With less than two weeks before it happens again on Showtime, this morning Variety published a lengthy piece featuring interviews with Twin Peaks director David Lynch, returning star Kyle MacLachlan, and Laura Dern, a new addition to Twin Peaks but certainly not to the David Lynch cinematic universe. There’s been speculation that Dern will be playing Diane, the unseen colleague to whom Special Agent Dale Cooper (MacLachlan) addresses his tape-recorded dispatches from Twin Peaks. Dern won’t confirm that, of course, but she does hint at a callback to not only the original series, but a scene she and MacLachlan shared in 1986’s Blue Velvet: “Kyle and I had several scenes, particularly in the car, when we’re talking about the robins,” she says. “There’s this very beautiful, hopeful poetry amidst this hellish world they’ve entered.”
The piece has a few more revelations about what to expect from the upcoming third season of Twin Peaks: Showtime CEO David Nevis lets it slip that Lynch’s FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole plays a “pretty prominent” role in the new season, adding, “I probably said too much.” Lynch says that the freedom of cable TV doesn’t mean there will be nudity or excessive violence in the new season, cryptically adding, “the story tells you what’s going to happen.” He also repeats his earlier statement that Fire Walk With Me will be essential to understanding the new season.
Perhaps most intriguingly, series co-creator Mark Frost, who describes a 400-page tome mapping out the continuation of Twin Peaks Lynch delivered a few months after the Showtime green light, says fans should not expect a the show to begin with a murder like the death of Laura Palmer, warning, “It’s going to be very different this time around.” Expanding on that, Nevins says the scope of the new season will be greater; unlike the initial run of the show, which took place mostly in the town of Twin Peaks (a.k.a. Snoqualmie, Washington), the new season will feature multiple storylines taking place in different parts of the U.S. that eventually converge. The majority of the new season was shot in Southern California, but whether that means sets or location shooting, naturally, remains a mystery.
“I think [Lynch has] evolved to an even more extreme version of himself, but all of the themes are visible,” Nevins says. “ I think David Lynch is a really relevant voice: What does it mean when we say, ‘Make America great again?’” You can puzzle over that and the rest of the interviews with Lynch, Nevins, MacLachlan, Dern, and more over at Variety.