SDCC 2017: 10 Things We Learned From The Twin Peaks Panel

Naomi Watts, who received her breakout acting role in Mulholland Drive sixteen years ago, discussed her relationship with the famed director and recalled how she visited his house with Laura Dern (another longtime Lynch collaborator) to “coax” him into coming up with ideas for new projects.

Shortly after their confab, the Twin Peaks revival was announced and so she made it her mission to continue to “drop hints” about the two of them working together again, despite not being part of the original cast line-up:

“That’s what you do with David – ‘Come on, hire me again.’ It’s just so good to be on a set with him or just in a room. He was talking about some ideas as he smoked, and smiling a lot, but not really saying yes or no. Finally I heard the rumour that Twin Peaks was happening. I wasn’t part of that original team, so it would be wrong for me to be pushy about it. But I did drop some hints.”

Lynch certainly has an eye for his female protagonists, hence his phone call to Watts, inviting her to read through some script pages for Twin Peaks, which only contained her scenes (with all other dialogue and scenes blacked out). It wasn’t until later that she discovered she would be working alongside Kyle MacLachlan:

“And finally I did get a call that said, ‘Naomi, come to the house, I want you to read something.’ […] He just gave me an envelope, a cup of coffee, and sat me in a chair that he built next to a table he built. I sat there for an hour or so and read these pages. […] The scenes I was in, that’s all he gave me. [I asked Lynch about Dougie’s identity, however] it was not told to me, but I certainly posed that question, which he did not clarify.”