List of Twin Peaks characters

The following is a list of characters from the television series Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

Frank Silva was a set decorator who worked on the pilot episode. One day, when he was moving furniture in Laura Palmer's bedroom, a woman warned Silva not to get locked in the room. The image of Silva trapped in the room sparked something in Lynch, who then asked Silva if he was an actor. Silva said yes, and Lynch told him that he had a role in mind for him on the series. Silva accepted, and Lynch shot footage of him behind Laura's bed with no real idea of what he would do with it.

Silva's reflection was accidentally caught in the footage of Sarah Palmer's frightening vision at the end of the pilot. Sarah sees a hand uncovering Laura's heart necklace from the ground, and Silva can be seen in the mirror behind her head. Lynch was made aware of this accident and decided to keep Silva in the scene.

To save on money, Lynch intended to cast a local girl from Seattle "just to play a dead girl". The local girl ended up being Sheryl Lee. "But no one — not Mark, me, anyone — had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead." Indeed, the image of Lee wrapped in plastic became one of the show's most enduring and memorable images. When Lynch shot the home movie that James takes of Donna and Laura, he realized that Lee had something special. "She did do another scene — the video with Donna on the picnic — and it was that scene that did it." As a result, Sheryl Lee became a semi-regular addition to the cast, appearing in flashbacks as Laura, and becoming a recurring character—Maddy, Laura's cousin who also becomes another victim of BOB.

MIKE made his appearance in the pilot episode which was only originally intended to be a "kind of homage to The Fugitive. The only thing he was gonna do was be in this elevator and walk out." However, when Lynch wrote the "fire walk with me" speech, he imagined MIKE saying it in the basement of the Twin Peaks hospital – a scene that would appear in an alternative version of the pilot episode, and surface later in Agent Cooper's dream sequence. MIKE's full name, Phillip Michael Gerard, is also a reference to Lieutenant Phillip Gerard, a character in The Fugitive.

Lynch met Michael J. Anderson in 1987. After seeing him in a short film, Lynch wanted to cast the actor in the title role in Ronnie Rocket, but the project ultimately fell through. While editing the alternate ending of the foreign version of the pilot episode, an idea occurred to Lynch on his way home one day: "I was leaning against a car — the front of me was leaning against this very warm car. My hands were on the roof and the metal was very hot. The Red Room scene leapt into my mind. 'Little Mike' was there, and he was speaking backwards... For the rest of the night I thought only about The Red Room."

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