Hollywood, Hamlet and me

10 April 2012

When the actor Jack Hawkins lost his voice to throat cancer he said all he needed now was for a genius to invent the silent movie.

Examining the determinedly monochromatic Kyle MacLachlan across a bland hotel room this afternoon - we are in Munich but you really couldn't tell - I think how well this distinctive actor would have suited the era of black and white movies.

Dressed dramatically in blacks and greys, a finger wagging a black signet ring that bears his family crest, Kyle occasionally allows a shiny black lock to flop across his pale fore-head. At his present director's whim, his hair is dyed. Left to itself, as it is in the hip new movie-version of Hamlet that opens on Friday, it is, he says, "salt and pepper", although, I think, the salt is gaining on the pepper.

Hamlet's director, Michael Almereyda, withheld the boot polish because he had cast MacLachlan as nothing less than Hamlet's stepfather. A devotee of David Lynch, Almereyda envisioned the star of Lynch's Dune, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks playing a "younger, vibrant, lethal Claudius, a Richard Branson or a Donald Trump", which would fit because this modern Claudius is CEO of the Denmark Corp, New York.

The film's publicity notes that its Hamlet, Ethan Hawke, is the first to be aged under 30 in cinema history. But at 41, MacLachlan is certainly the youngest Claudius. "I had the same reaction as you when I got my agents' phone call in Los Angeles," Kyle admits. "When they said Claudius, I said, 'I think you've probably got it wrong. It's probably Laertes, perhaps Horatio, hopefully not Fortinbras. And they called back and said, 'No, it is Claudius.'"

MacLachlan is a charmingly modest man but he was wise not to hope they wanted him to play Hamlet. His technique would have matched the part, but not his looks. Off screen his over-defined, preppy elegance has helped win him the hearts of a series of Hollywood goddesses and that divinity among supermodels, Linda Evangelista. On screen, it simply sends up notions of what a matinée idol once was.

"Yup, there's no escaping that I've had the benefit of doing some interesting things, with the likes of David Lynch and Oliver Stone, and I haven't had to battle through the more boring and mundane stuff."

Lynch, that unreliable genius, first cast the 23-year-old Kyle in 1983 for his dark, muddled sci-fi epic Dune. He played Paul, Lynch's skewed version of a space prince, a callow youth who would grow into a seasoned rebel leader on a far distant planet. It was a $40 million flop and none of the four sequels Kyle signed for was made, but Lynch cast him in his next movie, Blue Velvet. It was, many would say, the best film of the decade. As a fable for the painful transition from innocence to experience, Jeffrey Beaumont's story was a hundred-fold more compelling than Paul's. There may be no more disturbing scene in the history of cinema voyeurism, than that in which Kyle as the wholesome college boy watches Dennis Hopper's sadistic nutcase beat up the naked Isabella Rossellini and then rape her as he presses an inhaler mask to his face.

"That little touch of the gas mask makes it," says Kyle. "It's - Oh my God! - a threat Jeffrey does not recognise. But it was a kind of accident. If you really want to know, the deep story is that the gas was supposed to have been helium to make Dennis's character speak in a kind of squeaky, disturbing voice. Unfortunately, when they tried it in the mix, it was just funny. Everyone laughed. So they decided to go with Dennis's regular voice which made the gas an unknown quantity which, you know, upped the danger even further."

Before accepting the part, Kyle asked his parents' permission. By then, he was in his mid-twenties, which suggests to me either that Kyle, whatever he says, was half-freaked by the script himself or had got used to deferring to over-protective parents. Brought up in Washington State not far from the fictional Twin Peaks township, he was the oldest of three sons of a stockbroker and his wife, a schools' PR. They were both strict parents. It was an outdoors childhood, the only discernible threats being getting run over or falling in the irrigation canal. In due course Kyle went to university in Seattle, where he enrolled in a professional actors training programme.

What I want to know is whether anything untoward lay beneath this picket-fence childhood, if - to return to Blue Velvet - he ever metaphorically tripped over a decapitated human ear on the lawn or, in Twin Peaks terms, if Agent Cooper ever found something nasty in his cherry pie. One remark of his leapt at me from the cuttings. His parents' marriage, he once said, "lacked passion". Could this absence be what later drew him into making so many transgressive, sexually charged films?

"It's a good question. I like to think of my growing up as fairly - well, average isn't really the word - but as a sort of classic American upbringing. I don't know if my parents were lacking in passion so much. They enjoyed each other's company. But I don't think that they were in love."

I say that sounds an unpleasant awareness for a child to have. "It wasn't as dramatic as it might appear because they were really lovely together. I think, more specifically, my father really loved my mother. I think my father's a very simple man and had very simple wants and needs. He was a stockbroker. He liked to play golf. He liked to work in his garden. Very traditional, straightforward. My mother needed a little more variety and I think she ultimately decided she needed something new and she left him for a younger man."

Kyle was 18. He and his brothers agreed she had the right to find happiness. Sadly, she died only eight years later. His father remarried, was widowed and married again. "My father," he says, "is as strong as a horse. He smokes. He drinks. And he's 66 or 67."

