Kyle reaches new peaks

When I was younger, about 22 years old, I had an appalling crush on Kyle MacLachlan. It first started when I saw him in Dune. He played a youthful God of the Universe who had to master riding huge worms in order to defeat evil. It was a mad film and it bombed, but I loved it. Then he was the youthful all-American suburban kid who found the severed ear in Blue Velvet. It was also mad, an art-house success, and I loved it too.

Then I saw him in Twin Peaks. He played FBI agent Dale Cooper, who had to solve the murder of Laura Palmer via a few backwards speaking dwarves and a lady carrying logs. This was the maddest of the lot. I really loved it but mostly, I think, because I loved MacLachlan.

With his dark-haired, quirky-yet-handsome looks, I thought he was something special. I also thought he was bound to become stratospherically famous.

Just as Hollywood stardom was beckoning in the early Nineties, though, MacLachlan disappeared. One minute he was the king of the indie film scene, the next he was nowhere. Then he resurfaced on the pages of fashion magazines, posing with his then-girlfriend, model Linda Evangelista.

He seemed to have become subsumed by Evangelista and her life of endless designer shows and highprofile parties. The last time I saw him was on the pages of a glossy magazine with Evangelista dressed up in a naughty outfit holding a cane and MacLachlan bent over waiting to be spanked. It was all very odd.

Now MacLachlan - probably best known currently for his role as Charlotte's impotent former husband in Sex and the City - is sitting in front of me drinking coffee and eating toast. He is still, at the age of 43, very attractive. His jet-black hair is now peppered with grey. In fact, it has actually got dyed black streaks in it, which is slightly strange but also forgivable. "Hollywood is not good when it comes to age," he says.

He's terribly fit and tanned and dressed simply. He is, however, rather self-contained. This may be because I try to hug him when I meet him. Later on, once the ice is broken, I tell him it is because he feels so familiar. After all, I've seen every film he's been in. Even the dreadful Showgirls. Even The Flintstones.

He is incredulous. "You've seriously seen all my films?" he says, looking amazed.

"Yup," I say. "And the whole 32 hours of Twin Peaks?" he says.

"Back to back," I say. "Jeez," he says. Then he starts talking hurriedly about his new wife, Desiree Gruber, who is in PR and management.

But, back at the beginning, after I try the almost-hug, he barely looks at me for the first half hour. He only starts warming up when we get on to his obsessions. "I get very caught up with things," he says. "I used to be dominated by domestic things. I had a lovely house in LA - I still do, but it's rented now - and it became this growing, mad obsession.

"I'd spend all day thinking of ways to change it. It was 'Hey, let's completely redecorate all the bedrooms'." He says he thinks his preoccupation with domestic improvements came from a sense that, contrary to this outward appearance of order and symmetry in his home and garden, he was actually living in limbo.

"The film world is a crazy place to be," he says. "You sit around all day waiting for the phone to ring. Are people talking about you or aren't they? I had no control over my film career so I became very controlling over my house. It was asphyxiating. The house began to spiral as out of control as my career."

Why, then, considering his concerns over his future, did he disappear for six years on an extended holiday with Evangelista? He was doing very well for himself. Why jeopardise that?

The story goes that they met at a photo shoot to promote Barneys department store in New York, and within weeks she had left her husband, Gerald Marie, the head of Elite model agency in France. "It did happen quickly," says MacLachlan. "But we didn't get together on the first night. We got together on the second."

Essentially his relationship with Evangelista seems to have been about breaking free from certain shackles that dogged him from childhood. He says he was the nerd of his class in the small school of the small town of Yakima in Washington State. He and his two younger brothers had short hair when everyone else wore theirs long. They were good at golf and music, not football and baseball.

"I think we stuck out," says MacLachlan, "and I found it difficult. I already felt disengaged with my contemporaries and I wanted to hide that, not accentuate it." His parents were pretty traditional. His father was a lawyer-turned-stockbroker.

"Discussions in my family consisted of 'You're wrong - now go up to bed without your tea and stop complaining, they weren't draconian, they just couldn't seem to grasp that we wanted to blend in."

Encouraged by his am-dram mother, MacLachlan turned to acting. "I loved it," he says, "and people seemed to suddenly like me because I was the lead in the play." It didn't make him feel more comfortable in his skin, though. That only happened when, having graduated in drama from the University of Seattle, he was auditioned by David Lynch.

"I met him and it clicked," he says. "David saw my darker underbelly and he used that. He got me and I got him. It was very special." MacLachlan and Lynch ended up parting ways after Twin Peaks. "I was angry with him at the time," says MacLachlan, "because he breezed in, directed two shows and then just left us on our own. I felt let down."

When Evangelista came along, MacLachlan suddenly got the chance to do something he'd never really done before. He had fun. He'd had a reputation for going out with highprofile girlfriends - Lara Flynn Boyle and Laura Dern - but Linda was different.

"God, we had a ball," he says. "It was like a party. I got to submerge myself in the world of fashion. I became a bit of a clothes horse, actually. Linda opened up the world to me."

It was the ultimate rebellion - the small, strange boy turned talented actor having fun in one of the most meaningless ways possible.

"It wasn't meaningless," he says. "I had never travelled before. When we were kids my father would be, like, 'What's the point? We're happy here and we may not be happy there. Let's just stay at home'. He can't cope with not being in control." We're back on control again. There are, of course, some things you can't control.

His mother left his father because she also wanted to have fun. "She went off with a man 10 years her junior and had a great time for nine years." She died, aged 53, of ovarian cancer. "Devastating," says MacLachlan, simply.

In turn, after six years, he and Evangelista split up. "We just drifted away from each other," he says. "I didn't really want to get married as I couldn't see the point and the relationship wasn't really going anywhere." There were also pictures of her canoodling with Manchester United goalkeeper Fabien Barthez, so that was that.

MacLachlan then decided to rethink his career, which meant that he came over to do a stint on the London stage in On An Average Day with Woody Harrelson. "The difference with doing a play is that you are in control of that role. In film you give your performance to the best of your ability, and then you are in the hands of the director and the editor and the producer and there's not much you can do about it.

"For the time it takes to make the film you are treated like a cosseted pet - anything you want is yours. Then the process is over and you're hung out to dry. It's like being a mink. But I can either chafe at it or give in and enjoy it. I chose to enjoy it, I think."

He is also enjoying being in love. A year after splitting up with Evangelista he met his future wife, Desiree. "We were both waiting to see an osteopath and we started talking. Two nights later I bumped into her at a party and we exchanged numbers, and that was that." He seems very happy. They do lovely things like sail along the Amalfi coast and hang out in the South of France. They are even thinking of moving to Rome for a year. Not permanently, though.

"We'd miss New York too much," he says. He moved there because he was filming Sex and the City and Desiree was based there. "Renting out the house in LA was so freeing. Mind you," he says, "I've got obsessed with the gym. I go every day. I can't stop thinking about working out. God, that's worrying."

At the end of our breakfast I tell him I hope we're all going to see more of him. "The telephone's ringing, I think," he says. When I finally stop saying things like "But you made a fantastic Claudius", he rises to leave. As he goes he turns around to say goodbye. He looks as if he's about to hug me. But he squeezes my shoulder instead.

It was almost a hug. I'm sure of it.