David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks arrived in a world largely unprepared for its mix of glossy Americana, surrealism and horror. Since it was first broadcast in 1990, it has become part of television’s DNA, and stands as one of the greatest achievements of the lauded film-maker, who died last week.

Mark Frost (co-creator): I first met David Lynch in 1985. I had seen Eraserhead in 1979 at a midnight showing in Minneapolis, and I walked out with the oddest feeling and said: “Someday I’m going to work with that guy.” Six years later, a mutual agent of ours thought the two of us would be good to collaborate on a project they were representing, and fostered an introduction. We hit it off from the very first moment. We were laughing within minutes. We loved all the same movies, we knew all the same directors. That project went away, but then another agent approached us and said: “What do you guys think about doing a television project together?” We had nothing to lose.

The germ of Twin Peaks came from a couple of places. In middle school, the older sister of one of my closest friends was brutally murdered at a boarding school in Vancouver by an escaped convict, and it was a devastating experience for the family. I was about 14. She was a year older than me and I had a crush on her. It was a devastating experience for me, too.

Then my grandmother, who was a colourful character, told us for years this amazing story about a young woman in Albany, in upstate New York, who had been murdered in the early part of the 20th century and found floating in a pond near where we lived. Years later, two lumberjacks were convinced they’d seen her ghost.

So the image of the girl lying in the water on the edge of the lake was the key. That led to us branching out and creating the universe of the town. David drew a physical map on the back of a placemat at a coffee shop where we would have lunch every day, and we had two mountains on the map. When it came time to say, “What’s this town called?”, I looked at it and said: “Well, we could call it Twin Peaks.”

Mädchen Amick (Shelly Johnson): I was the youngest cast member. I was 18 when I did the pilot, so I was actually a teenager playing a teenager, as opposed to some of the other cast members. I had seen Dune and Blue Velvet, so I was thinking: “Wow, David Lynch on television! This is either going to go terribly badly or be something really notable and special.”

Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Harry S Truman): The initial meeting with David was an easy and joyful event; just the two of us. We discovered we were born exactly four days apart. He always claimed older brother status. I figured there was no way on God’s green earth that a major American network in 1989 would actually put something this quirky on the air.

Dana Ashbrook (Bobby Briggs): It was complete luck I was in it. I’d known Johanna Ray, the casting director – Eric DaRe (AKA Leo Johnson), her son, was one of the few people I knew in LA – and my picture was in the stack she gave David and Mark when they were casting Twin Peaks. I came to their office and we just talked. I said I thought the script was really funny and they laughed. They thought it was funny, too.

Joan Chen (Josie Packard): I received a script and the character had an Italian name. I saw Isabella Rossellini recently and she confirmed the part was originally written for her. I’d seen Blue Velvet, so I understood Josie’s character: the mysterious foreign person in an incestuous little community.

Wendy Robie (Nadine Hurley): It was my first television role. The pilot was shot in Seattle and I was just a local actor brought in to audition. Nadine hadn’t been written yet, but the character was supposed to be very, very angry. So that’s what I did. David said Nadine would be blind in one eye, and what did I think of that? I thought about it for a while, and then I just asked him: “Which eye?” As if that would matter! Mark and David thought that was hilarious. I think that’s why they cast me.

Frost: The pilot was very specific. It had a hotel next to a waterfall. It had a picturesque train station, a sheriff’s department, a high school, the diner. We went up to Seattle and scouted for five days, and we were really discouraged we hadn’t found what we were looking for. On the last day, the location manager said: “Well, there’s one place I could show you. It’s a little out of the way” – the towns of Snoqualmie and North Bend. So we drove out there the next day, and every single thing in the script was right there. It was spooky. We had just imagined a town that already existed.

Michael Horse (Deputy Hawk): I’m the most un-New Age guy in the whole world, but I have Indigenous friends that live up in that area, and that forest has an entity. You know the animals had things to say. Mark Frost had a big grasp of Native culture. When they went up there, they realised Hawk is really the only one that understands what’s going on. He had his feet in both worlds.

Chen: We were only there a short time; later we moved to LA. But it was magical. You could always hear the wind blowing through the trees, you could always hear running water.

Ontkean: There was a morning rehearsal, in our location outside Seattle. We then piled into David’s rental car and he played a tape of the very recently composed theme music. It was an out-of-body, transcendent experience. Angelo Badalamenti’s melody and chord progressions wrapped everything in a sublime gift basket. We knew we were on our way.

