Trivia / Twin Peaks

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• Accidental Downer Ending: The series has an ending which seems to take fiendish delight in screwing over every likable member of the cast. This was not intended to be the series' absolute finale, as a third season was planned, but after failing to regain its flagging viewership, the show was cancelled before it could be produced... Then it finally received a sequel series 25 years later, which tied up some of the loose ends, left others hanging, and ended on yet another downer note (although at least this time it was intentional).
• Acting for Two:
  • Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer) also portrayed her cousin Maddy. In The Return, she also plays Carrie Page, who may or may not be Laura Palmer in some alternate dimension.
  • In The Return Kyle MacLachlan portrays Cooper, his evil Black Lodge doppelganger and Dougie Jones. In the final episode, it's implied that a new tulpa is made so that he can both search for Laura and return to the Jones family.
• Acting in the Dark:
  • To avoid spoilers about The Return from leaking online, the cast were only given the scripts with their own lines on each day of shooting, after which they had to return the pages, which were then shredded under supervision.
  • The above isn't actually too far removed from what they did in the original run, which left many of the cast members so in-the-dark about their own show that they'd usually find out about where their plot threads actually led when the show was actually aired.
• Award Category Fraud: While it was mostly ignored at the Emmy Awards, The Return competing in the limited series categories counts. Sure, it's separated from the original run by twenty-five years, has its own feel, and there was no plan to continue afterwards, but it's still the third season of a continuing drama series. Not long afterwards some rules came into play at the Emmys that would likely have put it into eligibility in the drama series categories instead.
• Auteur License: David Lynch and Mark Frost were given total creative control over The Return, which led to it being the monumental Mind Screw it is.
• Blooper: Killer BOB is a rare character who is born of a blooper. Lynch had been toying with the idea of giving Silva a role on the show already, but accidentally showing up reflected in Sarah Palmer's mirror is what clinched it.
• California Doubling: Only the pilot episode was genuinely filmed on location in Washington State, with the two production seasons being made in Los Angeles. The Return, however, had several episodes filmed entirely in Washington State.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Since Michael J. Anderson can talk backwards, he did so and his voice was reversed. Technically, the idea came first and was expanded when David Lynch discovered this proficiency.
  • Carl Rodd singing and playing the guitar was included because of Harry Dean Stanton's skills.
• Cast the Expert: The woman who plays Alice Tremond, aka the owner of the house that used to be Laura Palmer's in the final episode, is in fact the real-life owner of the house who had no previous acting experience and was offered the role by David Lynch.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Madchen Amick originally auditioned for the role of Donna Hayward, which ultimately went to Lara Flynn Boyle. However, the creators of the show were so impressed by Amick that they created the role of Shelly specifically for her.
  • David Lynch originally wanted Robert Forster to play Sheriff Harry Truman, but Forster was unavailable at the time due to other commitments, so the role went to Michael Ontkean instead. By the time of the Return, Ontkean had retired from acting and therefore declined to return as Harry, so instead Forster was cast to play Harry's brother, Frank Truman.
• Channel Hop: The series debuted on ABC and was revived on Showtime in 2017.
• Completely Different Title: The show's Cantonese title is 迷離劫 (Blurred Robbery/Mysterious Tribulation)
• Creator Backlash: David Lynch doesn't think very highly of season 2. As he puts it:
  The pilot is the only thing I am particularly, extremely proud of. There were great moments along the way. The second season sucked.
• Creator-Chosen Casting:
  • Madeleine Ferguson was created because David Lynch was so impressed by Sheryl Lee that he wanted to have her on the series full-time.
  • Lynch cast Miguel Ferrer after seeing him in RoboCop (1987).
• The Danza: James Hurley was played by James Marshall.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Most of the teen characters in the series are played by actors in their twenties. For example, Laura Palmer, who was seventeen, was played by Sheryl Lee, who was around twenty-three at the time. This is actually a result of Executive Meddling though, as many of the teenaged characters were originally intended to be college-aged young adults.
  • Sherilyn Fenn who was 25 at the time of the show had her relationship with Agent Cooper broken up because her character was 18. Agent Cooper then took up a relationship with Heather Graham's character of Annie Blackburn. Heather Graham was notably five years younger than Sherilyn Fenn but playing 22.
  • Wally Brando is 24 but played by Michael Cera (29)
  • Becky is 24 at the oldest but played by Amanda Seyfried (31).
  • Agent Tammy is said to be "barely 30" and still a very green agent. Chrysta Bell was 39. Interestingly, Kyle MacLachlan himself was only 30 during the first season of the show, while his character was established to be 35.
• Descended Creator:
  • BOB, played by a crew member who accidentally ended up in a pivotal shot. They could have reshot it easily but David Lynch loved the visual of this guy hiding in the shot.
