The “perfect” actor David Lynch called “the coolest there is”
David Lynch was the owner of a singular and unique mind.
While ‘Lynchian’ might now be an aesthetic many try to capture, the reality is that no one ever will. It all came from the inner workings of that one man, complete with all his weirdness, wonder and rebellion.
That’s part of the reason why he settled into being one of those directors with his own core cast. We see this happen a lot when a particular filmmaker has a very distinctive vision and style and miraculously stumbles across an actor who perfect suits it. Wes Anderson has the likes of Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and more. Sofia Coppola constantly comes back to Kirsten Dunst as her own kind of muse. And as for David Lynch, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, and Sheryl Lee feel as essential to the definition of ‘Lynchian’ as any colour palette or trope.
However, that doesn’t mean that his casting was predictable. In fact, it was quite the opposite as Lynch’s decision veered towards the wild and the rebellious. Take, for example, the decision to randomly cast David Bowie in Fire Walk With Me – that was a bold choice.
But the biggest, boldest casting choice of his career was one he was actively warned against. The filmmaking world told him not to do it, but with the vision already in his mind, nothing would stop Lynch from casting Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet.
“I was told not to hire Dennis. They said, ‘No, you cannot do that—he’ll get fucked up and you’ll never get what you want,’ but I always wanted Dennis and I knew he was the perfect Frank Booth,” Lynch said. Once his mind was settled on that, there was no stopping him and no putting him off, despite the infamous tales of Hopper’s on-set chaos.
There was no stopping him because already, in Lynch’s mind, Booth was Hopper and Hopper was Booth. The role of the violent drug dealer had already taken its shape. “To me, Dennis is about the coolest there is. He’s the rebel dream guy, and he has romance and tough guy rolled all into one, and it’s just perfect. And it’s a fifties thing, born out of the fifties,” Lynch said, which was exactly what he was after.
He needed that romance to exist under the sinister surface of Booth. “There’s a scene with Dennis watching Dorothy sing, and Dennis cries in that scene, and that was totally perfect,” he said. “That’s a side of this romantic fifties rebel thing, where a guy could cry and it was totally okay and cool and then beat the shit out of somebody in the next minute.”
The issue was that, as with really every David Lynch production, the budget was tight. Blue Velvet was being made with a tiny amount of $6million, a figure Lynch had negotiated to allow himself full creative control. His desire to cast Hopper was a toss-up – on one hand, he’d be perfect. On the other though, his chaos could be costly if he left them down.
Then a miracle happened. “Dennis was clean and sober and had just shot another picture,” Lynch concluded, as if the stars aligned. “Then Dennis called and said, ‘I have to play Frank Booth because I am Frank Booth,’ and I said that’s good news and bad news. I had no reservations about hiring him.”
