Interview with Russ Tamblyn by Huw Rossiter in October 1990

Mark Frost and David Lynch’s groundbreaking television series Twin Peaks made its debut in the United Kingdom on October 23, 1990. On that day, several newspapers published an interview with Russ Tamblyn by reporter Huw Rossiter. This syndicated article was edited for space in several newspapers at the time but I was able to piece together a full transcript. These early interviews offer interesting tidbits about created the wonderful and strange show we love today.

WHO IS HUW ROSSITER?

Huw Rossiter began his career as a print journalist. He spent 19 years at the BBC; latterly as Head of Press & Publicity at BBC Wales, having spent the first 10 years of his BBC career as a Publicity Officer in London. Huw joined S4C in October 2006 as its first Director of Communications. He was previously Head of Broadcasting Communications at Ofcom.  Between 2001 and 2003 he was Head of Public Affairs at the Independent Television Commission (ITC). By early 2011, ITV Wales appointed Rossiter as its public affairs manager and was responsible for communicating ITV policy to the political and public arenas in Wales. He also once ran his own public relations consultancy, Rossiter Communications, but it appears he is no longer involved with that business. More recently, Huw leads the Wales Committee for the Journalists’ Charity.

HUW ROSSITER’S INTERVIEW WITH RUSS TAMBLYN IN OCTOBER 1990

Between October 20-23, 1990, Huw Rossiter’s interview with Russ Tamblyn ran in several local newspapers throughout the United Kingdom. Each interview was accompanied with different publicity photos and the articles were edited for space. Some stories ran longer than others or included additional quotes.

West Side Story was never like this.

Those were veteran actor Russ Tamblyn’s thoughts while filming a scene for Twin Peaks, the cult American “soap noir” which makes its eagerly-awaited debut on BBC2 (tomorrow, 9pm).

The 56-year-old Californian, who starred In the 1961 hit musical West Side Story, was musing on the suggestion from Twin Peaks director David Lynch that he should “think about ghosts” while delivering his lines.

“It was such a wild piece of direction because the scene had nothing whatsoever to do with ghosts, ” recalls Tamblyn, in London to launch the series that has been the talk of America this summer. It put the scene in a strange new context which is exactly the effect David wanted to create.”

Tamblyn, who plays the crazed “psychedelic shrink” Dr Lawrence Jacoby In Twin Peaks, was to grow accustomed to his director’s unusual approach. Lynch, the man behind such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart, wanted Twin Peaks “to be totally different from any other TV drama”

And different it certainly is. It has been described as “Peyton Place meets Salvador Dali”, a surreal soap opera packed with riddles.

Why, for example, is there a fish in the coffee pot? Who is the lady carrying the log? What is the meaning of the dwarf who talks backwards? And, most intriguing of all, who killed Laura Palmer?

David Lynch and his partner Mark Frost, a Hill Street Blues scriptwriter, have created the mist-shrouded sawmill town of Twin Peaks, where the locals are buzzing following the murder of high school prom queen Laura Palmer.

It is a drama populated with the strangest set of characters ever to feature in a TV series. What’s more, they are all murder suspects in a saga filled with cryptic dialogue and filmed in cinema-style detall amid lush scenery near the Canadian border.

Picking Russ Tamblyn – “buoyant American dancer and tumbler”, according to one film guide – for Twin Peaks was an inspired piece of casting. For what could be more surreal than this former Tom Thumb star playing the crazed psychiatrist Dr Lawrence Jacoby, a man who gets a sexual thrill from listening to his patents’ problems?

The role has provided Tamblyn with “the biggest challenge of my career.” He is first glimpsed in the 90-minute Twin Peaks opener telling a couple of nurses about the “talking fish” he had encountered on a fishing trip.

“Is that bizarre or what!” Tamblyn, the wide-eyed boyish face that made him a natural for such MGM musicals as Seven Brides For Seven Brothers still lurking behind his grizzled grey beard. “That wasn’t in the script. But David Lynch suggested I use the line because it happened to him. He remembered catching a fish and how its mouth was opening and closing as if it was talking. It’s such a wonderful image.”

Tamblyn immediately went to work on making Jacoby as “bizarre and eccentric as possible.”

“Jacoby is the kind of psychiatrist who you suspect of having sex with his patients. There’s a heck of a lot of dramatic potential with a situation like that. It’s not only a great expose of what can happen in a psychiatrist-patient relationship, but it’s also visually wonderful in scenes where the guy is asking women intimate questions and getting turned on by the answers.

“The more I thought about it, I realised that a woman is more vulnerable with a psychiatrist than she would ever be with almost any other professional. That’s the deliberate sense of unease that David Lynch wanted to create.”

Lynch’s films – eerie, erotic, disquieting – would suggest a man possessed of a correspondingly dark psyche. On the contrary, says Tamblyn.

He’s like a little country boy, always saying things like: ‘Oh, golly gee!’.

“I haven’t found anything weird about him. He comes across as a neally well-adjusted guy, almost like an eagle scout.

“Sure his films are dark and brooding – that’s what makes them great. He’s interested in turning life around on its head, making people realise that things are rarely as they seem. On one level Twin Peaks is a murder mystery, on another level it’s about secrets and moral corruption.”

Tamblyn is convinced that Twin Peaks fever, having already raged in America, will soon sweep Britain.

“When we made the pilot episode I remember thinking: “The British are going to love this’. I still predict that, because Twin Peaks has qualities that are so British.

“There is a great vein of humour running through it. It’s bizarre but also believable and David Lynch and Mark Frost have this wonderful ability to capture that strangeness that most of us see in real life.

“You think the log lady is weird? I met a guy in Kentucky who told me about colleague of his who talks to a box of nails. Life is full of bizarre things like that.”

As to the question Who Killed Laura Palmer? Tamblyn says he is as much in the dark as anybody else.

“None of the cast knows who did it, not even the murderer,” he grins. “It might be me, then again it might not. There are over 20 suspects. The only people who do know are Mark Frost, David Lynch and Lynch’s daughter Jennifer who has written a book called Laura Palmer’s Diary.

Tamblyn is honest enough to admit that the series has rekindled his career.

“I had resigned myself to the fact that would Russ Tamblyn from West Side Story for the rest of my life,” he says.

“I never thought my career would forgive the pun peak again. So it really has been twin peaks for me.”