Lillard was given no background on his character and had no idea what his motivation was. As he prepared to film that interrogation scene, Lillard recalls pulling Mark Frost aside to see if he could get any information to ground his performance. ”He was like, ‘I can't tell you anything,'" Lillard said. ”I'm like, ‘Yeah, I understand that, but I don't have any idea what any of this means. I don't understand any of it. So you've got to let me know at least what I'm talking about.'" Frost did, for the record, walk the actor through what his character had experienced.
Lillard auditioned for his Twin Peaks role; as he noted, ”when a David Lynch opportunity comes through, you're jumping at the chance." When he first started reading through his lines, Lillard wondered—as actors often do—if his character would end up doing anything noteworthy, ”or if it's just going to be this kind of pedantic normal guy." Luckily, ”normal" people don't have a place in Twin Peaks. When he got to the interrogation scene, Lillard was thrilled—but nervous. His first thought? ”That's bananas."
”I will say that it's the most intimidating scene I've ever read on the page," Lillard said. ”Because you know that the stakes are really high, because people are going to watch, and then you realize that there's this slug line of emotional high stakes, and then none of it means anything. So you're like, ‘Oh my God, how do you do that? . . . Can I actually pull this off?'"
The enormity of the project he was working on—and particularly this scene—hit Lillard as he drove to the shoot.
”I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God, people are going to see this scene all over the world. And it's going to be around forever,'" Lillard said. ”I was super aware of the fact that I was doing something that wasn't an average day of work. I was crazy stressed."
