‘Nightmare Cafe’s’ Lindsay Frost Has Peak Friday Experiences

It’s one of the real mysteries of “Twin Peaks”: Given her all-American, big-boned blond beauty and those impeccable family connections, why didn’t Lindsay Frost get the Laura Palmer part?

After all, her brother Mark was the canceled cult series’ co-executive producer; her other brother, Scott, wrote a number of the episodes, and their actor-teacher father, Warren Frost, was a “Twin Peaks” regular, playing the town’s doctor.

But she didn’t even go up for it. Frost says she was too old . . . and too busy. “They were casting high school kids, and I couldn’t play high school,” the 29-year-old actress says, “plus the year that they made that pilot, I did another pilot.”

From the very beginning of her career, though, Frost has been hot. Three weeks after leaving Minneapolis, where she grew up, for the bright lights of New York, she began a four-year run in a continuing role on the CBS daytime soap “As the World Turns.” That led to feature films and guest shots on TV, including episodes of “L.A. Law” and “Father Dowling,” as well as to a part on Broadway, where she played in the original production of the Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly.”

Now, after a season as a regular on the Friday-night series “Mancuso: FBI” on NBC, she’ll be back--same night, same time, same network--on “Nightmare Cafe,” which is executive produced by horror-film director Wes Craven and co-stars Robert Englund (Freddy in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films).

“It’s my old spot. I’ll never get off Friday nights,” Frost says with a throaty laugh. “Part of the attraction for me (in doing “Cafe”) was that, having my whole family involved with ‘Twin Peaks,’ I felt if I were to do another television series I wanted to do something that was going to break new ground too, and not just the same old-same old, and I found that with this script.” The fantasy-anthology series premieres Friday.