Despite his beloved coffee and the twelve-year run of his signature line (and perhaps red wine and, okay, Cheetos), Lynch did not seem to care a great deal about food and drink beyond the requisite sustenance it provided. (Cigarettes, of course, were another matter.) On The Elephant Man, he packed a tuna fish sandwich every day for lunch and saved his production per diem to be able to afford a car when he returned to Los Angeles. The stories of his six- or seven-year run of milkshakes and coffee at Bob’s Big Boy are legendary, while his later “quinoa phase” spawned a beloved short-form work. When he found places and/or items that he liked, he tended to stick with them, sometimes for quite a while.
In dress, Lynch did not care about high fashion (ironic given numerous luxury brands’ pursuit of him for their commercials) or styles of the time—witness his adoption of and adherence to a standard work uniform of slouchy pants and long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the neck. Sure, outfits could be a symbol of one’s individuality and belief in personal freedom, and his works were meticulously, often gorgeously costumed. But in life, his preferences leaned utilitarian.
Even when hosting a journalist at his home, he did not invest energy in the notion of tidy self-presentation or attempt to dress any other way than he normally dressed or be anyone other than who he normally was. In some interviews, he joked about dressing like a bum most of the time, but in our last in-person conversation, he unself-consciously sported a well-worn shirt ripped open from wrist to elbow. Neither of us mentioned it.
Whenever Lynch lost himself in rhapsodic response or concentration attempting to summon forth a particular detail, he would close his eyes and just continue speaking, fingers fluttering in the air as his mind made its way to its intended resting place.
But Lynch wasn’t ascetic. “David liked money. He was not trying to be a monk,” said Peggy Reavey, Lynch’s first wife and, like him, a lifelong painter. “He liked money, but he just didn’t want to make it by doing stuff that didn’t interest him.”
Ditto spending that money on things that didn’t interest him, things that weren’t connected to his creative passions or family. Despite being born at the front end of a generation that would come to embrace American consumerism unlike any before it, Lynch himself had a far less rapacious appetite than most, it would seem safe to say.
Lynch’s divorce from, or deemphasis of, these myriad elements—some literal, practical necessities of life, some luxuries or common hobbies or indulgences—was of course a way to devote more time and energy to the various creative endeavors that fascinated, enlivened, and sustained him. And Lynch was driven by a creativity perhaps as wayward as it was varied.
After one achieves success in any field, professional advice givers descend, telling you how to capitalize on if not your celebrity, then at least the market forces or trends that helped render some favorable outcome for you. Opportunities for endorsements or ancillary income exist in certain fields more than others, but if you’re in the arts, the thrust of advice from any professionally retained representation will almost always be the same—make a version of the same thing you just did, but maybe different by around five degrees. If the success was more niche, the advice will accordingly center on how to pivot and go more “mainstream.”
Sometimes, yes, after two or three (lucrative) repetitions, comes the advice to branch out in order to show “range.” One thing you will never, ever hear, however, is to go and do something in a totally different field from whatever it was that just won you attention. It takes a lot of intestinal fortitude to remain true to oneself and one’s own genuine creative interests in the face of this mostly well-intentioned professional steering, because we all like being told that our vision has merit, that our efforts are laudable.
I imagine for some fans of Lynch’s films, there was frustration, especially after Mulholland Drive, that he didn’t hew more closely to the conventional path of a director (especially an auteur filmmaker), reliably crafting a new film every two or three years, even if in his increasingly handcrafted, downscale-budgeted way. But for a lot of fans of Lynch’s work, his refusal to conform to the sensible dictates of forerunners was a big part of the attraction in the first place.
Despite an incredibly fertile midcareer stretch that saw the lensing and release of six feature films plus the Twin Peaks pilot over a thirteen-year stretch, Lynch was likely never going to remain that type of guy. Yes, there were some of the typical constrictive market forces at work, plus other exigencies. But the scope of his creative exploration was not something to be fenced in or dictated.
While Lynch always exhibited an exacting craftsmanship in the selection and use of music in his films, here was someone who would take that love even further, branching out into experimental music and releasing collaborations as well as his own albums. Here was someone who would lean into emerging digital technologies in a childlike, let’s-see-what-this-can-do manner as well as the community-building possibilities of the nascent Web 1.0. This isn’t even including fine art and photography, which were always part of his life.