His eldest son's vice is falling in love with his leading ladies. During Blue Velvet, he embarked on an affair with Laura Dern and they lived together for four years. On Twin Peaks, a huge but short-lived TV cult 10 years ago, he met Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna. They dated for two years, "a brief time in the scheme of things". (Of the rumours rumbling when we talk that she is now involved with Harrison Ford he says: "I was older than she was when we went out so I guess, if it's true, she's continued a pattern - except that it's gotten worse, poor thing.")

But he really doesn't make a habit of having affairs on location, he says. "On set you get to know someone very quickly. On the whole, the magical allure, the mystery, is gone in the first 10 minutes."

In June 1992, however, the allure of Linda Evangelista, with whom he was appearing in a fashion shoot for Barneys of New York, did not wear off. Within a few months she had left her husband, Gerald Marie, the head of the Elite agency in Paris, and she and Kyle were an item. The interviews they separately gave over the following six years were, again, suggestive, Kyle talking about their "engagement" and having children, Linda complimentary but non-committal. When I inter-viewed her in 1997 she told me she had "a beautiful, beautiful private home", but prophetically added: "You have f***-ups everywhere." The following summer, she was pictured splashing about in St Tropez with a French soccer star, Fabien Barthez.

A joint statement announced Kyle and Linda had slowly grown apart, although from what he tells me, that was clearly a euphemism for a more violent wrench. "Good things come from dramatic changes and upheavals. Sometimes I think that the larger the explosion, the longer it's been waiting to happen and the greater the need for the change. I think it was something that needed to come and just hadn't yet. So I think it was a necessary thing, a necessary change."

MacLachlan took a while to recover. He was out of action anyway, having ruptured his back. In traction for three months, he was in his LA chiropractor's surgery when a fellow patient, a rising star among New York PRs, 33-year-old Desiree Gruber, walked in. "I was a captive audience so to speak. I couldn't move. We got speaking and then, quite by accident, ran into each other a while later and hit it off right away." They have been together for 18 months.

Was he still depressed from breaking up from the world's most beautiful woman when they met? "I was actually quite fine by then. I'd gone through the beating-myself-up period, doing all the things that you do when something like that happens, looking back at the mistakes."

Is Desiree a beauty in the super-model mould? "I think she's a beauty. I think she's lovely. She's tall. She's like 5ft 10in and dark and just, I think, lovely, and very much her own person. She's 33, very confident and comfortable in her own skin, in any situation, any environment. She had the benefit of a terrific upbringing. Her father was part of the Special Forces so, of course, there's a certain military atmosphere, shall we say, around the house."

This he identifies with, given the strictness of his own upbringing? "Very similar backgrounds, in fact. That's very true." They'll probably try for children within the next couple of years. "God knows, none of us are getting any younger."

Rolling Stone magazine once wrote that MacLachlan's "greatest skill may be in choosing projects" but the words must have been written a long time back. From Oliver Stone's The Doors to Harold Pinter's adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, his movies have rarely been as good as his performances. In recent years, he has settled increasingly for television, including a recurring role in Sex and the City. An inexcusable film nadir, however, was Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls in 1995, a beyond-tacky story of a Vegas stripper that nearly killed Elizabeth Berkley's career and got Kyle nominated for a Golden Gooseberry Award. I say I have to ask him the Jay Leno question.

"You mean the one he asked Hugh Grant? 'What was I thinking of?'" He invites me to believe or not what he says about his respect for Verhoeven and for what on paper read like a "deep, dark, disturbing" portrait of Las Vegas. "The character that I was to play was not unlike Claudius in a strange way: on the surface a very media-savvy stroker-smoother-manipulator, but deep down with only one thing on mind, the success of the show. I thought, 'This is great. I like to play a wolf in sheep's clothing.' So we went into it with all good intentions and É"

He tunes into himself. Laughs. "And we got shot out of the water. It was just high camp without any irony."

Machlachlan knows Hamlet is about many, many things. "But for me, from Claudius's perspective, it is about the idea that you've done something and your fate hangs upon this moment of decision. In his case, it occurs before the play starts when he kills Hamlet's father. Everything is then unavoidable. But what makes Claudius compelling to me is his argument near the end where he sort of says, 'Guys, if I had it to do it again, if I could give back my queen and my crown, would I?' And he replies: 'Well, no, because those are the very things I want.'"

In 1984 when the boy scout trashed his suburban childhood by signing up for his strange apprenticeship with David Lynch, he sealed his own fate. His career sag in the unironic, conservative Nineties traced the same slouch as Lynch's. By the end of the decade, as the seasoning in his hair declared, he could no longer play the prince for Lynch or anyone else. As he says: "They don't like old in Hollywood." The week after our interview he travels to the Isle of Man to shoot a small film. Thus we make our choices and thus we live them out. But, what an interesting actor his have made of Kyle MacLachlan. And, incidentally, what a colourful guy to meet.

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Hollywood, Hamlet and me

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