What, no damn fine coffee? Much to my disappointment, Kyle MacLachlan is
sipping sparkling water in the swish Berkeley Hotel bar. But this is the
only letdown.
Some stars do themselves more harm than good on the promotional trail,
scuppering their artfully constructed persona. It is my pleasure to confirm
that the 48-year-old actor lives up to his off-kilter image. MacLachlan’s
on-screen default setting is fearsomely normal with a trace of the unhinged.
In 1994 Rolling Stone called him “the boy next door if that boy spent
lots of time alone in the basement”.
Thirteen years on it is hard to better that description. The tanned face is
now slightly leathery, but the abundant hair suggests that the boy next door
is not ready for sheltered accommodation just yet.
This British visit is a vital cog in a whirlwind global tour promoting the
television show Desperate Housewives. He has just come from the Far
East, where his wife Desiree is still holidaying. While she suns herself he
has been reconnecting with London. He spent five months here in the early
Noughties when he starred in On an Average Day at the Comedy Theatre
with Woody Harrelson.
He has Cornish and Scottish ancestry, although his German connections are more
illustrious: “My late grandmother was convinced we were descended from
Bach,” he deadpans. “We are very musical so maybe there is something in it.
Or maybe not.”
His role in Desperate Housewives as Orson Hodge has given another boost
to a career that has had more ups and downs than a yo-yo convention. It has
also boosted his female fanbase – not that he needs to. Before marrying in
2002 he was romantically linked with his co-stars Laura Dern and Lara Flynn
Boyle and dated Linda Evangelista for six years.
Unlike many actors, he is just as happy to talk about the misses as the hits,
but more about those later. First there is his success in Desperate
Housewives, which has got a lot of women and quite a few men hooked on
Wednesday nights. Is the control freak Orson a murderer? Will he be killed
off? There is no answer to the first question, but I would imagine that the
television company wouldn’t be stumping up for a Knightsbridge suite if he
were about to bow out. “It was supposed to be a one-season part, but I was
enjoying the work so much I floated the idea of staying on and they seemed
to like it,” he says.
I had assumed that MacLachlan landed the role after having been a hit as the
impotent hubby Trey in Sex and the City, but it turns out that the
origins of his casting lay elsewhere. Marc Cherry, the creator of DH,
turned out to be a long-term fan.
“I think to people of a certain age Blue Velvethad an impact,”
MacLachlan says. “And Marc actually told me that Twin Peaks was
the show he had never forgotten seeing me on and that he always had me in
the back of his mind.”
MacLachlan became available because his previous TV series, In Justice, had
just been cancelled. It was his attempt to do a conventional legal drama,
which is simply not what viewers want MacLachlan to do.
Despite the square jaw and forceful features, he’ll always be Mr Creepy: “I
guess that happens with actors. I’ve just been reading a biography of Steve
McQueen and his fans didn’t want him to do comedy or Ibsen, they wanted him
to be Bullitt, driving a fast car.” Typecasting does not really bother him.
It is symbolic of the way that there was never quite a perfect
MacLachlan-shaped hole in Hollywood for him to fit into that he now spends
his time partly in Los Angeles, and partly in New York.
Of course, being a little left-field can attract unusual fans who pay a little
too much attention. There is one Kyle-ite on the web who is convinced that
he insists on wearing the same tartan boxer shorts in everything he does.
After a quick think, this is one rumour he can put to bed. “I wore those in Sex
and the City because my character, Trey, had Scottish roots. But I don’t
think I’ve worn them anywhere else. My own personal style is a little more
subtle. Except maybe on special occasions or at Christmas.” The trace of a
smile dances across his lips, as it does regularly throughout the interview.
Unlike In Justice, Desperate Housewives slots snugly into MacLachlan’s
CV. As with Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, it is all about that
seething underbelly behind something beautiful. Or as the Gang of Four put
it, “the dirt behind the daydream”, although there are considerably more
laughs in DH than in BV. MacLachlan agrees: “I can see the
similarity, but this time round the darkness is handled a little lighter.”
There has, however, always been an element of comedy in even his darkest work.