Frost: When we were shooting in Seattle, we asked our local casting agent to show us some young women who might be right for Laura Palmer. We saw hundreds of photos, then we met with Sheryl Lee and loved her – so much so that we said: “Well, we can’t just have her be a picture on a television set. We have to find a way to bring her back to life.” Sheryl was absolutely perfect and a dream to work with. There’s a lot of serendipity when you’re doing something like this, and on almost every occasion, the right person walked through the door.

Amick: We took over a real diner. I forget where we got the pies, but man, were they good! Everybody was clamouring to eat them after the scene was done. We had to create wagers of who got to eat the pie.

‘There was a lot of friskiness going on’

Horse: Some people would go: “Oh, David just throws out stuff to be strange.” No. There’s nothing David did that didn’t have a purpose and make sense.

Frost: We always felt that telling the 3D, on-the-ground, Americana version of Twin Peaks was only half the story; what we’re talking about here is the element of mystery in life, and the idea that there’s more to life than we know.

Horse: I told David, a lot of my Native artist friends really like your work, because we know that the dream world is just as real as the awake world.

Frost: We were interested in exploring the dream lives of these people, particularly Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), who was our way in to this world. We would write these things down but then David would, as we say in the business, “beat the page”: he’d do something even more stunning and glorious than what we had written. That was one of his great gifts as a director: the ability to convey all of that in imagery and sound. Like [for the Red Room scenes] shooting it backwards and having them speak backwards. I’d never seen that before. I don’t think anybody else had seen it.

Sabrina Sutherland (production coordinator): Michael Anderson (AKA The Man from Another Place) had such a command of being able to talk backwards for the Red Room scenes. It was something he used to do when he was a kid, apparently. Whereas Sheryl Lee had to take her time and learn it backwards word by word. It’s hard!

Ontkean: A magical curtain surrounded the entire production. The atmosphere was both mellow and buzzing with electricity. Mischief, mayhem and mystery, all surrounded by humour and giant truckloads of good cheer. I loved every minute of preparing, rehearsing, shooting and hanging out.

Ashbrook: I would show up when I wasn’t working just to try and get in scenes. I would hang out, just to watch David work. It was a family kind of vibe.

Amick: We would have fun on set. There was a group of us – Heather Graham, Lara Flynn Boyle, Sheryl Lee, a couple of crew members – we ended up doing this whole series of Polaroid pictures: we’d come up with insane things to do on the set. Like, one of us would stand under a floor lamp, and another one would hang from a chandelier. There’s a good stack of those Polaroids, all on a big ring. We usually rotate who has them – I think I have them right now.

Frost: There was a lot of friskiness going on. You put a bunch of young, attractive actors in a contained environment, it’s just like putting a bunch of bunnies in a cage – you’re going to get more bunnies! But nothing that really intruded with the day-to-day business of the show. We kept it professional. There were no divas in that group, and everybody pulled their weight.

Horse: I don’t know about anybody else, but I was basically having a ball. I was notorious for stealing stuff off sets back then. If I’d known Twin Peaks was going to be what it was, man, I would have taken more stuff.

‘David had an aura around him’

Ashbrook: David would lead the way. He would set a mood. During the pilot, he would have the music piped into his headset while he was watching the scene take place. He would let us hear that music too, occasionally. So you’d put on his headphones and you’d hear like – duuun, duuun … the Twin Peaks soundtrack music, and it really just set a vibe.

Ontkean: David was purely and absolutely attentive to what’s in the air. He was always ready, willing and completely able to incorporate anything and everything into a scene. He calmly conducted the orchestra with all six senses. Number six being instinct/intuition.

Robie: He would create something and then it was up to you. He’d leave this big empty box for you to fill. It was wonderful, an absolute faith: whatever bonkers thing he was going to set before you, your job was to fill it, to make it real, to make a human story.

Sutherland: He had an aura around him. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like he was electrically charged. He was a wonderful person, a very good human being, and I think that came through in everything he did.

Chen: I was surprised how gentle and real and just … normal he was. I expected somebody a little strange, not so ordinary. He was a totally sincere person.

Ontkean: The more time I spent with David, it became abundantly clear he contained and displayed strong elements of both Truman and Cooper.

Chen: I think it was Laura’s funeral scene; we were all sitting in different rows. And Richard Beymer (AKA Benjamin Horne) came up behind me to take his seat and he whispered something in my ear. It wasn’t in the script, and I didn’t know what he whispered. And then when they cut, he came over to me and apologised profusely, like: “Joan, I’m sorry, David asked me to do that.” I said: “I didn’t hear it. What did you say?” And he said: “He told me to say ‘cunt’.” David just wanted to see what I would do when the camera was on me. But I’d never heard that word before! English is my second language. So obviously he didn’t get what he wanted. I just did this bland “what?”.

