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After a long wait, Twin Peaks is back. David Lynch’s cult favorite series has returned after a quarter century away with an all-new season. The new episodes feature plenty of new characters and plenty of faces from the show’s original two-season run. There’s one major player from Twin Peaks that fans won’t see in the new season—and boy, does he have his reasons.
Michael J. Anderson played the Man from Another Place in four episodes of Twin Peaks’ original 1990-1991 run, and his character has taken on a life of his own. Put it this way: Google is packed with GIFs of the Man from Another Place treating the a zig-zag striped floor as a dance floor. Despite being synonymous with Peaks, you won’t see Anderson on the Showtime revival. That’s because Anderson and Twin Peaks writer/director David Lynch have been feuding for a while, and that feud is intense.
Back in August 2015, Anderson posted a photo on his Facebook page containing a very inflammatory caption. The post, where Anderson indirectly accuses Lynch of raping his daughter and orchestrating the death of Eraserhead star Jack Nance, has since been deleted—but a screengrab of the caption was uploaded to Imgur. The caption reads:
He totally did NOT rape his own underage daughter and then write a television series about it. She totally has NOT lived under a DEATH THREAT from her own father, all her life if she ever told. He NEVER had his ‘best friend’ murdered. And he DEFINITELY NEVER suggested to me that I should kill myself! There’s a whole bunch of other stuff he never did either.
Lynch’s daughter Jennifer later spoke out about Anderson’s claims. “I am sorry that Mike is doing this,” Jennifer Lynch said in August 2016. “None of what he says is true, and I hope he receives the help and peace he needs.”
While Anderson erased the photo caption containing those claims, he’s still made plenty of public jabs at his former director on Facebook. He wrote on April 20, “Lynch fans, seeming to place a high priority on ‘sanity’ is ironically hilarious.” Earlier, he compared Lynch to President Trump: “Its clear that Trump is redefining what it means to ‘be presidential,’ just as Lynch redefined what it meant to ‘make sense.'”
Earlier this month Anderson revealed that he’s never been able to watch the show that he’s so synonymous with. “I couldn’t watch TP when it originally aired because it was so BORING,” he wrote. “Every time I tuned in, it was people talking in a room. That’s it. And if I stayed long enough to hear what they were saying, they would be talking about NOTHING. I figured out that I couldn’t follow the plot, (or had to make one up) because there WAS NO PLOT. A man went to a town to investigate a murder. That’s it. Nothing else ever happens. Just people talking in rooms. And all this taking NEVER advanced the murder investigation ONE BIT. I liked the part that I was in, (because I was in it), but it still didn’t make a hoot of sense. Hard to watch.”
Lynch’s new season of Twin Peaks, one without the Man from Another Place, is currently airing on Showtime.
