Kyle MacLachlan hits new heights as Twin Peaks´ quirky Cooper

by GLENN ESTERLY

'Odd enough to get me some fringe acceptance'

Quirky kid Kyle MacLachlan comes into his own as Agent Cooper on Twin Peaks

[Twin Peaks (ABC, Global) returns with a two-hour première Sept. 30. Regular episodes begin Oct. 6. - Ed.]

It´s a damn fine day for Kyle MacLachlan.

Better than the damn finest cup of coffee. Agent Cooper, his character on Twin Peaks (ABC, Global), has ever had. Better than that taste sensation when the Great Northern Hotel´s maple syrup - smack! - collides with ham. Better even than the best cherry pie ever dished up at Norma´s Double R Diner, which is where (everybody knows) pies go when they die.

The day started with MacLachlan´s 20-year-old girlfriend and Twin Peaks costar, Lara Flynn Boyle, racing into the bedroom of his Southern California home, jumping up and down on the bed and waking the actor to the news that he´d been nominated for an Emmy for best dramatic actor.

Oh, man! Today is not the kind of day for which Cooper advocates you take time out to do something to reward yourself - whether it´s a cup of scaling black coffee or a dreamy catnap or an extra rich, fresh chocolate doughnut. No need today. Today, Kyle MacLachlan, 31, will have people calling and congratulating and soliciting - until what he needs most is a few minutes of solitude, of not having to talk.

For 20 minutes he gets it - driving his ´84 Jeep from his home to his publicist´s office in Beverly Hills. Then it´s many more congratulations and much more soliciting with MacLachlan - always courteous and very soft-spoken - repeating, "Thanks, thanks, thanks..."

Finally, he´s locked into a conference room for an interview that´s been postponed several times because of his furious schedule - he just finished filming director Oliver Stone´s movie about the Doors, and went straight into production on the new season of Twin Peaks - and because he´s been ailing with a form of sinusitis.

A publicist knocks, enters and hands MacLachlan a coffee, full of cream, sugar and goodness knows what else; what, he is asked, would Agent Cooper think of such tampering with the real thing?

"Cooper..." MacLachlan says, smiling. "Most people have a regulator that causes them to acknowledge the enjoyable things of life with just, say, a smile and to go on with their day. Cooper really feels the need to communicate the things that bring him joy. He has to share them. His regulator is off when it comes to that stuff. The fun is in the reactions he gets from it. Michael [Ontkean, who plays Sheriff Truman] is so great at that - just the slightest, subtle look at Cooper over the latest of his great discoveries." As for what ultimately makes Cooper tick: "Putting together pieces of a puzzle. He just has a great fascination with putting all of these separate clues together."

In the view of American Film magazine, after a disastrous entry into big-time show business in David Lynch´s $40-million bomb, "Dune," followed by redemption in Lynch´s "Blue Velvet," MacLachlan put it all together with Twin Peaks, which, the magazine said, "in a Lynch production is like doing a tightrope act with one of John Cleese´s Silly Walks."

MacLachlan himself found it "weird and eerie" to do the pilot of Twin Peaks in 1989 in the towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie Falls - places he´d driven by many times on the way to Seattle from his Yakima home in south central Washington. At the time, he had been in the theatre arts program at the University of Washington. "The diner where we shot, I was always driving past," he says. "Then you´re back there filming something that´s the Northwest as David has molded in his mind, having lived there himself growing up. And then the series that comes out is not very popular with the folks who actually live back there. You think about all that, and it´s weird. None of it makes any sense." Good-naturedly, he adds, "But why should it when very little else does?"

Back in Yakima (pop. 50,000), MacLachlan was the oldest of three sons in a "very conservative, very square family. My dad always described himself as 'so square, I´m cubed'." Das was the county prosecutor before turning to stockbroking; Mom was the public relations director for the school system. The reins on the boys were taut. "The length of the hair was a huge issue.," MacLachlan recalls. "It was on the same scale as debating nuclear weapons. Kids when I was growing up were letting their hair grow long. The minute mine or my brothers´ started to touch the top of our ears, it was straight to the barbershop. We were the last kids in our school to be allowed to let our hair grow. We´re talking late ´60s, early ´70s, and in terms of hair I was completely out of it. It was a life-and-death issue, and I was dead."

