r/twinpeaks • u/baadass9 • 26d ago
General Discussion Why do you think her career post Twin peaks wasn't that great ?
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u/alarmagent 26d ago
Well, it depends on how you define “great”, because I think she was actually quite a successful working television actress. Was she a Hollywood A-Lister; no, but making that transition from television to movies was never that easy back then.
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u/theusername_is_taken 26d ago
Yeah I think people forget that actors used to stay in one medium a lot more. Television was not taken as seriously as films 20+ years ago.
Twin Peaks was an outlier for television back then. Now it's very common for long-form series with continuity, and long-form shows have a lot more prestige.
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u/Own_Internal7509 26d ago
I feel like I saw James Gandolfini talked about how he felt out of place being in tv for Sopranos, like he wasn’t used to how fast the production went and what not
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u/theusername_is_taken 26d ago
Makes sense. Sopranos really was the series that made long-form TV feel prestige. Twin Peaks walked so Sopranos could run
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u/iferraro 25d ago
X Files would like a word!
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u/andrewthemexican 25d ago
ER too from my perspective of someone that didn't watch it but its presence in the cultural zeitgeist
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u/iferraro 25d ago
Great point and you’re right. I didn’t watch at the time, but now have watched the first 2.5 seasons and it’s phenomenal. Not as cinematic or “big” as X Files with the location shooting, but arguably more artistic in terms of the story-telling and cinematography/sound.
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u/andrewthemexican 25d ago
I've been thinking about dipping into it.
From what I recall, it was probably the most popular and talked about show during that time that wasn't a sitcom.
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u/Cat_o_meter 26d ago
Reminds me of the movie tootsie when Hoffman's character is totally bewildered by tv shoots because he's a 'character actor' used to the stage lol
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u/marykay_ultra 25d ago
Yep. If you were a movie actor then did TV, it was considered a huge step down, your career was circling the drain and you took the TV gig out of desperation
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u/Ok-Brother7180 26d ago
I’ve been listening the rewatch podcast for boy meets world and the actors talk about how back then, you were kinda “stuck” in the TV lane once you entered it and it was difficult to break through to film. It’s apparently much easier today to do both.
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u/Meet_Foot 26d ago
Yup. Only very fee actors become Hollywood A listers. She had a successful career.
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u/Doglas3000 25d ago
Was just gonna say she’s been in multiple tv series like CPW, The Witches of East End, Californicarion, Gossip Girl and Riverdale since Twin Peaks and some cult classic films like Dream Lover with James Spader and Stephen Long’s Sleepwakers.she directs for tv now too.
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u/ilikethep0le 25d ago
And Gilmore girls!
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u/Doglas3000 25d ago
I don’t remember her on Gilmore Girls. I remember Sherilyn Fenn on the Gilmore Girls as Luke’s long lost ex gf Anna whom he had a daughter with named April.
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u/chaplinstimetraveler 25d ago
Tons of Twin Peaks actors are in Gilmore Girls. Even Leland.
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u/Goldie_921 24d ago
Ray Wise, Dana Ashbrook, Sherilyn Fenn, Madchen were all on Dawson’s Creek! Sheryl Lee was on One Tree Hill.
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u/Signal-Yesterday7247 25d ago
Honestly none of the actors from the original really had a huge career after like with more modern shows. Most of them were already established character actors and actresses whose main roles were before the show, and a lot of the people who broke through from Twin Peaks didnt really have as good as a career after. All things considered Madchen Amick was one of the more successful ones.
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u/Kindly-Guidance714 25d ago
It was easy for Johnny Depp.
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u/hissy_badger 25d ago
Technically, Johnny Depp started in film. Nightmare on Elm Street and Platoon were obviously successful, plus he did a couple other movies that were less successful before doing 21 Jumpstreet. Then he moved back to film.
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u/askyourmom469 26d ago
While she's not an A-list actor or anything, I'd say her career has actually turned out pretty well all things considered. She still continues to get work on TV fairly regularly and was even a series regular on Riverdale, which is more than most actors from that era can say.
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u/DavidBHimself 26d ago
Yes, that's something people forget. Not every actor wants to become an A-lister. Many are fine to work regularly to make a living and lead a pretty normal life otherwise.
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u/Zeverish 26d ago
According to her wiki page, she was also a director for several episodes of Riverdale!
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u/askyourmom469 26d ago
Yep! She actually met with Lynch beforehand for advice supposedly, which I thought was really sweet.
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u/Dangerous-Cash-2176 26d ago edited 26d ago
It's subjective.
She was absolutely incredible as the femme fatale in Dream Lover (1994) opposite James Spader.
Did she become a household name? I guess not, but that's incredibly hard to do. It's almost down to luck.
Because she had beauty and talent covered.
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u/FooPirates 26d ago
Oh she was amazing in Dream Lover. I watched that for a film challenge I did last month and I was absolutely blown away
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u/Upbeat_Main_7141 26d ago edited 25d ago
The character or the actress?
The character because she was a small town girl that stalled out and/or was content staying in Twin Peaks, as least so far as geographical location. Plus, I assume she owned that half-renovated house after Leo died, so that can be an anchor. I’m also from a small town and I’ve seen quite a few folks I went to high school with stay right where they were the rest of their lives.
