Laura Dern writes heartfelt letter to 'dearest friend' David Lynch: 'You have forever transformed all of art'

Laura Dern misses her "dearest friend." The beloved actress and scion of Hollywood royalty won her Oscar for her performance in Noah Baumbach's 2019 film Marriage Story, but to hear her tell it, the most important moments in her career all came from her many collaborations with David Lynch.

Lynch died last week, just a few days before what would've been his 79th birthday, and Dern marked that occasion with a short and sweet Instagram post referencing their shared nickname for each other, "Tidbit." But now, Dern has penned a heartfelt letter to her departed mentor in the Los Angeles Times. She reflects on the sadness of this iconic L.A. filmmaker dying at such a moment of profound crisis for his adopted home in the wake of the recent wildfires, and all the various things she learned from working with him over the years.

"It somehow doesn’t shock me that gratitude and despair are so closely aligned at this moment for our city and our loss of you — a genius who gave us not only some of our most iconic imagery and impacted our dreams but also forever wove Los Angeles into them," Dern wrote.

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As the child of Hollywood icons Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Dern started acting at a young age, but her breakthrough performance came in Lynch's Blue Velvet. The 1986 cult classic transformed the careers of everyone involved, from Lynch himself (who rebounded from the disaster of his failed Dune adaptation) and Dennis Hopper (whose performance as the deranged, nitrite-inhaling Frank Booth revived his career as a go-to Hollywood villain), to the young Dern and Kyle MacLachlan. Dern played Sandy, the classic girl-next-door who falls for MacLachlan's boy detective Jeffrey Beaumont even as he gets embroiled in the dark and disturbing conspiracy revolving around lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini).

"On Blue Velvet, you took me and Kyle MacLachlan under your wing and treated us as essential collaborators," Dern wrote. "Your deep inclusion of us as partners and peers profoundly shaped us both. You believed in the ritual of art and the grace that deserves to be given to it. My first memory of this was a warm wind floating over us on a Wilmington, N.C., summer night where you played Shostakovich while we filmed so we could understand the feeling of mystery you longed for. You and Kyle introduced me to the chicken walk."

Related: The secret history of the Blue Velvet ears

MacLachlan just penned his own Lynch tribute for the New York Times, reflecting on his long collaboration with the director that often overlapped with Dern's.

"I’ve long marveled at the trust David had in me: From my first screen test in 1983, when I froze delivering a line directly to camera. To hiring me as the lead on his very next film, Blue Velvet, after Dune landed with a thud," MacLachlan wrote. "To building a TV series around me — Twin Peaks — that premiered when I was 31 years old and not particularly well known. To escorting me into a secretive, windowless room in 2015 and handing me the 500-page script for Twin Peaks: The Return, in which he asked me to play three distinct roles, two of which were light-years outside my wheelhouse."

MacLachlan and Dern played lovers not just in Blue Velvet, but also decades later in Twin Peaks: The Return. The long-awaited TV revival cast Dern as Diane, the previously-unseen character to whom MacLachlan's Dale Cooper would address reports about his investigation in the town of Twin Peaks. But Diane arrives in the show with obvious bitterness about Cooper, and eventually — in one of the show's most intense scenes — reveals that years ago she had been raped by Cooper's dark doppelganger (also played by MacLachlan). In her new essay, Dern remembered shooting that sequence.

Related: Talking to David Lynch about Twin Peaks: The Return

"I remember sitting with you in that hotel bar in downtown L.A. on Twin Peaks: The Return," Dern wrote. "We were about to shoot a moment where my character, Diane, was pulled toward a room upstairs, where she would express her story in monologue and experience deep horror. What struck me with such awe, as I sat, cigarette in hand, was how much you cared about Diane’s journey — how much you loved her and were willing to stay with her."

Dern was also central to Lynch's most experimental (and perhaps least-seen) film, 2006's Inland Empire. Shot on digital video years before it became standard Hollywood practice, and composed of scattershot and sometimes improvised scenes long before internet-inflected storytelling became widespread in American pop culture, Inland Empire is a trailblazing film that features a monumental performance from Dern — to the point that Lynch famously put on his own unique "For Your Consideration" campaign to get her an Oscar nomination. When asked what the surreal film was about, Lynch would just go back to its simple subtitle: "A Woman in Trouble."

Related: David Lynch wants to get in your bloodstream

"I just never imagined when I was a teenager that I would be so blessed to spend all these years shapeshifting and growing, directed by your guidance on the life ride of art," Dern wrote. "You gave me an opportunity to explore every aspect of the female psyche, to play out archetypes and then shatter any former understanding of them. You pushed me toward fearlessness. You brought me to haunted spaces of terror, also holy ones, and you even helped me find the hilarious in tragedy. You made me believe in all that is good in our country and fear all that lies beneath."

Read Dern's full essay here.

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