But we’re never given a chance to hear Laura tell her own story. We learn about her life strictly through the perspective of others. In the original series, Laura is an absent protagonist. A pain that reverberates throughout the prequel film, Fire Walk With Me. She’s happy in the moment, regardless of the pain she’s living with. We know Laura led a secret life, but what Lee shows us here is a carefree young woman. Lee beautifully expresses Laura’s enchanting vitality without any performativity. On the tape, we watch Laura laugh and dance with Donna as James trains his camera on her effervescent smile. What Lynch saw in that scene was Lee’s ability to exist in the present moment with unquestionable ease. I said, ‘Man!’, you know, ‘She has got a presence and a natural ability.’ She wanted to be an actress and she was in Seattle to act. “She did do another scene – the video with Donna on the picnic –and it was that scene that did it. This is where Lee’s life would change forever. It was the picnic flashback between Laura, Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle), and James (James Marshall). What cemented to Lynch and Frost her keen ability to be powerfully authentic was her one actual scene. At this stage, Laura Palmer was still just a dead body, but as Lynch recalls in the book Lynch on Lynch, “No one–not Mark, me, anyone–had any idea that she could really act, and that she was going to be so powerful just being dead.” Lynch instantly gravitated to her headshot. She eventually landed in Seattle, where Lynch and Frost were casting the pilot for Twin Peaks. She studied with the famed American Academy for Dramatic Arts before bouncing between different acting conservatories across the country. Sheryl Lee began her career in the theater. But through her harrowing work, she cut through Laura Palmer’s contradictions, giving life to a character that was always so much more than a dead girl wrapped in plastic. Initially, Laura Palmer was only meant to be a MacGuffin, driving the series’ mystery in disparate directions.
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Her unenviable challenge was figuring out how to play a character conceived as a plot device. Sheryl Lee brought that story to the forefront in her devastating performance as Laura Palmer. Twin Peaks is a tragic story of emotional trauma fueled by abuse and addiction. And because I was able to see the foggy Pacific Northwest world through the clarity of my own mind for the first time since I was a child, the true horror of the show emerged.
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I was in the hospital briefly, and on the day of my release, a new episode of a series I literally grew up on was waiting for me.
I’ve written at length about my sobriety, but my recovery story literally began the day The Return premiered. When Twin Peaks: The Return premiered in 2017, I brought to it something that made this visit even more personal: my recent sobriety. The impact was immediate, and it stayed with me. I’d never seen anything quite like its patented brand of binge-worthy whodunnit weirdness.
After stumbling across my parents taped copy of the season two finale as a child, they properly introduced me to the series when I turned twelve. What I brought to my first visit to Twin Peaks was a blank slate. Because, like every great work of art, the meaning of Twin Peaks comes out of what we bring to it. But despite containing themes we can connect with together as a fandom, I find the show to be a very personal viewing experience. Since the 1990s, fans have been unpacking what the show means underneath its mix of soap opera melodrama and heady philosophical musings. When asked her thoughts on the many mysteries of the enigmatic franchise Twin Peaks, Sheryl Lee, the actress who played Laura Palmer, told Fangoria, “The reason I don’t like to talk about it isn’t because I feel so private about it, it’s that I appreciate that it means what it means to everyone else…I want them to have freedom to have their own feelings and ideas about it.”ĭavid Lynch and Mark Frost’s twisty drama is a show practically made to be debated. In this entry, we examine Sheryl Lee’s performance as Laura Palmer across the Twin Peaks series. Welcome to The Great Performances, a recurring column exploring the art behind some of cinema’s best roles. Acting is an art form, and behind every iconic character is an artist expressing themselves.
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