Close collaboration: Which actors have worked with David Lynch the most?
Whether you think David Lynch is an undisputed genius or a pretentious creator of the incomprehensible, it’s hard to deny his success and the legacy he’s already achieved. Since the 1970s, Lynch’s movies have bewildered and enticed fans. He’s carved out a whole new space in mainstream cinema, where the surreal and complex overlap with humour and gripping mystery.
With Eraserhead, Lynch used haunting imagery, including a grotesque alien-like baby, to convey social isolation and fears of fatherhood. Then, with The Elephant Man, Lynch demonstrated his ability to make genuinely emotive and moving pieces of cinema, something that punctuates movies like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the final act of Mulholland Drive. His hit television show Twin Peaks and movies like Wild At Heart and Inland Empire show Lynch’s propensity for campiness and utter dedication to his own ideas, no matter how outrageous, strange and bizarre.
To help him convey his distinctively Lynchian ideas, the filmmaker has often recruited the same actors throughout the course of his career. These stars know precisely what Lynch wants, understanding him on both a creative and personal level. By building up a strong rapport with certain actors, Lynch has been able to squeeze exactly what he needs out of them, and the results are clearly worth it.
Some of Lynch’s most frequent collaborators aren’t well-known stars, but they’re people that the filmmaker can’t help coming back to. For example, Scott Coffey has starred in six Lynch projects, usually in minor roles, such as Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: The Return and Inland Empire. Similarly, Lynch has placed Grace Zabriskie in five projects, most notably as Sarah Palmer in Twin Peaks, leaving the actor closely associated with Lynch more than anyone else in her career.
More recognisably, however, are actors like Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, who have collaborated with Lynch numerous times, playing some of his most coveted characters. MacLachlan played FBI Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, of course, reprising the role in Fire Walk With Me and the third season, set 25 years later, which also featured Dern. He starred in Blue Velvet with Dern, too, as well as playing the lead character in the critically panned Dune. Dern has also appeared in Wild At Heart, Inland Empire, and even the concert film Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted.
Similarly, actors like Naomi Watts, Sheryl Lee, Freddie Jones, Miguel Ferrer, Michael J. Anderson and Everett McGill have all frequently worked with Lynch, becoming associated with the surrealist auteur. Yet, there have been two actors who have starred in more Lynch productions than anyone else – Jack Nance and Harry Dean Stanton.
Both have featured in seven titles by Lynch, with Nance appearing in the director’s debut feature, Eraserhead, as the main character, Henry. From there, he appeared in almost every movie helmed by Lynch (apart from The Elephant Man and Fire Walk With Me) until his death in 1996, with Lost Highway being his last collaboration. Lynch once called Nance (via Film Threat) “one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met.”
Stanton, on the other hand, made his first appearance in a Lynch movie in 1988, starring in the short film The Cowboy and the Frenchmen, also featuring Nance. He appeared in Wild At Heart, playing Diane Ladd’s character’s boyfriend, as well as featuring in Fire Walk With Me, The Straight Story, Inland Empire, The Return and even Lynch’s unsuccessful HBO show Hotel Room. You can watch Stanton and Lynch talking to each other in the 2012 documentary by Sophie Huber, Harry Dean Stanton Partly Fiction.