Kyle Merritt MacLachlan (/mlkln/; born February 22, 1959) is an American celebrity. MacLachlan is a Golden Globe Award winning and two time Emmy Award-nominated performer. In the 1993 movie version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, MacLachlan played the lead part of the persecuted Josef K. He also had a recurring part in the American television series Sex and the City, impersonating Dr. Trey MacDougal, the onetime husband of Charlotte York (Kristin Davis). He impersonated the spirit of Cary Grant in Touch of Pink. His likeness to Grant was previously noticed in a episode of Twin Peaks. The film was heavily panned by critics and it rolled up seven Golden Raspberry Awards (from a record 13 nominations). MacLachlan himself was greatly embarrassed along with his engagement; although some amusement writers alleged that he walked from the movie ‘s premier, he personally contradicted these claims using the remark that he “endured through the entire two hours” of the premier. Recently, MacLachlan continues to play black or morally ambiguous characters. This comprised a guest character on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, in which he played a dad who shot and killed a sociopathic kid who’d murdered his son. MacLachlan after had another guest role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2011 as an alternative character. This time he impersonated the father of a son who’s killed by his illegitimate half brother. After starring in the short lived In Justice, MacLachlan is now a routine on Desperate Housewives. His character, the mystical dentist Orson Hodge, first appeared throughout the show’s second season, and MacLachlan became a full time cast member from the beginning of season three. On July 7, 2007, MacLachlan was among the presenters in the London leg of Live Earth. MacLachlan appeared in the 2008 film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. In the 2008 English language DVD rerelease of the cult 2006 Norwegian animated movie Free Jimmy, MacLachlan voiced the character of “Marius”, a militant animal rights activist.
(On Dune (1984)) First film, first big break. It was a book that I loved when I was 15, when I read it for the very first time in '74 or '75, whenever I first came to it. It was kind of a fairytale that it ended up being me, because I was nowhere near Los Angeles when it happened. I was in Seattle, working in the theater, and I'd been out of school for less than a year. Looking back, it was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience: seven months on a film in Mexico City in a giant, super-sized scale movie. It was the beginning of my working relationship and friendship with David Lynch. It was the highest highs and the lowest lows when the film came out and was sort of panned and critics really hated it; it meant that I really had to sort of start again. Which I did with David and Blue Velvet (1986). Granted, I had the exposure and I'd been in a big film, so that was sort of helpful, but ultimately it was a very difficult two years before Blue Velvet (1986) began filming. But it remains some of my fondest ever memories of working. I have a lot of photographs and writings and memories of that period of time, but 1983... that was a long time ago. [Laughs.]
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(On Showgirls (1995) "That was a decision that was sort of a tough one to make, but I was enchanted with Paul Verhoeven. Particularly RoboCop (1987), which I loved. I look back on it now and it's a little dated, but it's still fantastic, and I think it's got some of the great villains of all time in there. It was Verhoeven and [Joe] Eszterhas, and it seemed like it was going to be kind of dark and edgy and disturbing and real."
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(On seeing Showgirls (1995) for the first time) It was about to première, I hadn't seen it yet, and I wanted to. So I went to see it and... I was absolutely gobsmacked. I said, "This is horrible. Horrible!" And it's a very slow, sinking feeling when you're watching the movie, and the first scene comes out, and you're like, "Oh, that's a really bad scene." But you say, "Well, that's okay, the next one'll be better." And you somehow try to convince yourself that it's going to get better... and it just gets worse. And I was like, "Wow. That was crazy." I mean, I really didn't see that coming. So at that point, I distanced myself from the movie. Now, of course, it has a whole other life as a sort of inadvertent... satire. No, "satire" isn't the right word. But it's inadvertently funny. So it's found its place. It provides entertainment, though not in the way I think it was originally intended. It was just... maybe the wrong material with the wrong director and the wrong cast. Apart from all that, it was great. [Laughs.] It has a couple of moments in it that are pretty wild. And I gotta say that, when I was watching the actual shows that they created, I was like, "Hey, this is a Vegas show!" I was watching it from the audience, and it was amazing, what they were able to create. But reduced down to its elements, it was, uh, not one of my finer attempts. But it was done initially for all the right reasons; it just didn't turn [out] to be what I anticipated. Everybody has one of those in their repertoire, I think. It's just that this one has stayed around. Even Ishtar (1987) eventually disappeared. But this one keeps coming back! [Laughs.]