So why would Lynch add acting to his plate, lending his visage or voice especially to projects other than his own? After all, his pathway into film and cinematic auteurdom was not rooted in writing roles for himself. Why would he even care about performing if it pulled him away from these other endeavors, all of which either had deeper roots for him or were part of an ongoing, state-of-the-art, professional education that could be applied directly to his moviemaking?
Lynch chose to act for several reasons, I imagine.
One reason could be classified very readily as rooted in personal connection—of taking part in a creative endeavor with close friends and/or family and lending his participation to a project he viewed as worthwhile.
A second reason could stem from pure experiential desire. Throughout his life, Lynch exhibited a streak of curiosity born from a refusal to surrender his childhood innocence. When he wanted to learn more about something—even if that something maybe scared him a bit or made him uneasy—he wasn’t afraid to lean into it, to try to figure it out.
Famously, Lynch himself talked about tackling acting to get over a personal sense of panic and anxiety attached to it. “Mainly I did it because I had a fascination to see if I could do it—mainly to overcome this fear of acting, which is phenomenally fearful,” said Lynch to David Breskin in Inner Views.
Also, while Lynch himself didn’t speak of his acting often or deconstruct experiences in such a causal manner, some who knew him did talk about a couple of his earliest forays into acting giving him a stronger awareness of an actor’s mindset and thus how to even better communicate with them as a director.
A third reason to act could be found in projects that gave Lynch an opportunity to more readily express his robust sense of humor and thus present a more complete or well-rounded public-facing version of himself.
Appearing on Charlie Rose’s eponymous PBS talk show on February 14, 1997, Lynch was asked about comedy and whether he wanted to make one; his answer was a point-blank yes. Asked then whether he could do it, Lynch laughed and blinked hard. “I’ve made some attempts. I’m very interested in humor,” he said. “I’m interested in a humor that can sit next door to horror or fear or something more serious. And an out-and-out comedy, even though I’ve written them, I somehow keep myself from following through and doing it. . . . Maybe the hardest thing to do is a comedy that works.”
Despite ignoring On the Air, the dismally received 1992 ABC sitcom that Lynch cocreated with Mark Frost (who then had little to do with the show), these comments are revealing, as there certainly is no small number of Lynch performances that reach intentionally for comedy. Lynch’s forays into acting then come into sharper focus as at least partially a way to foreground the rascally side of his eternal child, the same type of child who still lives inside all of us, the child of whom he spoke when he said in a November 28, 1999, BBC Two interview with Mark Cousins, “Inside we are ageless, and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little.”
Finally, a fourth reason for Lynch’s interest in performance could be a way to connect with or advance the essential spirit of the art life, in himself as well as others. This certainly seems evident in numerous short-form projects and acting efforts from the last two decades of his life—unsurprising, perhaps, since with age often comes a consideration of and reengagement with the beliefs and principles that most matter to us.
Naturally, projects can check multiple boxes. And these classifications, as deeply considered as they are, aren’t necessarily definitive. There’s a diversity of opinion on the subject, even from people who knew him for many, many years.
One thing can be stated with certainty, however. Lynch didn’t take acting roles for money. If easy paydays were the only aim, there’s no doubt he could have very easily traded on his reputation and accrued goodwill among especially the artist class to score an assembly line of light-lift cameos in everything from genre offerings to quirky independent films. Lynch also could have cashed in on his well-known persona and distinctive voice with product endorsements in ad campaigns he helped create and steer. Offers of the latter variety were especially bountiful in his later years—proof of the great truth of the advertising world: when in doubt, try to co-opt cool.
Instead, Lynch made the colorful and interesting performance choices that he did. However essential, collectively and individually, they might have been to him personally, we’ll never truly know. We only get to enjoy and contemplate, celebrate and debate.
Excerpted from The Dreamer’s Path: Twin Peaks And David Lynch The Actor. Copyright 2026 by Brent Simon. Reprinted with permission of Tucker DS Press. All rights reserved.
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