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Amiable as he is over the phone, Kyle Mac-Lachlan is a hard one to figure out.
He chats easily about Hong Kong, where he is on vacation with his wife and where he graciously offered to do phone interviews with the media to talk about Desperate Housewives.
In a blink, though, he changes tack to reveal that his favourite moment of season two — where he plays the sinister Orson Hodge — was when he accidentally ran over James Denton's character, Michael, with his car.
At this point in the show, the characters are still unaware that Orson is responsible for Michael's injury.
"Yeah, yeah, that was fun," he said in the same placid voice he used throughout the conversation, offering no hint as to whether it was all a joke.
A NEW CHALLENGE
MacLachlan might have honed this air of inscrutability on the show he's best known for, the ground-breaking early 90s TV series Twin Peaks, where he played quirky FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.
The 48-year-old actor won a Golden Globe for that role, but the show ended after two seasons.
MacLachlan subsequently stayed in Hollywood and made a few interesting character choices — appearing in the 1993 update of Franz Kafka's The Trial, 1994's live-action The Flintstones and the infamous 1995 softcore stripper flick Showgirls.
But he didn't really find the spotlight again until he surfaced on HBO's Sex and the City as a high society momma's boy married to the prissy Charlotte York.
Disposed of after two seasons, MacLachlan continued to work restlessly, but only recently earned his third big break on Desperate Housewives.
MacLachlan became involved in the show only because creator Marc Cherry had been closely following his career.
"Marc, as it turned out, was a fan of Twin Peaks, so when he was looking for someone to play this new guy, he thought of me," said MacLachlan.
The actor relished the idea of playing a mystery man.
"I was looking forward to it. It was a chance to create a character who seems like one thing on the surface, but has a lot more complex things going on underneath," he said.
"Initially, I think there's a feeling that Orson's up to no good, but you do sort of get to like the guy a little more as the season goes on."
The character who, like most new additions to the Housewives family, has a suspicious past, was a welcome change for MacLachlan, whose recent TV roles had been more straightforward.
"It's definitely more challenging than Trey," said MacLachlan, referring to his role as apron-tied and sexually-challenged Trey MacDougal on Sex and the City.
"He was sort of the joke on that show as opposed to Orson being a co-conspirator with Bree on Desperate Housewives."
HE LOVES HIS JOB
It's obvious from the way MacLachlan raves about the show that he's actually a big fan and not just an actor fulfiling his promotional obligations.
"I loved the show when it first came out. The sense of humour is so different from what you usually get on TV, and it's really the kind of dry, peculiar thing that I love," he said.
That's why he jumped at the chance to join the cast in the second season, despite the fact that by then, the show had lost about half of its previous average of 20 million viewers a week.
"Well, the first season revolved around the mystery of the murder and that worked really, really well," said MacLachlan. "I think maybe in the second season, the mysteries just weren't as developed as they should have been."
So far, the third season has been well received.
"It's an incredibly difficult thing to take a show that has been through a slump and to revive it," said MacLachlan.
"I think it's a testament to Marc's recommitment to the show that he's been able to do that."
Asked whether he thinks Desperate Housewives is capable of returning to its first season heyday — when it was showered with critical acclaim, Golden Globe and Emmy nominations and awards, and even referenced by US First Lady Laura Bush — MacLachlan didn't miss a beat.
"Definitely," he said. "The type of humour that exists on the show, it's amazingly smart and interesting. There's nothing else like it." - TODAY/sh
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