Dis­sect­ing Audrey’s Dance with Twin Peaks star Sher­i­lyn Fenn

Sher­i­lyn Fenn refers fond­ly to Audrey Horne as ​“the char­ac­ter that changed my life”. In Octo­ber 2014, Twin Peaks cre­ators David Lynch and Mark Frost announced to the world: ​“That gum you like is going to come back in style!” Fenn didn’t believe it, until she heard straight from the main man him­self. Soon after she received a call from Lynch inform­ing her that the rumours were true. ​“I was thrilled, thrilled, thrilled,” she tells LWLies.

Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived as a back­ground fig­ure of no spe­cif­ic impor­tance, the high-school Peep­ing Tom with seri­ous dad­dy issues – a kind of female equiv­a­lent to Blue Vel­vet​’s Jef­frey Beau­mont – was dras­ti­cal­ly rewrit­ten after Lynch met Fenn at an ear­ly audi­tion. She became one of the show’s most icon­ic fig­ures – a clas­sic Lynchi­an cre­ation who radi­ates both a beguil­ing inno­cence and an inner darkness.

Audrey’s most famous moment is with­out ques­tion her dance in the Dou­ble R din­er. Along with Lau­ra Palmer (Sheryl Lee), Audrey received the hon­our of her own theme. Titled ​‘Audrey’s Dance’, the woozy jazz num­ber is first heard in the din­er in a Lynch-direct­ed episode. Sat with Don­na Hay­ward (Lara Fly­nn Boyle) at the counter, Audrey becomes dis­tract­ed by the music. ​“God, I love this music … isn’t it too dreamy?” she asks rhetor­i­cal­ly, then gets up to swoon and sway.

While Audrey’s return in sea­son three proved frus­trat­ing­ly enig­mat­ic and some­thing of a dis­ap­point­ment to both Fenn and the fans, the actress has noth­ing but the high­est praise for Lynch. Audrey’s dance made a sur­prise return in part 16, with the char­ac­ter per­form­ing it once more with feel­ing at the Roadhouse.

In 1990, bumped up from a glo­ri­fied extra to a major char­ac­ter, Fenn was ​“hor­ri­fied and ter­ri­fied” to learn there was a scene which required her to dance. ​“I loved the music, but it felt so vul­ner­a­ble,” Fenn sums up Ange­lo Badalamenti’s com­po­si­tion. ​“The [danc­ing] scene was there [in the script], but it was rewrit­ten. David told the cast and crew to go get a cap­puc­ci­no and take a break [while he worked it out]. Fenn, who does a wicked Lynch imper­son­ation, says the direc­tor told her: ​“You’re going to dance at the end of it, Sher­i­lyn Fenn!” I called my act­ing coach and was freak­ing out. ​“Why? Why am I danc­ing? I’m not danc­ing!” He said, ​“Don’t wor­ry, it’s David Lynch. Just do what he says.”

Rather than go for a show-off actor­ly style, ​“Watch me! Watch me! I’m doing a dance!”, as Fenn describes it, she kept it fair­ly low-key, in 1990 and 2016. Lynch was hap­py enough with this approach, too. ​“What­ev­er I did, there’s lit­tle move­ment as pos­si­ble, I don’t think I moved very much! You do the best you can.” But she clev­er­ly used her own sense of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to craft the per­for­mance and find truth in it. ​“I think in some fun­ny way, because I was like ​‘I’m not sure, is this going to work, I feel stu­pid’, it was a truth­ful place.”

Lynch gets cre­ative on set, both stick­ing to the script and impro­vis­ing or rewrit­ing dur­ing the shoot. One thing he chose not to do was rehearse or chore­o­graph Audrey’s dance. ​“No, no, no, no. He wouldn’t want any­thing like that,” Fenn says. ​“How could he chore­og­ra­phy it? He re-wrote it [on set] and then he said: ​“We’re putting on the music, just dance!” When it was time to revis­it in sea­son three, his direc­tion was again super min­i­mal, instead giv­ing Fenn a pep talk, rather than spe­cif­ic direc­tion. ​“Sher­i­lynn Fenn, that’s your music, that’s your song, just groove, it’s gonna be great,” Lynch told her. Some­times, he’d ask her to do it like she did in 1990, but Fenn found that unhelp­ful. ​“I’m not 24, I’m frickin’ 52 and I can’t do it the same.”

The pur­ple light­ing scheme at the Road­house came as a sur­prise to Fenn, and unex­pect­ed­ly brought up some per­son­al mem­o­ries. ​“My dear friend Prince had just died and there was a pur­ple light on me and I was like, ​‘Oh my gosh!’ I had been lis­ten­ing to songs of his that mean a lot to me; his ​‘Love­sexy’ record, which is about his strug­gle with good and evil, God and Satan, and neg­a­tiv­i­ty. I’d dance to his music and let it move me.”

The Offi­cial UK Twin Peaks Fes­ti­val is on the 7 and 8 Octo­ber, 2017. More details here.