Lynchian romance: The ‘Twin Peaks’ storyline Kyle MacLachlan refused to do
As the brainchild of David Lynch, Twin Peaks was never going to be anything less than weird. And yet, despite many preconceived notions of just how insane it could have possibly gotten, the series somehow conspired to be substantially weirder than anyone could have imagined.
On the surface, the show follows Kyle MacLachlan’s federal agent Dale Cooper as he investigates the murder of Sheryl Lee’s Laura Palmer. Of course, that’s doing Twin Peaks a major disservice considering the sheer volume of mindfuckery that follows, where existentialism and surrealism go hand-in-hand with death, dissonance, melodrama, the supernatural, and whatever Lynch was feeling at the time.
There weren’t many conventional lines Twin Peaks wouldn’t just cross but trample into the dirt, although MacLachlan drew one at a romance he believed to be unpalatable. The tension between Cooper and Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey Horne was so thick it would struggle to be cut with even the sharpest of blades, but any plans for a full-blown romance between the two was shot down.
For his part, MacLachlan was of the belief that well-to-do FBI employee Cooper wouldn’t even consider the notion of a romantic entanglement with a high school student, even if the six-year age discrepancy between the actors in real life is a drop in the ocean compared to the widening chasm of age caps that continue to be a staple of film and television.
In fairness, though, that’s only one side of the story. While MacLachlan may well have rejected a romance between Cooper and Audrey on account of it being out of character, that’s not exactly the way Fenn remembers it. There were enough overt hints in Twin Peaks to indicate it wouldn’t have been a huge pivot to head in that direction – not that wild swings were off the menu by any measure – but good old-fashioned jealousy may have been the real cause.
At the time, Cooper was in an off-screen relationship with Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna Hayward in the series. According to Fenn, when she caught wind of Lynch prospectively pushing her real-life beau into a fictional entanglement, the idea was suddenly dropped in short order.
“It was a silly thing that Audrey Horne and Agent Dale Cooper didn’t stay together, because that’s what should’ve happened,” she told AV Club. “It happened organically, without anyone making a plan for it to happen. But they had to stop it because people got mad and jealous, and it was just stupid.”
The inference was pretty clear already, but Fenn went ahead and spelt it out to erase any doubts. “I’m not supposed to say it,” she explained before saying it anyway. “But David knows I tell what happens, and what happened was that Lara was dating Kyle, and she was mad that my character was getting more attention, so then Kyle started saying that his character shouldn’t be with my character because it doesn’t look good, because I’m too young”.
Just like that, any hopes viewers held for Cooper and Audrey to get together were over in an instant thanks to an onrush of envy. Allegedly, of course.