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[Further speculating on why Dune (1984) failed]: It had kind of a throwback quality, at a time when we were just getting used to science fiction. We were just seeing shiny "Star Wars" stuff. I appreciated "Alien" because it felt like that ship had been in space God knows how long. It was kind of beaten up and dirty. This was something that was even different than that. This was like made from the '30s, kind of. It was just at the wrong time. Add to the fact that it was very difficult to follow, it was a bit stilted, it was just not what people wanted at that time. Now you go back and revisit it and you're sort of stunned at the beauty of some of the scenes. It doesn't pull together but, to me, it's like a Blade Runner (1982). I like to go and watch "Blade Runner", which made no sense but which I loved going into that world. I think people loved going into the world of "Dune" with all of its problems.
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[on whether or not the failure of Dune (1984) was deserved]: I think yes and no. We made it in '83 and it came out in '84 [with] 'Dino De Laurentis', who had a habit of over-hyping all of his pictures and saying it was the biggest budget ever seen - an over-the-top kind of salesmanship. It was a book that was incredibly popular but was impossible to translate. David did an okay job. Now you'd do a "Lord of the Rings" thing - you'd break it into three and you'd hope that it would recoup. But that would be the book, would be three movies. I think it was ill-fated from the get-go. There was no way you were going to make sense of this. There were just too many things going on. Add to the fact that special effects were sort of in an infancy. I know we'd had Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), that was '77 and this was '83, [but] blue screen was still pretty rudimentary. You couldn't use the computer on any of this stuff and that would have been a tremendous help.
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There's not very many filmmakers like David [David Lynch], particularly in America. He's so brave and courageous. He creates from a place that is unknown. He's not following any blueprints. He's following an unconscious urge and that's hard to do nowadays when people want to know how much you're going to make on this film on the first day of filming. They want to know what they can recoup by day 90, or day 120, or day 180, or whatever. And David just doesn't work that way and that just doesn't exist anymore.
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After the series finished, I was reluctant to return for the film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). I was pretty naive about it. At the time, I felt like I was trapped in this stale role, but looking back, Dale Cooper was one of the best things that happened to me. I went on to make some film choices that were rather strange - made with the best intentions, but not necessarily coming out the way I wanted them to. I certainly can't pretend that I didn't do Showgirls (1995). But I've been around for a while now, I'm of a certain age and I'm still doing what I love to do. There's some good work in there and there's some work that's questionable.
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Fact
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When his son, Callum, was born in 2008, he created a new wine vintage at his winery called "Baby Bear".
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In one of his roles, as the fictional Mayor of Portland, Oregon, on the Independent Film Channel series Portlandia (2011), he co-stars with Sarah McLachlan, who spells her last name the same as his father, Kent McLachlan, but is no relation.
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Living with his wife Desiree, and son Callum, in Manhattan, New York City, NY and Columbia Valley, Washington State. [2013]
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He maintains a website for his family's two dogs (a Jack Russell terrier and a Yorkie/Chihuahua mixed breed), mookieandsam.com, who also have their own YouTube series.
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Owns a vineyard and winery in the Columbia Valley of Washington State with business partner Eric Dunham. Other than his well known love of wine, his main reason for purchasing a vineyard was to spend more time with his father, Kent McLachlan, who had recently retired from being an attorney and stock broker.
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The name of his winery, "Pursued by Bear," was suggested one evening over dinner by Fred Savage, referring to a stage direction in a Shakespeare play. As the story goes, Shakespeare only ever wrote one stage direction in any of his plays (that job was generally left for stage managers), as included in "The Winter's Tale": "Exit, pursued by bear".
Kyle and his wife, Desiree Gruber, became the parents of their first child, a son named Callum Lyon MacLachlan, on July 25, 2008. Callum weighed in at 8 lbs. 6 oz.
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Graduated 1977 from Eisenhower High School in Yakima, Washington.
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Director Bruce Beresford said about him: "Kyle wears his handsomeness easily; he doesn't carry on. And he's not a boring man. He's ordinary but interesting, which is difficult to find."
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Married Desiree Gruber at Plymouth Congregational Church in Miami, Florida (her hometown).
Kyle has Scottish, English, Cornish, and German ancestry. He has, perhaps jokingly, stated that he could be a direct descendant of composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), through Kyle's maternal great-grandmother, Henrietta Bach. However, Henrietta was descended, through her own patrilineal line, from a man named Johann Christoph Bach, born in Germany in the late 1600s. Thus, Kyle is not a direct descendant of Johann Sebastian Bach (at least through that line).
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Has two younger brothers.
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Graduated University of Washington with a bachelors degree in Fine Arts (1982).
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