Wendy Robie is the Woman Behind the Patch

While researching Twin Peaks, I love discovering early 1990s interviews with cast and crew. This time, I found a short article about Wendy Robie written by Hester Riches and published in the Calgary Herald on Feb. 1, 1991. Robie discussed her approach to playing Nadine Hurley in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s wonderful and strange show.

WOMAN BEHIND THE PATCH, WENDY ROBIE

According to a Los Angeles Times article on Jan. 14, 1994, Wendy Robie was working at Seattle’s Bellevue Repertory theatre when she was asked to read something called “Northwest Passage.” Written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, this script evolved to the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, which was shot on location in Snoqualmie Valley and Washington state from Feb. 21 to mid-March 1989.

“I came to the audition wearing a shawl, thinking it was a Western,” she told Robert Koehler in the L.A. Times article.

Robie never expected to be in a hit television series like Twin Peaks. It was, “Just one of those things, a fluke.”

Since she was actively involved with theatre, staring in a television show or relocating to Los Angeles, California were never in her career plans.

“It never crossed my mind, quite honestly,” she told Hester Riches in 1991. “This was the last place I expected to find myself because my background was in classical theatre, and Los Angeles is not a town for theatre.”

Years of stage work gave Robie an edge in portraying Nadine Butler Hurley.

“All I knew was that she was an obsessive, that she was fiercely unhappy and that she was really strong.”

Robie went with that strength in a scene played at Nadine’s living-room window.

“David wanted me to move the drapes up and down, up and down. And so I just started doing it very mechanically and I could hear him laughing over the intercom. . . . I thought, ‘He must like this,’ so I kept doing it.”

The silent drapes became a running joke in Twin Peaks as Robie’s role expanded in the series. Who could forget Nadine yelling “Cotton Balls” at Norma Jennings during a run-in at the Twin Peaks General Store in episode 1.001?

“When I came down to L.A. to film the first season, they just gave me gold. Always small scenes, but such rich stuff. I’ve never played anyone who hurts as much as Nadine. There was just so much pain there.”

This article was published in Feb. 1991, which means most of the second season had already aired in the United States. For the second season, Nadine spent the first few weeks in a coma, then, thanks to her husband Ed’s sweet melodies, she emerged with superhuman strength and the belief she was back in high school.

“I think David was giving me a present for the pain of last year. He was saying, ‘Now this year we’re going to give you some fun.'”

Robie seems to be having a blast with the high-school hijinks and is apparently delighted to be learning on the job. But as much as she enjoys her TV experience, Robie still longs to get back on stage. She’s spending her years in L.A. auditioning for roles and lining up film work.

“This is the place to be while you get what mileage you can out of something like Twin Peaks, so that 10 years from now, 20 years from now, I can still do the kind of theatre I love.”

In the aforementioned Los Angeles Times article from 1994, she mentions her cut scene from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me appeared on laserdiscs in the Europe and Japan.

“Robie’s Nadine proved to be a durable character on the surreal soap, and even lasted into the film sequel, ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,’ though not in the U.S. print (‘You can find Nadine,’ Robie says amusedly, ‘on the European and Japanese laser disc versions, as the really hard-core fans probably already know’).”

This was not the case as her deleted scene with Ed at the Double R Diner in Lynch’s 1992 masterpiece wouldn’t be seen until decades later with the release of The Missing Pieces in 2014.

Wendy Robie would also star in Wes Craven’s 1991 film, The People Under the Stairs, with Twin Peaks co-star and on-screen husband, Everett McGill.

You can read the original article from the Calgary Herald below.