  • David Lynch himself as Agent Gordon Cole.
  • Mark Frost also appears in a small, but recurring cameo as journalist Cyril Pons.
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Philip Gerard, the "one-armed man"/MIKE was played by Al Strobel, an actor who had lost his left arm in his youth.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Lynch and Frost originally wanted the Twin Peaks sign to list a population of 5,120. ABC, however, expressed worry that viewers would find it hard to identify with such a small community, and demanded that an extra digit was added to the sign, bringing the population number up the 51,201.
  • Lynch and Frost had originally planned for the principal teenage characters to be college students in their early-to-mid twenties. ABC had them charged to be high school students in their late teens instead.
  • ABC more or less forced Lynch and Frost to reveal the identity of Laura's killer during season 2, something they did not intend to do just that soon. They were being pressured to reveal this as early as the end of the first season.
• Fake American:
  • Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Harry S. Truman) and Kenneth Welsh (Windom Earle) are actually Canadian.
  • British Tony Jay portrays Twin Peaks-born and raised Dougie Millford.
  • British Tim Roth (Gary "Hutch" in The Return) plays an American with a deep Southern accent.
  • Irishman Dan O'Herlihy Not Even Bothering with the Accent as Andrew Packard.
• Fake Nationality:
  • The Renault brothers are French-Canadians played by two American actors.
  • Amoral Afrikaner Thomas Eckhardt is played by Englishman David Warner.
• In Memoriam:
  • The first episode of season 2 is dedicatd to Kevin Young Jr.
  • The second episode of the revival is dedicated to Catherine Coulson and Frank Silva. The third is dedicated to Don S. Davis and Miguel Ferrer. The fifteenth to Margaret Lanterman (Log Lady) who died during production.
• Japandering: A disappeared persons case, a Japanese tourist, Georgia coffee.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Donna Hayward; played by Lara Flynn Boyle in the series but Moira Kelly in The Movie.
  • The third season mostly avoided this as a matter of style. Only Pierre Tremond was fully recast, which was done to keep the character as a child. A variety of means were used to bring back supernatural characters:
    • Frank Silva had passed away decades ago and was unable to reprise his role as BOB, so the series used previously existing archive footage of him.
    • David Bowie's death forced Philip Jeffries to appear as a mechanical device similar to a steampot, with a voice by Nathan Frizzell.
    • Michael J. Anderson feuded with David Lynch, so the Man From Another Place is transformed into a talking tree with a head that looks like a brain. An uncredited actor provides the voice.
  • None of the Brazilian voice actors returned in the 2017 revival, as the dub moved from Rio to Sao Paulo. Most of the Mexican Spanish cast was replaced as well.
• Posthumous Credit: Catherine Coulson, Miguel Ferrer and Warren Frost all died before the third season show premiered. Harry Dean Stanton also died shortly after the final episode aired.
• Post-Script Season: The series sorta went downhill like this after Laura Palmer's killer was revealed, the main plot being resolved (due to Executive Meddling, no less - the writers had other plans). It felt incredibly awkward to have Dale Cooper still hanging around in Twin Peaks, even though he didn't have a reason to stay after the killer had been found. Windom Earle was more of a stand-in for Laura Palmer's killer than a real villain.
• Production Posse:
  • Kyle MacLachlan first worked with Lynch in Dune (1984) and again in Blue Velvet.
  • Jack Nance, who played the protagonist in Eraserhead (along with minor roles in both Dune and Blue Velvet) plays Pete Martell, who discovers Laura Palmer's corpse.
  • Catherine Coulson was a longtime member of Lynch's crew, having worked with him behind the scenes since Eraserhead; she finally took a turn in front of the camera as Margaret the Log Lady.
  • The Return features many previous Lynch collaborators such as Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Robert Forster, Trent Reznor and Patrick Fischler.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Will's actor, Warren Frost, is the father of series co-director Mark Frost.
  • Pierre Tremond's first actor, Austin Jack Lynch, is David Lynch's son.
• Role Reprise: No less than 37 actors returned for the 2017 revival.
• Romance on the Set: Kyle MacLachlan and Lara Flynn Boyle were in a relationship while filming the original run.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • The series was renewed for the second season, but the network moved it to one of the lowest-rated timeslots on television, Saturday nights at ten.
  • A spectacular case happened in Germany. RTL held the rights for Twin Peaks in 1991, yet competitor Sat1 outright spoiled the whole series by telling the name of Laura Palmer's murderer on their teletext. As a result, the series wasn't such a big hit in Germany.
  • It was also the network that pushed Lynch to reveal Laura's killer much sooner than he intended to, which without the main draw of "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" left the rest of Season 2 in plot limbo, which contributed to the declining ratings.
