Kyle MacLachlan, Lynch's Leading Man, Opens Up About Loss and a New Memoir

Kyle MacLachlan has not yet come to terms with the death of David Lynch. The actor says as much himself, in a new interview in which he reflects on the loss of the director who shaped his career.

The two names are inseparable. MacLachlan was Lynch's on-screen alter ego across four decades of work, the wide-eyed innocent at the center of the director's most defining films. To talk about MacLachlan's career is to talk about Lynch, and the actor is now doing exactly that — publicly, and with a memoir on the way.

The book is the actor's own account of his life in film and television, and the interview accompanies it. In it, MacLachlan addresses the grief that lingers after Lynch's death. He admits he still hasn't processed the loss. That admission frames everything else he discusses: an actor taking stock, in print, of a career that began with a director few actors ever fully understood.

The interview's framing is pointed, even affectionately cheeky. MacLachlan, it suggests, is "secretly a normie" — Lynch's singular weirdo on screen, something closer to a regular guy off it. The tension between those two identities runs through the conversation. It also runs, presumably, through the memoir.

One revelation stands out among the career retrospection: MacLachlan hesitated before taking a role in "Sex and the City." The long-running series represented a different world from Lynch's — mainstream, glossy, commercially dominant — and the actor was not immediately sure it was for him. He took the part anyway. The role became one of the most widely recognized of his post-Lynch career, introduced him to audiences who had never seen a Lynch film, and now forms part of the story he tells in the book.

The memoir arrives at a moment when interest in Lynch — the man, the method, the mythology — has intensified following the director's death. Actors who worked closely with him are among the few people positioned to add anything substantive to that record. MacLachlan worked with him longer and more consistently than almost anyone. Whatever he writes about those collaborations will carry weight that few other accounts can match.

For now, the actor speaks of the loss in unresolved terms. The grief is still fresh; the reckoning incomplete. The memoir, and interviews like this one, are the form that reckoning takes — a leading man measuring himself against the director who made him, and finding the account still difficult to close.