Amick: There was a scene with Norma (Peggy Lipton) and Shelly at the diner, and Shelly’s sharing how heartbroken she is. And just before we were about to start, David came over to me and he just stood there and grabbed my hands and looked at me, and I looked at him. And I’m kind of waiting for, like, is he gonna say something? Eventually he just nodded and said: “OK”. I received what he was sending me without words. And immediately when the cameras were rolling, I was just locked into the emotion of the scene. That was David’s way: he was very genuine and connected and inspired, and he cultivated that on his set. It was a special place.

‘I’ve never seen something become so notable, so quickly’

Twin Peaks premiered in the US on 8 April 1990 with a feature-length pilot, watched by 36 million people.

Amick: The first episode – from hour one to hour two, the numbers skyrocketed, apparently, because people were literally calling each other, going: “Are you watching this show?”

Ontkean: Paul Newman, who was my friend, missed the broadcast of the original Twin Peaks pilot on television and was well aware of the avalanche of positive reviews. I called David and asked for a copy to be sent to us in New York. Paul arranged for it to be shown at a Manhattan screening room. It was just the two of us and Mike Nichols. Afterwards, Paul gathered himself, got real quiet, turned to me and said it was one of the few times in his life he had experienced a perfect movie.

Amick: I’ve never seen something becoming so notable, so quickly. We were thrown into a whole new world of fame and celebrity. I wasn’t quite prepared for that.

Ashbrook: I went to New York for the first time in my life to do David Letterman, and then we went for an early dinner to the Hard Rock Cafe, which, at the time, was very hip. And I got recognised, and I think that was the first time I realised: “Jesus, people are actually watching this.”

Amick: Oprah Winfrey invited me to be an audience member on her show in Chicago, and I remember the first thing she said to me was: “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

Ashbrook: People were always coming up and being like: “Oh my God, who killed her? Who killed her?” I’d never, ever thought of it as a mystery. It was never even a thing where we were like: “We’ve got to keep this big secret.”

Chen: After the first season – this is how naive I was – I wanted out because I wanted to do a film called Turtle Beach, and I was upset I was doing Twin Peaks and I might miss the opportunity. So I mentioned to David many times: “Is there any way we can let Josie out of the show?”

Frost: I said to David: “We don’t want to kill her, because we might want to bring her back. You never know.” So he said: “Let me think about that.” And then he came back the next day and said: “I think she gets turned into a drawer knob.”

Chen: That was how he ended Josie – locked inside a drawer knob! Maybe it was his sort of revenge on me.

‘The production monster started chasing us’

The second season began in the US on 30 September 1990.

Amick: It was definitely a different vibe. David wasn’t around as much, and I feel like they had to create something that was like: “What would David do?” It was a little forced, in hindsight. The show started becoming meta: almost making fun of itself and just leaning into the camp.

Sutherland: David would breeze in, do his shows and breeze out. Mark wasn’t around a lot either.

Ashbrook: Whenever David wasn’t directing, everything changed. It became, like, television world, where everybody tried to rush and speed through stuff. But when David was on the set, it was like: “Slow down. Everybody calm down.”

Frost: The difficulty we faced, which every show faces, is when you get into a second season, you’ve got, like, a 22-episode order. It’s a lot of work to do in a very short period of time. And before long, what we used to call “the production monster” starts chasing you. It’s like a reaper going through a field, and the blades are getting closer and closer. So you’re basically running for your life and throwing pages over your shoulder as you go, to feed the monster.

Sutherland: The only issue I remember was when they were writing that Sherilyn Fenn’s character (Audrey Horne) and Kyle’s character were possibly going to get together. And Kyle was saying he thought an FBI agent wouldn’t get involved with a high school student. Kyle was like: “No, I’m not doing that.”

Ashbrook: I just was sort of “one episode at a time” – I didn’t know anything that was going on.

Amick: I never knew anything. You had to really focus on your storyline and your scenes, because there was such a big world being woven together. I didn’t have the capacity to keep it all straight and figure it all out.

Horse: Every now and then I would look at Everett (McGill, AKA Big Ed Hurley) and go: “Do you understand any of this?” He’d go, “No”, and we would go and ask Jack (Nance, AKA Pete Martell). Jack could explain everything.

Chen: David’s talent was that somehow we believed everything he wanted us to do. We didn’t question it. With someone else you might say: “I don’t think this makes sense. I don’t think this character would do this.” With David and Mark, what came in the script, I was excited. I was like: “Oh my God, this is what she is!”

