Kyle MacLachlan: ‘You have to let failure bring you to uncomfortable places and find out it’s never personal’

Kyle MacLachlan (Washington, 66 years old) is not used to contemplating the apocalypse. “It’s enough to make it to the end of the day,” the actor jokes from his Los Angeles home. In one hand, he holds a cup of black coffee à la Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks, and in the other, a fistful of nuts. “I’m going to eat breakfast while we talk,” he warns, with his habitual blend of amiability and oddity. The reason why David Lynch’s eternal muse is thinking about the end of the world this early in the morning is Fallout, a Prime Video adaptation of the successful video game saga, whose second season recently premiered. MacLachlan’s character is a scientist ready to betray his own family out of loyalty to Vault-Tec, a company profiting from nuclear catastrophe through its sales of bunkers. But getting back to the question at hand: what would MacLachlan do if faced with imminent apocalypse?

“I would collect all my loved ones and we would spend the day chatting, remembering our best anecdotes,” he quips. Done and done. We set a 30-minute hypothetical atomic bomb countdown for our interview, and begin to visit a few of said yarns. In fact, MacLachlan is no stranger to such predicaments. As a child, he lived through the tension of Cold War nuclear panic in Yakima, a remote town in Washington state. “Everything came to us through television and film. You were always very anxious, always worried about what was happening elsewhere. But at the same time, it was a wonderful place and it was very safe to grow up there. You could spend the whole day with your friends on your bike and turn up at your house at night,” he says.

His childhood, spent between innocence and an apparent darkness that lay beneath, is essential to understanding his career. That atmosphere is not only present in many of his best projects, it is also what ties him for life to the man who discovered him as an actor: the dearly departed David Lynch. “It really hurts that I’ll never hear how he greeted me again: ‘Hey, Kyle,’ in that little voice of his that I loved. I miss not being able to go visit him, we lived very close to one another. And also, the love that we had, the conversations, and his creativity. He was always creating something, and we had spoken about working together again,” he remembers. As if infected by the unmistakable spirit of his teacher, MacLachlan speaks haltingly, at times leaving sentences half-finished, and starting again as if nothing had happened, in the same sweet tone and ear-to-ear smile.

“Our childhoods were very similar. The northwestern states are very isolated and allow you to spend the day inventing adventures. We both shared a love for nature, forests, rivers… Then he went to college in Philadelphia, and I in Seattle. We didn’t feel comfortable in the city, it overwhelmed us, but we wound up adapting.” What truly brought them together was the failure of the lavish Dune (1984), the first film they collaborated on, and MacLachlan’s first movie role. “In this business, you can’t evolve without failing, and I have had big failures. With Dune, there were so many expectations, and when it came out, they went up in smoke. My career stalled and it seemed like it ended before it had really begun. But you have to let failure bring you to uncomfortable places and find out it’s never personal. Especially when you’re an actor. If a project doesn’t work, you become the image of its failure, your face is linked to failure. And that alters your entire psyche, your DNA, but it makes you stronger,” he says.

Later came the successes, and many of them took place with Lynch. “His universe required a very special energy, and I became the man he was looking for. With David, everything was surreal, but on set, there was always a feeling of love and pure joy, even in the darkest moments. There was more or less laughter, but you always felt that we were doing something different, rewarding, and relevant in this small world,” says the actor. Throughout his life, the director bequeathed MacLachlan with thousands of lessons that now he never tires of repeating. To the rest of the world, Lynch gifted the most precise description of his cult actor: “Kyle is an innocent, and he’s kind of all-American in a way that makes you think about the Hardy Boys,” Lynch wrote in his memoir Room to Dream (Random House, 2018). Over the course of his career, MacLachlan has dedicated himself to representing the thousand and one faces of that American, eccentric, friendly man.

He got his start as the son of a rotten United States in Blue Velvet, went on to be the agent charged with solving one of the country’s most famous fictional murders on Twin Peaks, and wound up as the most dysfunctional boyfriend and husband in the nation on Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. But of course, our apocalyptic trip through his career doesn’t remain in the territory of nostalgia — it’s also full of new memories. For some time now, MacLachlan has been living a second golden era, having evolved to become America’s father with his roles in Fallout, the Disney franchise Inside Out — he jocularly says his own head is governed by Joy and Anxiety — and the college comedy Overcompensating. “It’s the journey of all actors, and I feel tremendously fortunate to be playing all these dads. The actors I admire are the ones who know how to play as a team. Acting is’nt about who the star is, but trying to support each other so that the scene shines collaboratively. That’s always the goal,” he says.

If that weren’t enough, he’s also become the father of TikTok, no less. “I love surprising people. It’s one of the trademarks of my career. If you’re paying attention, there is no kind of coherence in the tone of my roles,” he says. In the videos he posts to his accounts, one finds the trends of the moment and short sketches with a sense of humor so surreal that it achieves the impossible: connecting Lynch to Gen Z. “That fact that you, on your own, can now create a little scene with music is incredible. In my time, there was nothing like it and I’ve completely embraced it now. I’ve always had an extremely strange sense of humor, more English than American. I love puns, wit, nonsense and silliness.”

He’s also opened an account on Letterboxd, the platform of preference for cinephiles, where he creates lists of movies that his most iconic characters would watch, and has even made a podcast called What Are We Even Doing?, on which he interviews and gets to know young creators and actors. What does his son think of him having such a prominent social media presence? “Well, I think he tolerates my TikToks. [laughs] But the thing is, he belongs to a generation that isn’t so judgmental. That’s exactly what we talk about on the podcast. I love their authenticity and how they embrace it. When I was young, I felt a lot of pressure to fit into a mold and behave as was expected of me. That’s why my heroes were always the outsiders, the people who went against the norm,” he says.

MacLachlan must be a diligent student when it comes to these teachings of the younger generations, because he’s putting some of them into practice when it comes to his own career. “At first, I was very critical of my work, of whether I‘d been good or bad in each role. But with time, I’ve come to understand that’s a waste of time. Characters exist on their own, beyond me, and it’s the reaction of the public that truly makes them memorable. That happened to me, for example, with The Captain on How I Met Your Mother. People loved that bizarre energy,” he says.

TikToker, podcaster, and sixty-plus Gen Z idol — at times, it would seem that there are no more molds left for MacLachlan to break. One last example? 20 years ago, he started his small wine label, Pursued by Bear, in his home state of Washington as a way to spend more time with his dad. He’s gotten more and more involved with the project. “I love coming home from time to time. The city is very much governed by the seasons and harvests. When I was little, I had a huge vegetable garden in the backyard. So it’s part of my DNA.”

One — or several — bottles would likely be the final element necessary for that hypothetical last day on Earth. “Wine creates community, it’s a great conversation starter,” says the actor. Before our countdown ends, he raises his coffee cup and says goodbye with a toast. It’s a relief that no atomic bombs are falling. They would ruin his vineyards, and in a few days he has to go see about the latest crop.

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