Kyle MacLachlan says ending his four-year romance with Laura Dern to date Lara Flynn Boyle was “not my best moment.” In a Sept. 21 conversation, he said the choice destroyed his relationship with Dern, then added that the two have since healed and are “great friends” now.
Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks
The split reaches back to the 1980s, after MacLachlan and Dern had already worked together in Blue Velvet. He said he and Dern later shared the screen again in the 2017 Twin Peaks revival, which gave the breakup a second act in public view rather than leaving it frozen in old gossip.
MacLachlan said David Lynch cast Dern as Diane in that revival, and he described the news as “the most brilliant thing you could have ever said to me.” He also said he was “so excited to get to work with her” again, a line that sounds less like nostalgia than a practical sign the relationship had already been rebuilt enough for another professional pairing.
Sept. 21 and 2024
He revisited the breakup on the Dinner's on Me podcast in 2024, then elaborated in comments published on Sept. 21. MacLachlan said, “We fell into this relationship, and it just destroyed the relationship with Laura,” and added, “I did not handle that well, especially for Laura.”
That candor matters because he did not stop at self-criticism. He said Dern was “very understanding” about the split, and he later described their current bond as healed, which is the practical takeaway for anyone tracking whether this was a clean public reset or just a polite distance. On his account, it is the former.
Laura Dern and 2017
Dern’s side of the story has long carried its own blunt language. In a 2000 Talk interview, she said, “I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I've never heard from him again,” then added, “It's like a sudden death.”
MacLachlan’s newer remarks do not erase that history; they do something more useful. They show that a breakup that once looked final became a working friendship by the time Twin Peaks returned in 2017, and they leave the reader with the clearest answer available: the damage was real, but so was the repair.
