INTERVIEW: Jake Wardle to celebrate David Lynch at special UK event
Image courtesy of the festival / Provided by official website.
This weekend, Sept. 27-28, the United Kingdom will celebrate the legendary director David Lynch, who died earlier this year, with a festival that is being billed as A Gathering of the Angels. Fans can meet actors from the Lynch-verse and also enjoy special film screenings, music performances and immersive experiences.
One of the guests on hand will be Jack Wardle, who played the green-gloved Freddie Sykes in Twin Peaks: The Return, the third season of Lynch’s most famous project.
“It’s one of the best experiences of my life,” Wardle said in a recent Zoom interview. “It’s been like eight years now, and it still feels surreal like it was a nice dream or something. But it actually happened. Even to this day, I’m like, wow, that actually happened.”
At the event, Wardle will join singer Chrystabell, Lesley Dunlop (The Elephant Man), Michael Horse (Twin Peaks) and executive producer Sabrina Sutherland, among others. The venue will be London’s Genesis Cinema.
For Wardle, one of the most fascinating aspects of his time on Twin Peaks: The Return is how he came to the Showtime series in the first place. The process didn’t involve a traditional audition, but instead, he participated in multiple Skype calls with Lynch over a series of years.
“I wasn’t even an actor at the time when I was selected for it,” Wardle said. “I was still at university studying something different, like more behind-the-camera stuff. I had a YouTube channel, and I made a video quite a while prior in 2010 that went viral doing different accents. It was David Lynch who saw that video, a friend of his sent it to him, and then after he saw that he wanted to get in contact with me.”
In 2012, Lynch reached out to Wardle, but the entire experience was wondrously mysterious. Here’s how it went down: Sutherland randomly messaged the actor on YouTube and stated that she worked for a director who had seen the accent video and was potentially interested in casting him in a project.
“I was just curious,” he said. “I didn’t think much of it. OK, I’ll see what this is about, and I agreed to Skype. … She didn’t say it was David Lynch until just before. She said, ‘Oh, by the way, the director I work for is David Lynch and not someone with the same name.’ I was like, ‘Hang on, I’ve heard that name before.’ I double-checked. Oh wow, he’s the one who’s done The Elephant Man. At that time that was the only film of his that I had seen. I had seen it twice actually, once as a child and again at secondary school.”
In fact, in secondary school, Wardle’s school had performed the play The Elephant Man, and he was cast in the title role. When he was younger, he watched Lynch’s film for inspiration on how to perform as John Merrick.
“Now the director of that film is contacting me and wants to speak to me,” Wardle said, reliving his amazement. “I can’t believe it. Yeah, we had the Skype call, and it was really friendly, laid back, casual. And he basically just told me, ‘I really love your video, not only when you do the accents, but when you get into the character.’ And he asked me if I considered acting, and I said, ‘I was thinking about it.’ Although at the time I was studying more behind-the-camera stuff. I was studying editing and post-production, but I was open to the idea. He said he wants to cast me in something, but obviously at that time in 2012, it hadn’t gotten off the ground yet. And then eventually we stayed in Skype contact for the next couple years. Just once in a blue moon he’d Skype me with an update.”
Lynch would call back and say that the project was almost funded, and then the next update was that the funding fell through. At one point, Wardle’s hopeful dream almost fell apart. The director called and said he had to shelf the project and focus on something else.
“But he said, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t forget about you. I want to cast you in something,'” he remembers. “And then in 2014, just out of the blue, he Skyped with me. He said, ‘Have you ever watched Twin Peaks before?’ At that time, I hadn’t. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Doesn’t matter. We’re making a new one, and you’re going to be in it.’ That was 2014, and then I think it was not too long after I saw the online news article saying he walked out of the Twin Peaks project because of a funding disagreement.”
Wardle’s dream was being built up and torn down with every new update, but then Twin Peaks: The Return was able to find its footing thanks to a campaign of actors who persuaded the powers that be that the project needed to move forward with Lynch at the helm.
“And then it was late-2015 when it was all confirmed,” Wardle said. “They started filming, and then I started my visa process and everything. And, yeah, 2016 I was out there and had the best experience of my life. That’s it in a nutshell. It wasn’t an overnight thing. It was a long process.”
That story and others will likely be part of A Gathering of the Angels as fans and special guests meet in London to talk about Twin Peaks and the influential life of this auteur.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
A Gathering of the Angels will take place Sept. 27-28 at the Genesis Cinema in London. Click here for more information and tickets.
