Kyle MacLachlan names his most overlooked movie: “That’s kind of a fun one”
Kyle MacLachlan has had an absolutely insurgent career, best known for playing FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch’s seminal mystery TV series Twin Peaks, which rocked the boat of the television landscape at the time with its supernatural-driven whodunit.
Twin Peaks set the stage for other supernatural mystery shows as well as more grounded crime dramas, and even saw a revival in 2017, for which MacLachlan and Sheryl Lee both returned. As far as the rest of MacLachlan’s career goes, it seems like he is always showing up and stealing the show in the most surprising of places. Twin Peaks’ original run lasted only from 1990 to 1991, after which MacLachlan went on to star in its prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, while branching out with other projects that weren’t always as successful.
In the 1980s, MacLachlan starred as Paul Atreides in Dune and as Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet, both divisive and singular films directed by Lynch, but not ones without ardent defenders. However, by the end of the 1990s, MacLachlan’s film career had definitely slowed down. He started to focus again on TV, where he would find his most prominent roles in the 21st century, including recurring character Trey MacDougal on Sex and the City. This also led to the roles that I, a Gen Z-er, know him from (don’t you dare laugh at me), as ‘The Captain’ in How I Met Your Mother and Calvin Johnson in Agents of SHIELD.
I look at this career and see arguably one project that is near universally adored, which changed television for the better, and so many others that provoke heated discussions, but never where you can say that the actor gives a categorically bad performance. MacLachlan knows how to surprise us by doing everything and anything, giving brilliantly striking turns across genres.
The Captain falls into a niche sitcom archetype that I personally love, of the recurring character who is genuinely pleased to see the main group every time, even though those characters all find him annoying. And in SHIELD, he is amazingly very, very unsettling as Daisy’s disturbed father, yet he still reveals a touching love for his family.
This is also the kind of career that hidden gems easily get buried in, and MacLachlan tells AV Club in an interview which of his projects he thinks are overlooked. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve enjoyed the journey. I’ve enjoyed the characters. Some, I think, work better than others,” the actor said. “I guess that’s natural. Just thinking about some of the performances, most of them have been found. I mean, The Hidden is a wonderful little buddy cop buddy science fiction gem, kind of a mixed genre film. And the character that I play shares some of the traits of Dougie. That’s kind of a fun one. But I think that people find them, and they hopefully appreciate the work.”
The Hidden was outside MacLachlan’s creative partnership with Lynch, directed by Jack Sholder, yet it falls nicely into the actor’s space of sci-fi horror, being about a law enforcement duo who investigate why peaceful people are suddenly turning violent. It’s another one of MacLachlan’s greatest hits from the 1980s, and definitely one people should watch if they are trying to understand the overall scope of his career.