• Sequel Gap: The series ended in 1991, and got revived in 2017, meaning it took roughly 25 years for the series to return.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: With only two seasons and 30 episodes, it popularized the Quirky Town genre in American television, having descendants such Picket Fences and Northern Exposure that ran much longer than Twin Peaks itself. Also, the amount of surrealism, eccentric humor, and horror in it were highly exceptional for a mainstream American drama series of its era, but such elements became much more common in television in its wake in the 1990s and 2000s. It also helped to popularize the trend for TV series with cinema-quality visuals, now practically the industry standard in scripted television. And that's not to mention its impact on gaming, most notably as a source of inspiration for the Silent Hill series.
• Shrug of God: True to form, both David Lynch and Mark Frost have refused to answer questions about some of The Return's most offbeat Mind Screw sequences.... at least at any length.
• Stunt Casting:
  • In The Return, Lynch continues the tradition he started in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me of giving musicians sizable roles by casting frequent collaborator Chrysta Bell as Agent Tammy. She acts mostly as The Watson.
  • The sheer number of cameos by recognizable actors in small roles is very much in line with stunt casting. Tim Roth, Mary-Louise Parker, Matthew Lillard, Michael Cera and Amanda Seyfried all make brief appearances.
• Throw It In!:
  • The villain BOB was created/cast when set director Frank Silva's reflection accidentally appeared in a mirror when filming the last shot of the pilot where Laura's mother wakes up from a frightening nightmare. Earlier that day, Silva had nearly trapped himself in Laura's bedroom, endearing him to Lynch, which led to him shooting footage showing him looking up from the foot of Laura's bed (Lynch had no idea what he'd use this footage for, at that point). His serendipitous reflection at the end of the pilot just cemented his place. According to Wikipedia, and according to Lynch himself.
  • Two other things from the pilot: When Cooper first examines Laura's body, a fluorescent light keeps flickering — the light they were using really was malfunctioning, but David Lynch liked the eerie disorienting effect this had, so it got written in as a transformer malfunction. And in the same scene, an extra misheard Cooper's line "Would you leave us?" as "what's your name?" and, thinking Kyle MacLachlan was breaking character, said his real name. The awkward moment that ensued got left in as a momentary aversion of Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic.
  • Mary Reber had no prior acting experience before her appearance as Alice Tremond. She just happens to be the current owner of the house used for the Palmer house, and David Lynch decided on a whim to hire her when going around warning all the residents on the street that Sheryl Lee was going to scream very loudly.
• Trans Character, Cis Actor: Cis actor David Duchovny plays trans woman Denise Bryson.
• Wag the Director: Cooper and Audrey were going to hook up, until Kyle MacLachlan strongly objected to their age difference.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Neither Lynch nor Frost ever intended to reveal the identity of Laura's killer, at least not as soon as it eventually happens in the show (even though they knew from the beginning that it was Leland).
  • Josie was originally going to be an Italian woman whose real name was Giovanna. She was also going to played by Isabella Rossellini, who was dating David Lynch at the time.
  • Bob Engels, the producer of Twin Peaks, was planning on a graphic novel continuation for the series for the "Complete Mystery" DVD set release that would have closed the book on Season 2's cliffhanger, and then gone in its own direction. David Lynch, while he appreciated the effort, vetoed it, saying that he didn't want to continue the series at that point.
  • Steven Spielberg, who was a big fan of the show, was originally set to direct the first episode of the second season before Lynch decided to direct it himself.
  • According to David Duchovny, Mark Frost originally wrote the role of Denise Bryson for James Spader, but he was unavailable.
  • In its earliest conception phase, the show was going to take place in North Dakota, but was moved to the Pacific Northwest because the state lacked mountains and forests.
• Working Title: The series was originally to be titled Northwest Passage.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: David Lynch and Mark Frost have admitted that they started writing the series not knowing who had killed Laura Palmer.
  • The series has many examples of Throw It In! and such but the identity of the killer wasn't meant to be revealed in the first place and happened only because of the network forcing Lynch and Frost's hands. This, of course, doesn't make it any less this trope, or rather it could be considered an even better example.
  • After revealing who killed Laura Palmer they didn't have a clear idea how to keep Agent Cooper in the series, and with Lynch busy on over projects, the writers struggled throughout much of series two for the show to have a focus.
  • Lara Flynn Boyle was asked to reprise her role of Donna for The Return, but she turned it down. It's unclear how much of a role Donna would've played in the story.
• Written-In Infirmity: Catherine Coulson was seriously ill with terminal cancer, when she filmed her scenes as the Log Lady for The Return, as a result, the Log Lady in The Return is also at death's door, sick with cancer. Coulson would eventually succumb to complications from her illness five days after her scenes were shot, and probably as a result, the Log Lady dies after her final scene.

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