quality to some of his onscreen work. But I feel like Lynch definitely got something out of every acting performance he ever gave, no matter how small. I think the fact that he was both selective and, in a certain sense, prolific at the same time speaks meaningfully about his relationship with acting, and contradicts the notion that it was somehow random or an afterthought.
There’s an interesting bit from The Elephant Man producer Jonathan Sanger in which he says Lynch saw a psychiatrist for a single meeting and decided he didn’t want to understand his own mind. Your book necessarily involves trying to understand Lynch through his habits, routines, quirks, and eccentricities, but Lynch himself often resisted the impulse to explain his work, as well as himself. Did you wrestle with how much psychological interpretation is useful when exploring the artistic side?
That was definitely something I thought about, particularly after Lynch’s passing. Around the time of Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, and especially Lost Highway, I remember reading—not “bad,” but mostly unsuccessful and unsatisfying—interviews with Lynch, where the interviewer would ask a lot of dead-end questions about thematic meaning or attempt to get Lynch to cosign some interpretation of his work or motivations.
In a way, I went to school on those. But I’m also not an absolutist. So the first time I interviewed Lynch, I was nervous but had the advantage of knowing all the things I didn’t want to ask—of feeling like I had an understanding of the types of questions that had a higher chance of eliciting thoughtful consideration. And then, in those answers, and the spaces in between, with what wasn’t said, there would be room for a reader to draw some of their own conclusions about meaning or intent.
So when I first met him I said something like, “Thanks so much for your time, I appreciate it. I know you’re keen to finally talk about how you made the baby from Eraserhead, but if it’s all the same I’d rather not, actually.” And he just laughed and said, “Good deal, Brent!” So I like to think that helped form a strong mooring for our interview interactions moving forward.
When the possibility of interviewing him for the book still existed, I always thought it would inform this incidental psychological illumination, based on a juxtaposition of his reflections, some of my own framing, and then whatever insights and perspective his colleagues, scene partners, friends, and family had—because I do believe there can be some validity to the notion that artists don’t always initially understand the full meaning of their art. And also sometimes the mask slips. Sadly, that planned conversation never happened.
But I tend to view things through a critical and analytical filter, so that component still felt hugely important—and in some ways even more so, since the last couple chapters grapple a bit with Lynch’s legacy, and how and why his loss hit so many people so hard. All this is maybe a long way of saying that I felt confident enough in the central idea of the book that I knew there would be interpretations I could make and present in non-concrete terms, as speculative, and that various interviews could either bolster or run counter to some of those arguments. That felt in keeping with the spirit of a lot of Lynch’s work.
On that note, the book ends with an epilogue discussing David’s passing, and the unfortunate reality that you were never able to speak with him specifically for the book. After spending so many years talking with Lynch, and then years researching his performances, do any burning questions remain that you wish you could have asked?
Oh man, so many. Questions about abstractions, from my perspective, tended to produce some very interesting answers. So my most burning questions would be a mix of the speculative and open-ended, plus other weird stuff—like maybe the last sound he recalled being unnerved by, things like that.
Also, he was never really one for self-analysis, but every once in a while, just through an informal back-and-forth, you could maybe lead him into talking about how his interest in a certain object or idea—usually an object—had shifted or changed shape, or maybe even how he viewed something aesthetically different. Those discussions and little conversational alleyways felt somewhat revelatory, because they seemed like small glimpses of underpinning creative instincts.
I’d probably want to ask in roundabout fashion about some of his recurrent fascinations and visual touchstones, and maybe whether he felt differently when painting, filming, or taking still photos of fire, for instance. I wouldn’t ask about the Eraserhead baby, that’s for certain.