Frost: The guy who ran Capital Cities [parent company of the ABC TV network] – I remember meeting him and he didn’t know what it was about. It didn’t just scare him; I think it offended him. He seemed deeply uncomfortable with the whole idea of the show, even though, at that point, it was the thing that put ABC on the map. So they moved us to Saturday night for the second season, which was kind of a death knell. They basically held a gun to our head and said: “You’ve got to tell us who committed the murder.” David and I felt that was probably not the best idea, but they threatened to cancel us if we didn’t.

Sutherland: That’s the only time David ever really got mad at me on that second season. It was the last episode, which he directed, and he did not like the script that had been written. He came to me, and he was screaming at me: “Did this script go out to everybody?” Because my job was distributing the scripts. And I said: “Yes.” And he was so upset. So he rewrote it and took out stuff that he didn’t like, and made new scenes to make it more like his and Mark’s original vision of Twin Peaks. He was very, very upset, screaming at me. And then he was like: “OK, I know it’s not your fault, and you thought you were doing the right thing.”

Frost: Then David directed the final episode and created some of the most memorable scenes, I think, in our entire run.

Sutherland: The last thing we shot was Kyle in the bathroom, if I remember correctly.

Ashbrook: When it finished, me, Ontkean, Kyle, Michael Horse and Harry Goaz (Deputy Andy Brennan) had a sweat lodge that we did out in Malibu, near the beach. That was saying goodbye to it all – our little ritual. Michael Horse ran it. He said prayers for the world, for the Earth and for humanity. It was beautiful.

Horse: That’s what the community does, when they want to leave something behind or they want to bond with each other. So yeah, I did that for the guys.

‘It was like the ultimate college reunion, 25 years later’

A third season, known as Twin Peaks: The Return and set 25 years after the events in the first two, premiered on 21 May 2017.

Chen: After it ended, people started to talk more about it. It continued to keep an audience – people went back to see it. It’s like the best bottle of red wine that ages so well.

Frost: I approached David in 2012 and said “I think I have a way to get us back into that world.” That led to Twin Peaks: The Return five years later. And it proved to be maybe his greatest work, because the canvas is so broad.

Ashbrook: Before we did that third season, David always said: “No way it’s coming back. Dead as a doornail. I can’t imagine it, blah, blah, blah.” And then all of a sudden it happened. It’s so nice that people cared. It’s still amazing to me.

Amick: The Return was very momentous. I was in tears when I was doing my costume fitting. Our costume designer brought out a uniform that she’d been able to get from the archives, and my name was still in the apron. I put the Shelly waitress uniform back on, walked down the hall to David’s office, stood there, and he and I just started bawling.

Frost: It was like the ultimate college reunion, 25 years later.

Robie: It was kind of miraculous – a) that it happened; and b) that it was good, because you fear when those things happen that it’s not going to be the same. It was precisely not the same. It was bigger and richer and deeper and vaster. It answered questions by not answering them, just asking bigger questions. It solved mysteries by making them more profound, giving you greater mysteries. Who wants answers?

Horse: When they did the premiere of The Return, the executives had not seen it, and they said: “Mr Lynch, would you say a few words?” And he comes out; he goes: “This project has a lot of wood in it. I like wood.”

‘He was a simply wonderful guy’

David Lynch died on 15 January 2025.

Frost: All this happened in a kind of apocalyptic cloud [as a result of the Los Angeles wildfires] that feels like it’s enshrouded all of southern California, a place where I’ve spent the majority of my life. And I do believe that fire contributed to our losing David. He had emphysema. He was not in great health, and the last thing you need is something that’s going to make breathing more difficult. I’m sure it contributed.

Amick: It’s hard for me to find the words to express the loss of a masterful genius, but more importantly, a simply wonderful guy. I always say that my time with him was a blessing and a curse. I got immersed into the magic of David Lynch, and have carried that through my entire career. But then the curse was, I had to go out and work with ordinary film-makers. He spoiled me.

Frost: I’d had some really nice conversations with him over the last couple of years, as he was confronting his new reality and the things that were limiting to him, but it never limited his mind. And as long as he had that, he felt free. He never felt sorry for himself. Self-pity wasn’t in his lexicon. It was a terrible loss for everybody. And he was also a dear, dear friend of 40 years. He was such an indelible character and so singular in so many ways. It’s a ridiculous understatement to say I’ll never know anyone like him again.

• A Gathering of the Angels, a festival celebrating David Lynch’s work, will take place in the UK later this year