1. Jack Nance as Henry Spencer in Eraserhead
Jack Nance would deserve a place on this list if for nothing
but his commitment. Eraserhead
famously took five years to make as Lynch kept running out of money. That meant
Nance had to both remain in character for five years and wear Henry
Spencer’s—ummm—distinctive hair style
for five years. Nance’s work in the film is far more than that though. With a
bare minimum of dialogue, he relies on his subtly expressive face and
masterfully controlled body language to convey the real emotion roiling away
beneath Henry’s placid surface as he contends with his monstrous, mocking baby.
The slightest smile conveys a flash of fatherly pride, the upturn of eyebrows
conveys his despondency with his lot in life, his restful expression at the end
of the film let’s us know that he finally feels loved, and it is a most moving
climax. And when Nance does speak, his choked delivery draws out the film’s
humor and sadness with expert balance. Lynch regards Nance as one of the most
expert actors with whom he’s ever worked and handed roles in almost all of his
films to Nance until the actor’s death in 1996.
Control is also the dominant acting style in Lynch’s second and
first truly mainstream film. The Elephant
Man is home to several truly fine performances of carefully calibrated
emotion and steadfast dignity. Anthony Hopkins is great as the mentoring Dr.
Treves, and John Hurt accomplishes the nearly unthinkable by transmitting all
of John Merrick’s humanity from under a face-paralyzing makeup job. Yet Freddie
Jones is the actor most likely to steal a scene by essentially parodying all
the stiff-upper-lip-ness of The Elephant
Man. Carnival curator Bytes is an utterly undignified man desperately attempting
to emit dignity, trembling with anger, drunkenness, and desire. As cruel as he
is to John Merrick, we also get the sense that he may love him a little too,
that he harbors a deep fear of being left alone by the man he so wickedly
mistreats. This does not forgive Bytes’s villainy, but it helps us understand
him a little and humanizes a character that does unthinkably inhuman things.
Some of that was probably on the page, but so much of it is due to a brilliant,
brilliant performance by Freddie Jones.
3. Dennis Hopper
as Frank Booth in Blue
Velvet
In Blue Velvet,
Lynch created a villain even more repellant than Bytes. As embodied by Dennis
Hopper, Frank Booth is a truly vile individual: rapist, murderer, torturer,
drug dealer, noxious gas huffer. But even more explicitly than Bytes, he is
driven by a twisted notion of love. He does much of what he does because he is
in love with Dorothy Vallens. We see this in the tortured expression on his
face while he listens to Roy Orbison’s powerfully romantic “In Dreams” and in
the lovelorn look he gives Dorothy as she serenades the patrons of the Slow
Club while he strokes a piece of blue velvet clipped from her robe. Of course,
that twisted love does not excuse the horrible things he does to Dorothy and
her family, which make Frank a Lynch villain only trumped by Killer BOB in
terms of pure evil. Hopper fully committed to both the wayward romanticism and
the evil of Frank Booth, making him a fully complex villain.
4. Isabella
Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens in
Blue
Velvet
From villain to victim, Dorothy Vallens is an equally
complicated person. Just as Frank’s concept of love is twisted, she is twisted
by his concept, finding an uncomfortable level of pleasure in his mistreatment.
As he plays baby and daddy during their weird sex games, she plays the abuser
and the abused when she finds young Jeffrey Beaumont hiding in her closet. It’s
a dicey role, and the only way to approach it is to dive right into the deep end, and that’s precisely what Isabella
Rossellini does. With just a few acting jobs under her belt, she delivers a
performance of utter commitment and utter mastery. Dorothy is heartbreaking
when cowering beneath Frank or appearing nude and beaten on Jeffrey’s front
lawn. She is also terrifying when she first discovers him and wields a kitchen
knife to keep him in line. She derails the artificially happy ending of the
film with a look that says she will forever be haunted by her harrowing experiences.
As realized by Isabella Rossellini, Dorothy Vallens is David Lynch’s first
completely multifaceted female character. As we shall see, many more will
follow.
