‘Twin Peaks’ Co-Creator Addresses the Strangest Recasting in ‘The Return’

Twin Peaks is known for being one of the strangest shows ever created, but nothing in the series is as bizarre as how David Bowie’s character transformed in the reboot.

The series, initially cancelled in 1991 before being brought back 25 years later with Twin Peaks: The Return, is commonly known as one of the greatest series of all time.

Beloved for its genre-bending tone, its quirky humor, and its idiosyncratic style, the series was a massive hit on ABC worldwide and could often be found at the top of all sorts of lists with names like “10 TV Shows Cancelled Too Soon” before the 2017 sequel series. The show was so popular, in fact, Queen Elizabeth II famously cut short a meeting with Paul McCartney so as not to miss the series’ latest episode.

In the 1992 prequel/sequel movie Fire Walk With Me, rock legend David Bowie appears as Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who was secretly the leader of the top-secret paranormal investigation unit Blue Rose.

For The Return, series creators David Lynch and Mark Frost had to get creative since Bowie’s health was rapidly declining during the series’ production in 2016. (The rocker died in 2017 after a cancer diagnosis.)

Phillip Jeffries appears, yes, but his character has morphed into a talking tea kettle with the power to help people travel through time. The kettle version of Jeffries was played by Nathan Frizzell, doing his best Bowie impression. In a recent interview with NME, Frost discussed their attempt at bringing the rockstar back to Twin Peaks.

“We were talking to David Bowie about coming back and he wanted to do it. He obviously was battling serious health issues [liver cancer] and, at a certain point, he called us and said, ‘I’m not going to be able to do it’. We really thought long and hard about that,” Frost said. “And David [Lynch] tried to – and did – come up with a startling visual representation of what that might be in a way only he could. And I think David Bowie would have probably got a kick out of it had he been around to see it. I certainly did!”

All of Twin Peaks is streaming on Paramount+, except for Fire Walk With Me, which can be found on Hulu and HBO Max.