One year after famed director David Lynch died on January 16, 2025, at the age of 78, frequent collaborator Kyle MacLachlan took to social media to honor the Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive mastermind.

“One year without you and still moving through the strange and beautiful universe you opened for me, my dear friend. Forever changed, forever grateful, forever your Kale ?,” MacLachlan wrote on Facebook and Instagram, accompanied by a carousel of photos of the actor alongside the director through the years, on TV and film sets including the arthouse hit Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.

MacLachlan, 66, who currently appears on Amazon’s Fallout and recently starred opposite Ethan Hawke on FX’s The Lowdown, has been entwined with Lynch for his entire professional life. He made his film debut in Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune, and continued to collaborate with him on 1986’s Blue Velvet, 1990’s Twin Peaks and the 1992 film sequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

In the years following Twin Peaks, MacLachlan pursued more mainstream stardom, including parts in Showgirls and The Flintstones, and recurring roles on Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives.

Lynch continued his run of unusual cinematic projects without MacLachlan for the rest of the ’90s and ’00s, releasing films like Lost Highway with Patricia Arquette and Mulholland Drive, which featured a career breakthrough performance for Naomi Watts.

In 2017, MacLachlan and Lynch joined forces again for Twin Peaks: The Return, a surrealistic Showtime series that picked up where the previous series, which had been cancelled after its second season in 1991, had ended.

In a 2025 social media post after Lynch’s death, MacLachlan wrote, “Forty-two years ago, for reasons beyond my comprehension, David Lynch plucked me out of obscurity to star in his first and last big budget movie. He clearly saw something in me that even I didn’t recognize. I owe my entire career, and life really, to his vision.

What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.

Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met.

David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are. They are our breath.

While the world has lost a remarkable artist, I’ve lost a dear friend who imagined a future for me and allowed me to travel in worlds I could never have conceived on my own.

I can see him now, standing up to greet me in his backyard, with a warm smile and big hug and that Great Plains honk of a voice. We’d talk coffee, the joy of the unexpected, the beauty of the world, and laugh.

His love for me and mine for him came out of the cosmic fate of two people who saw the best things about themselves in each other.

I will miss him more than the limits of my language can tell and my heart can bear. My world is that much fuller because I knew him and that much emptier now that he’s gone.

David, I remain forever changed, and forever your Kale. Thank you for everything.”

He also eulogized his collaborator and friend in a 2025 New York Times essay, writing, “I was willing to follow him anywhere because joining him on the journey of discovery, searching and finding together, was the whole point. I stepped out into the unknown because I knew David was floating out there with me.

It’s like Agent Cooper says to Sheriff Truman in “Twin Peaks”: “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.”

I will miss my dear friend. He has made my world — all of our worlds — both wonderful and strange.”