Michael Almereyda

It’s hard to think of a performer who has aged more gracefully than Kyle MacLachlan. At 61, he’s still got that matinee-idol chin, full, robust head of hair, and the good-natured warmth to go along with it. Yet beneath the leading-man looks beats the heart of a considered, compelling character actor, a sensibility he’s brought to decades of beautifully idiosyncratic work in successes and flops alike. Even when he’s villainous, it’s impossible not to love him. (Except when he’s Mr. C in Twin Peaks: The Return, of course.) That kind of cerebral deadpan is key to his career-long collaboration with fellow Northwestern boy David Lynch, who plucked him from obscurity to star in his sprawling adaptation of Dune, whose disastrous reception nonetheless prepared him to become Lynch’s muse for Blue V...