MacLachlan also felt like a "pre-nerd, very much under the thumb of my parents at a time when that was not cool. So for me the lid never blew off, but little things leaked out the cracks. I dressed strange, for then. Every day, I wore suspenders and black wing tips to school. It was just odd enough to get me some fringe acceptance."

His mother, though, did enjoy community theatre and took him along enough that he saw certain advantages to becoming involved in a teenage acting program: attention and girls. "Ay-yi-yi! It was a chance to get crazy. I was kind of shy, and it gave me a chance to hold a girl´s hand and sing a song with her, no matter how sweaty your hand got. If you were participating, you just had to do it. It was a big deal, probably the equivalent now of having sex." Low-key, he notes, "That theatre thing was a plus for me."

A good student and the possessor of an entrenched work ethic, MacLachlan was accepted into an elite training program at the University of Washington. He studied with a vengeance, doing summer stock around the country until a casting agent spotted him in a production of "Tartuffe" and sent him to test for the lead in David Lynch´s production of "Dune." MacLachlan won the role, which was disastrous for him in the short term but started him on a long and winding road to becoming this fall´s cover boy, one of the year´s most sought-after interview subjects.

MacLachlan says of his film debut, "When I did it, I was very, very green. I didn´t know much about myself. I had spent most of my life being green. I was sheltered. The experiences I had were acting experiences, and those didn´t really show me who I was. So I look at 'Dune' now and think that if we could do it over, it would be so much better. Because I know David so much better now and how to work with him, and I know how to take the important relationships in my life and make them apply to the relationships that need to appear on the screen."

Despite the "Dune" fiasco - poor reviews for the film and MacLachlan´s work - Lynch wanted MacLachlan for his violently erotic "Blue Velvet" - the role of a young man with his eyes about to be opened wide forever. MacLachlan resisted initially, but ultimately accepted the role. As as result, by the time MacLachlan was into production of Twin Peaks the media was depicting him as "a Lynch creation," despite the fact that even after proving himself in "Blue Velvet" he had felt something important was missing and went to an acting class. "Actually, not so much an acting class as an emotional discovery class. It was about trying to dig the well a little deeper. I had always studied so hard, worked so hard, tried to absorb everything. But I hadn´t taken time to just stop and think. I was expanding as an actor, but I don´t think that I was expanding that much as a person."

Peggy Lipton, who plays Norma and was reentering show business years after Mod Squad, was in the same class. "Kyle did a lot of work on himself," she says. "He was nothing like he is today. He went through all kinds of introspection and grew tremendously. When I first saw him, he was a boy. A very talented boy, but I´m not sure he knew who he was then. Now he does. Now he´s a man."

The man - sitting in his publicist´s conference room, drinking adulterated coffee, skin as pale as Laura Palmer in plastic, younger looking than most of the alleged high school students in Head of the Class, calm in the midst of the Emmy nomination storm - trots out a line he´s the first to term a cliché: "I needed some time to 'come into my own,' I guess. It´s some kind of combination of confidence and being able to relax, just trusting what I´m feeling and believing that has some value. It´s a real interesting process.

"As far as being a David Lynch 'creation,' I resented the way it was perceived for a while. I love David and love working with him. But I used to hate seeing stuff that made it sound like he just stuck me in front of a camera. So here´s where more maturity comes in - after a time, I just didn´t care about it any more. I mean, I just finished a film on the Doors with Oliver Stone, who´s the all-time Marine commander director and who you hate at times for what he makes you go through, but who you love in the end. So I think that movie is going to be real good.

"The fact is, if I´d never met David, if this whole strange series of events hadn´t occurred, I don´t know where I´d be. The world down here [in Hollywood] is so fickle, and the currents are so unreadable, it´s impossible to say what would have happened. David just saw something in me he wanted to use, from the start. Why should I resent that, no matter how it´s presented, in any way?"

MacLachlan may have cleared that up in his mind, but he´s still at a loss to articulate what he does to make otherwise jaded critics rave, as one did, about his "exuding spiritual stillness and cool bemusement in the midst of carnage." MacLachlan: "I don´t know. That´s ... it´s just inborn, I guess. It´s gotten to the point where you wonder when it´s going to stop being a blessing and start being a curse. In the Doors movie, I play Ray Manzarek, who´s a Zen Buddhist, and there´s this great stillness about him, too. So there´s a little pattern developing there. That disturbs me a little. But yet, you´re never going to get away from yourself completely. So if that´s what I´m putting out there right now, well, I can swing around the pole for a while."