‘Twin Peaks’ Trivia: How the spirit of Bob took David Lynch by surprise
Some casting decisions take forever. In some stories, a movie or series has been pushed back and forth, all because the creators and crew can’t find the right person for the role. The nightmare situation typically unfolds when the role is stringent with no leeway. They need a person with precisely these qualities to fit into the story exactly this way and follow this exact plan. It is no surprise that David Lynch didn’t work that way.
Throughout his career, Lynch was a magnet for new talent. He was a director who seemed to find his people and then keep coming back, with faces recurring throughout his work. He couldn’t get enough of Laura Dern, giving her one of her first major breaks with Blue Velvet and then casting her again in a very different role as Lula in Wild at Heart. Lynch also discovered Kyle MacLachlan, adopting him as one of the key faces in his cinematic world, first with Dune, then Blue Velvet, and most iconically as Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks.
Lynch nurtured his actors into a mould entirely his own. The continued presence of Laura Palmer and his deepening interest in her story was, in part, a reflection of his admiration for Sheryl Lee. Her casting call originally asked her to “just play a dead girl”, offering a simple television debut. But as Lynch watched Lee work and saw how vividly she inhabited Palmer, he kept expanding the role, reportedly creating the character of Maddy Ferguson just to give her more time on screen.
As much as the world loves to talk about Lynchian cinema as a thing focused on visual and avant-garde storytelling, the true meaning of Lynchian should be a dedication to letting the cast lead and the director follow, as Lynch was not shy about changing things based on the talent around him.
There is no better example of this than the story of Bob, the looming evil spirit of Twin Peaks. But at first, even Lynch didn’t know that there would be a Bob, or how evil would be presented in the story. When he was developing the show with Mark Frost, his idea was actually very loose as they started with a map of this fictional town and worked from there, with Lynch stating, “We knew where everything was located and that helped us determine the prevailing atmosphere and what might happen there.” The concept was simple: a dead girl with a secret life, a sort of murder mystery.
But then, the spirit of Bob took him by surprise. He and Frost were building sets and crafting Laura Palmer’s house for the show when Lynch was jump-scared by a crew member. It was Frank Silva, and lightning struck with the lighting guy.
It’s quite insulting, really. Imagine someone seeing you and thinking, “Ah yes, you look like the embodiment of evil.” But when Lynch was startled by Silva, he began to think there might be a place for him in the show. Still unsure of the role, he filmed a short clip of Silva crouched at the bottom of a bed, staring directly into the lens.
Chance stepped in again. Later on, when they were filming a scene of Laura Palmer’s mother having a traumatic flashback, a camera operator called for the scene to be redone as someone was in the reflection in the corner of the shot. Lynch asked who it was, and when he heard it was Silva, the lightning struck again. Suddenly, Bob was haunting the set, and therefore the show, so Lynch wrote him in, using both of those scenes to craft this evil spirit into the world of the story, following the curveball presented to him.
