Balthazar Getty | Patricia Norris | Mary Sweeney | Peter Deming

Robert Blake (Mystery Man)

"I was surprised David Lynch called me.I would have thought that he'd call Dennis Hopper or one of his guys. But he just said, 'Hey, I want you to play this.' I have no idea why! I read the script like nine fuckin' times, and I didn't understand one fuckin' word of it! I said, 'Are you sure you want me to play this? I'll be the most cooperative actor in the world, because I have no fuckin' opinion on anything of what the hell to do!' I made this mistake once of asking him what my character was, and I realized that he really is too much of an artist to be that specific about things. It was an extraordinary experience. He really is a rare commodity in America. In Europe and other places, you find film authors, or you find them in colleges or at Sundance, where somebody takes an 8mm, four dollars, and goes out and makes a movie. But this guy does it as a professional and really makes the whole film, everything."

"I said, David, I have some ideas about how this character should look.' He said, 'No, no, no!' Just show me. Use your imagination.' And I said, 'Oh, yeah. That's what Tracy said.' I went off with the makeup people, and I got into this whole weird, fuckin' Kabuki-looking guy with ears [sticking out] and stuff I was imagining in my own strange world. Those times I have seen things that weren't there, when a ghostly appearance occurred. I knew it was my imagination; I wasn't really seeing something. But I sort of knew what the Devil looked like; I knew what Fate looked like. I used to have this image of myself that would come to me sometimes. I'd go out to the desert and get involved in some strange, isolated kind of thing, and all of a sudden I would come to myself as this white, ghostly creature. I said, 'Oh yeah, that's my conscience talking to me.' So I started going with that. I cut my fuckin' hair off, and I put a crack in the middle of it and all this shit. And the makeup people said, 'You're going crazy, man! Nobody in this movie looks like that; everybody looks regular!' I said, 'Leave me alone; just give me some shit.' I put this black outfit on. I walked up to David, and he said, 'Wonderful!' and turned around and walked away."

"The character does some surreal things but I was very curious as to what David was going to do with the way I looked: how was he going to have people react? Normally, when you see somebody who looks that way, you say, 'God, you look weird, man! What the fuck is your story?' I thought, 'What is David going to do when I walk into this party scene?' And it's very interesting, because he told everybody, 'React to him like he's a butler' He made all of them behave as though I looked normal. That was just a choice he made at the spur of the moment. I didn't have Bill Pullman go, 'Hey, you look crazy!' He just turned around and said, 'Hi, how are ya?' David didn't have anybody refer to the way I looked throughout the whole movie. No one was surprised or repulsed. He just said, 'That's what I'm going to do with this character: have everybody deal with him like he looks normal.' And I never asked him why he did that, but I probably wouldn't have if I was directing. I would have had people 'behave' around the makeup, but he didn't do that."