What happened to the cast of Twin Peaks? Where the stars of David Lynch's small-town nightmare are now
Six of them get back on a bus next month. Twin Peaks: Conversation With the Stars, an expanded US tour announced on July 29, puts Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Michael Horse, Dana Ashbrook, Kimmy Robertson and Harry Goaz on stage from mid-September. On October 26 and 27 they play Everett and Poulsbo, Washington, the towns where Twin Peaks was actually shot. The run ends on January 20, 2027, what would have been David Lynch's birthday, at the United Theater on Broadway in Los Angeles, as a memorial. Lynch died on January 16, 2025, at 78, of emphysema worsened by a wildfire evacuation.
One name is missing from that bus, and it is the obvious one.
The Cooper problem
Kyle MacLachlan, 67, is off the tour for a flatly unromantic reason: he is at work. He plays Hank MacLean on Prime Video's Fallout, back in production in Santa Clarita since May for a third season, after a February finale in which Hank wipes his own memory. Before Lynch died the two of them had been talking about a new project with Laura Dern. It does not exist now, and the man who played Dale Cooper is on a soundstage playing someone who chose to forget.
They did not go arthouse. They went primetime.
Twin Peaks dragged surrealism onto network television, so you would expect its cast to have scattered into difficult cinema. Instead they staffed the exact genre Twin Peaks invented: the glossy small-town serial with a body in it.
MacLachlan's biggest post-Peaks role was Orson Hodge, 85 episodes of Desperate Housewives. Mädchen Amick played Alice Cooper for 117 episodes of Riverdale, a show that is Twin Peaks with the lights on. Lara Flynn Boyle spent six years as ADA Helen Gamble on The Practice and took an Emmy nomination out of it. That is three people holding up American primetime for two decades while the credit went to Lynch.
Then most of them got out
What came next is stranger, because for several of them it is not acting.
Amick directs. Her feature debut Fractured, with Bruce Dern and Julia Ormond, premiered at the LA Femme International Film Festival on October 19, 2025, and she directed an episode of Brilliant Minds that aired on November 3, having already directed three of Riverdale. NBC cancelled Brilliant Minds in May, which is rather the point of learning to direct.
Michael Horse, 77, is a visual artist first now. Pioneer PBS spent an episode of Postcards in his workshop in May, on his jewellery and his ledger art: Native scenes painted over 19th-century accounting books, the kind once used to divide up Indigenous land. Deputy Hawk is the smaller half of what he does.
Russ Tamblyn is 91 and retired. His last credit is The Haunting of Hill House, in 2018. At 89 he published a memoir, Dancing on the Edge, part of it edited by his daughter Amber. That is the whole update, and it is a good one.
Sherilyn Fenn, 61, has the loudest new job here: cast in June in Netflix's live-action Scooby-Doo: Origins, shooting in Atlanta for 2027. Her post-Peaks peak until now was Showtime's Rude Awakening, 1998 to 2001, so her biggest booking in years is a talking-dog show. Take the win.
Ray Wise turns 79 on Thursday, August 20. He is on the tour, and he went back to daytime: on January 2 he returned to The Young and the Restless as Ian Ward, eight years after leaving. His best post-Peaks role is still the Devil, 31 episodes of Reaper, which is a funny thing to say about Leland Palmer.
Dana Ashbrook, 59, guested on ABC's High Potential last year, after a run as Rich Rinaldi on Dawson's Creek. His real second career is the reunion circuit, done properly, as a job. Bobby Briggs grew up to be the guy who shows up.
The one who was never on the poster again
Lara Flynn Boyle, 56, is the only one of the eight who did not appear in The Return. She had already been recast once, when Moira Kelly played Donna in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Lynch's complete public comment on her 2017 absence was one sentence: "You can go talk to Lara Flynn Boyle." Her last credit is Mother, Couch in 2023, and she was seen out in Los Angeles in May, her first public sighting since June 2025. She works rarely and lives privately. She has not quit, and she has said so herself.
The circle closed
Two people who came back for The Return are gone. Peggy Lipton, Norma, appeared in five episodes and died on May 11, 2019, at 72, of colon cancer. Warren Frost, Doc Hayward, father of co-creator Mark Frost, died on February 17, 2017, at 91. He filmed one last scene first, a Skype call, aired in Part 7. Michael Ontkean, 80, retired in 2011 and turned the revival down.
There is no season four coming. Mark Frost has said so plainly.
Where to start, if the tour got you
Run the 1990 Twin Peaks to the end of season two, then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, then Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, the deleted Fire Walk with Me footage cut together like a lost episode. Only then The Return. In that order the ending is devastating rather than baffling.
Then go sideways. Put on early Riverdale and watch Amick play a small-town mother with something buried, the same job Shelly Johnson had, now done by someone who also runs the camera. Or find the Postcards short and sit with Michael Horse's ledger paintings. This cast spent thirty-five years being asked about a dead girl wrapped in plastic. Most of them answered by becoming someone else, and next month it is all in one room.