5. Kyle MacLachlan
as Special Agent Dale Cooper in “Twin Peaks”
In Blue Velvet,
Kyle MacLachlan was Jeffrey Beaumont, the college boy who might have been a
pervert or might have been a detective. There’s nothing perverted about master
detective Dale Cooper, an unashamed embodiment of everything good. He is the
polar opposite of a Bytes or a Frank Booth, a character who could have been
nothing more than a cartoon good guy as those other characters could have been
cartoon bad guys. Kyle MacLachlan makes Agent Cooper flesh and blood, a
romantic, a sensualist, a paragon of morality even when tempted by the very
tempting Audrey Horne. MacLachlan delights in the role with each sip of damn
fine coffee and each bite of heavenly cherry pie. He is the Lynch character
you’d most want to protect you… or maybe just share a meal with you. I can’t
imagine another actor playing him with as much enthusiasm and nuance as Kyle
MacLachlan. That we never got to see where the actor would take his creation
next after undergoing a shocking transformation in the final moments of “Twin
Peaks” is one of the tragedies of the show’s early cancellation.
6. Grace Zabriskie
as Sarah Palmer in “Twin Peaks”
With a cast as vast as that of “Twin Peaks” there’s a lot of
room for great performances. Among the finest are those of Ray Wise, Sherilyn
Fenn, Piper Laurie, Michael Ontkean, Madchen Amick, and Dana Ashbrook. But my
vote for most undervalued player goes to Grace Zabriskie. As Laura Palmer’s
mother, Sarah, Zabriskie was riveting. TV has always been littered with
corpses, but we rarely felt the consequences and grief of death as we did when
Sarah first intuited her daughter’s death while on the phone with husband,
Leland. Her shriek is without artifice. As her husband seems to get a semblance
of his old self back over the course of the series, Zabriskie plays out Sarah
Palmer as a husk. Even when matters are not focused on Laura, we can always
detect the sadness echoing inside of Sarah. It is a devastated performance, and
quite a contrast from the wacko Grace Zabriskie played in Wild at Heart during a break in making “Twin Peaks”.
7. Laura Dern as Lula Pace Fortune in Wild
at Heart
Wild at Heart is
one of David Lynch’s most heightened films. Its Southern gothic landscape is
populated by such almost-over-the-top oddballs as Elvis worshipping Sailor
Ripley, awful mom Marietta Fortune, black angel Bobby Peru, and
Christmas-o-phile Jingle Dell, a guy who really likes the way cockroaches feel
in his underwear. Dell’s cousin is Lula, who is introduced as another strange item
with her Marilyn Monroe, sex-kitten act. As the film rolls along, Lula emerges
as its most fully human character (with the possible exception of Harry Dean
Stanton’s Johnnie Faragut). As things get grim for Sailor and Lula, her façade
drops, and Laura Dern’s acting prowess bursts through. We realize the talent
necessary to transition from Lula’s self-assured sexiness early in the film to
the sadness and difficult decision making that complicates her character toward
the end. Dern remains one of Lynch’s very favorite actresses, and he’d
spotlight her with something approaching awe many years later with INLAND EMPIRE.
8. Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
On the “Twin Peaks” series, Sheryl Lee got to make a few
enticing appearances in flashbacks as Laura Palmer but did the bulk of her work
as Laura’s identical cousin Maddie. In the prequel feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, she finally got to really play the
character for which she is most famous. Although Lee is clearly too mature to
be playing a high school girl, she delivers a performance so layered that no
other actress could have been more right for the job. Laura is simultaneously a
good-hearted teenager working for the Meals on Wheels program, a jaded
prostitute and drug addict, a caring friend, a passionate girlfriend (to two
guys, of course), a beaten-down victim of sexual abuse, and a master
manipulator. Lee plays each layer of Laura Palmer perfectly, uniting all those
various facets into a believable whole. Many have denounced Fire Walk with Me as too lurid and
bizarre, but the film would rise above such gripes if only for Sheryl Lee’s
riveting work. The rest of the movie is actually pretty great too.
9. Richard Farnsworth
as Alvin Straight in The
Straight Story
10. Naomi Watts as
Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Dr.
