Kyle MacLachlan has some thoughts on that ‘Twin Peaks’ ending

Kyle MacLachlan was the only “Twin Peaks” cast member to read all 18 episodes of the series’ celebrated return for a third season before filming began.

But as you’d expect with all things David Lynch, that reading of the 500-page-plus tome came with conditions — and coffee.

“I wasn’t allowed to take it home with me,” MacLachlan said in a video interview at The Times. “I needed to read it there in the studio where they were prepping to shoot. So I sat with a rather large pot of coffee — black, of course — and worked my way through it.”

Naturally, MacLachlan came away with questions. There’s a level of bafflement that comes baked in with any Lynch project, and the convention-defying “Twin Peaks: The Return” was no different. But even those expectations were challenged by the series’ final chapter, which ended with MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper (or more likely, some version of him) attempting to, once and for all, save Laura Palmer, only to find that doing so may be impossible. The past cannot be so easily changed.

“[David] doesn’t feel the least bit compelled to explain what something means — or doesn’t mean,” MacLachlan says. “He really wants the audience to take away their own interpretations.”

“All I know is, I’m at a place and I’m at a loss, and the Cooper character that we all know and remember was, I don’t think, ever at a loss,” MacLachlan continues, talking about the season’s final moments. “And to see that for the first time was very frightening and disheartening and confusing. That’s not what I played, but that’s what I saw when I saw it. [Gasps] Oh. Now we’re in trouble. And you realize even the best man — and we think of Cooper as the best man — maybe he didn’t get there. We don’t know.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, MacLachlan talked about the pleasures and demands of playing the different versions of Cooper — the catatonic Dougie Jones, the evil Mr. C, the heroic Agent Cooper, the Cooper we saw in the series’ last chapter — and whether we might see him don that black suit again. You can watch the entire conversation (sans backwards talking … sorry!) below. Give yourself a present and watch.

glenn.whipp@latimes.com

Twitter: @glennwhipp