The Dallas Morning News, Sunday, April 8, 1990

Actor Jack Nance, who starred in Eraserhead, is good-hearted sawmill Pete Martell in Twin Peaks.

Ex-Dallasite is a regular in David Lynch movies

By Ed Bark
Television Critic of The Dallas Morning News

"I don´t think we hit it off right away," Jack Nance says of his first meeting with David Lynch 20 years ago. "But we eventually broke the ice."

Mr. Nance, who grew up in Oak Cliff and was tutored by legendary Dallas Theater Center founder Paul Baker, has since become a constant in Mr. Lynch´s films. He´s been cast on all but one of them - The Elephant Man.

In Mr. Lynch´s first television series, Twin Peaks, Mr. Nance plays a good-hearted sawmill foreman by the name of Pete Martell. It´s a role far removed from his first, prolonged experience with Mr. Lynch The film was Eraserhead, a queasy cult classic released in 1977 after five years in production. Mr. Nance, now in his "late 40s," played the tormented, demonstrably odd Henry, who had strange visions whenever he stared at the radiator in his room.

"It was originally supposed to be this little half-hour film that was going to take six weeks to make," Mr. Nance recalls. "He (Mr. Lynch) gave me this script and it was just a few pages of these strange images and whatnot, this weird story. I didn´t quite get it. I read it and it was interesting, but I didn´t know if I wanted to do it. And then David said, 'Well, I´d like you to look at my film.'

The short film, a foreshadowing of Eraserhead, was titled The Grandmother. "It was like sitting in an electric chair," Mr. Nance says. "I mean, I was stunned by it. It was the most intense thing I´d ever seen in my life. Strange, weird. So then there was nothing I wanted to do more than Eraserhead. But I didn´t anticipate spending the next five years on it. Lynch was often real apologetic about that. He´d say, 'Well, probably nobody´s ever gonna see this thing. It´s not a mainstream movie.' But I didn´t feel like that. I thought this thing was going to find an audience that would sometime, somehow be knocked out by it."

Mr. Nance left Dallas in the mid-1960s, after learning the rudiments of acting from Mr. Baker.

"He scared me to death, but I think he liked me," Mr. Nance says. "He taught me that if you have tghe audacity to get out on the stage, you´d better do something once you´re out there. He got me my first acting job."

Mr. Baker assigned the young actor to a touring company that performed plays for children. "I don´t know if he wanted to see me far away or what," Mr. Nance says, "but it was a great thing for me at the time."

He next head West, to join the Pasadena Playhouse, which closed upon his arrival. Rebounding quickly, he became a member of The Circus, a San Francisco theater company.

"That´s where I really made my bones as an actor," Mr. Nance says. He since has worked regularly in films, not all of them Lynch´s. Credits include Ghoulies, Barfly, Colors and the upcoming Hot Spot, filmed in Austin and directed by Dennis Hopper.