In Twin Peaks his clean-cut Agent Dale Cooper, for instance, was
famously prone to declaring “Damn fine coffee” in the middle of his gruesome
serial-killer investigation. Sure enough, MacLachlan “adores” coffee. In
fact I’m surprised he has never made a coffee ad – but it turns out that he
did. “I did one in Japan directed by David Lynch for Georgia coffee. Did I
use the catch-phrase? You bet.”
The great thing about reaching a certain age is that if you have a secure
psychological grip on who you are then you are less ashamed of your past.
MacLachlan is certainly open about his less morally uplifting moments, from
his lucrative ads to his modelling work for Donna Karen to his cinematic
turkeys. “The great thing about getting older is the ability to embrace
everything from the good work to the screw-ups. Don’t take yourself too
seriously. Relax.”
Which inevitably leads us to the lap-dancing disaster movie that was 1995’s Show-girls.If
anything was going to be a conversational no-go zone it would be this
dreadful movie. I remember seeing it in Times Square when it came out and
the audience would have been throwing things at the screen during
MacLachlan’s notorious sex-in-the-pool scene if there had been an audience
to speak of. Yet MacLachlan discusses it freely.
“Marc Cherry had never seen it, so recently we had a special screening and he
asked me if I would do a commentary, which I was happy to do.” He is the
first to accept that the critics were right. “It is so terrible that it
succeeds in a number of ways, but not in any of the intended ways.”
So why did he do it? “It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who made Robocop,
which was great. It was written by Joe Eszterhas, who was the hottest writer
in Hollywood. And it was a chance to play a bad guy. It all made sense. Then
it came out and all hell breaks loose. Fortunately I’d done a few things
before that, so I took a little bit of a hit, I was wounded, but I didn’t
lose a limb.”
The chaos theory nature of the film business has worked in good ways for
MacLachlan too. When he landed his first role in David Lynch’s sci-fi epic Dune
in 1984 the 25-year-old from Yakima, Washington, had never even been in
front of a camera. “It was one of those times in your life when you have to
do a reality check. All I’d done was a Shakespeare Festival in Seattle, then
I went to New York to work on stage.
“The next thing I knew a casting agent had left a message on my answerphone
and I was flown out to Los Angeles to meet David. We were both from the
north west, we got on great and went from there.” That MacLachlan describes
Lynch as “a regular guy” gives you some idea of his notion of “regular”.
Even though Dune flopped, MacLachlan formed a tight bond with Lynch.
For nearly a decade he was De Niro to Lynch’s Scorsese. It is a period that
he looks back at particularly fondly, but although they remain friends he isn’t
sure if they will ever work together again.
MacLachlan’s speech, usually fast and organised, slows as he reflects on their
fruitful partnership. “The things that interest David, I don’t even know if
he has any control over, so he can’t think to himself: ‘I must write
something for Kyle’. But working with him was amazing. In a lot of ways I
was his vessel, his eyes and ears into the world. His scout. We both have an
unusual sense of humour and related to each other. It was his journey, but I
got a kick out of it and could function within it. I was like his beacon,
navigating a way through his crazy places.”
Maybe it was working with Lynch that helped to drive MacLachlan to drink. When
not acting or playing golf off an impressive nine handicap or posting film
of his dogs Mookie and Sam on their website, mookieandsam.com, he has
followed in the footsteps of Cliff Richard and turned his hand to
viniculture. “I love wine, and I decided to try making it myself.” In a nod
to his early Shakespearean work he has named his brand Pursued by Bear,
which actually sounds more like the name of a beer to me. Besides, shouldn’t
MacLachlan really be marketing damn fine coffee?
“You know what?” he says. “There’s a roasterie near my vineyard and I’m
thinking about doing something coffee-based, a Twin Peaksy thing.”
That smile skips across his lips again and I’m not sure if he has just hatched
a brilliant business plan or is having a typically twisted MacLachlan laugh.
You can take the man out of a David Lynch movie, but you cannot take the
David Lynch movie out of the man.
Desperate Housewives is on Channel 4 on Wednesdays, 10pm