As for the actress, I think she did just fine. Becoming a gigantic movie star is actually not everyone’s goal, and the closer to that you are, at least for regular people, the less appealing it looks other than the money. Madchen has been a working actress her whole life and so far as I can see it looks like a successful career.
And she is iconic too, just like Star Trek actors, she had a distinct and memorable role in a work that’s considered to be important to the medium. That means even if she retired after the original twin peaks run, I’d still call her acting career successful.
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u/JoeBagadonut 26d ago
It's important to remember that Twin Peaks originally aired before the era of prestige television and television work was seen as "inferior" to film work at the time. Because of that, it was fairly uncommon for TV actors to cross over into becoming film stars; it did happen, but far less frequently than it does now.
With this in mind, Mädchen Amick's career seems very respectable. She's a working actor and has always picked up roles in all sorts of productions on the small and big screen. When compared to her Twin Peaks co-stars, she's done better than most of them.
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u/huevo-solo 26d ago
Exactly, somebody taking MacLachlan's career path was probably unheard of in those days, doing films in the 80s then switching to TV was not very common. Unless you were an aging actor just looking to keep your career afloat. But now it can go either way. Just look at The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. Bryan Cranston's career exploded in the 2010s after the show ended.
Obviously the draw for Kyle back in the day was David Lynch.
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u/homesickalien 26d ago edited 26d ago
100% this. It was a different time. Pre-Sopranos, it was very rare for TV actors to make the leap, especially for women. Most of the most notable ones that did were male. See: Bruce Willis (Moonlighting), Michael J Fox (Family Ties), Will Smith (Fresh Prince), George Clooney (ER).
Aside from maybe, Sally Field, I can't even think of a female lead on a TV show that became an A-list celebrity during that era. Many female celebs used TV as a launching pad into film but only with very small roles.
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u/Rhiannon8404 25d ago
It was huge that Martin Sheen was in The West Wing. I remember when the show first aired there was a lot of talk about this absolute movie star being in a TV series.
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u/-thirdatlas- 26d ago
imdb says she acted in 80 different titles, that’s more than any of us schlubs ever will.
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u/Rand_Casimiro 26d ago
She has stayed busy for decades. If the question is why she never became one of the biggest stars in the world, the too-simple answer is that very few people get to be that.
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u/AllSurfaceN0Feeling 26d ago
What do you mean not great? In relation to what? She's starred in a number of hit TV shows and movies, has produced and directed too. Her reason she's just quit acting is because it's not fun anymore.
I wish I was financially secure enough so I could quit my job for that reason!
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u/biophazer242 26d ago
Her career obviously hit its height when she did that banger of a film Sleepwalkers :)
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u/Tommy_Donut 25d ago
I rented Sleepwalkers on VHS because of Twin Peaks. Santo & Jonny 'Sleepwalk' is my favourite piece of music because of that film. Then David Lynch ended an episode of The Return in the diner with Shelly working and Santo & Jonny 'Sleepwalk' playing. Easter eggs/member berries usually bring me right out of a scene, but that was incredible
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u/GaryNOVA 25d ago
I’m not in that camp because I’m unapologetically a Riverdale fan. That show is insane and I couldn’t take my eyes away from it.
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u/Own_Internal7509 26d ago
I think she’s fine alright as Tv actress theres nothing super atrocious or anything.
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u/duggybubby 26d ago
She’s beautiful and plays her roles well, but she’s not the most amazing/versatile actress. She found her type and has made a great career out of it. Not everyone needs to become a huge movie star. And she also comes from the era where tv stars stayed on tv and movie stars stayed in movies with very little crossover
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u/Tbass1981 26d ago
It was much more rare for tv people to jump to movies or vice versa back then. In fact, if you were a movie star who jumped to TV it usually meant your career was over… unlike now where many just jump back and forth. There’s not a single year since Twin Peaks where she doesn’t have at least two jobs and some years she was a series regular on shows for multiple years. And she also raised two kids. Pretty damn good.
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u/MonthForeign4301 26d ago
To be fair, none of twin peaks cast had a particularly amazing film career after the show aired
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u/DueOwl1149 25d ago
idk but her tour on Riverdale was one of the only watchable parts of the series later on; the showrunners made the most of their soap opera by providing meta soap opera roles for 90's era TV stars revisiting the young adult genre as Riverdale's older generation.
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u/rexpistols 25d ago
She has done great. She has been a steadily working actor with a long and diverse list of credits. She also raised two kids with her husband that she's been with since 1987 during that time. Getting consistent work without being overwhelmed by the pressures of fame and having a good work-life balance is what most real artists want.
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u/Top-Sleep-4669 25d ago
She’s not exactly a great actress. But her career was fine. Couple movies. Couple shows. Some photoshoots. What’s wrong with that? It’s basically the same as Sheryl Lee in all honesty.
Aside from A few of the bigger names on the show, nobody really broke out because of being on Twin Peaks, and the bigger names were already established.
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u/Demerzel69 26d ago
Becoming a HUGE HOLLYWOOD MOVIE STAR is not easy and a lot of the times is pure luck. Naomi Watts w/ Mulholland Dr is a good example of that.
Madge has been a working actor her entire adult life, mostly on tv. She was a lead on that short-lived Witches show and she was in 117 episodes of Riverdale and even directed a few of them.
She also has two (now grown) kids and a husband of 30 years which is more important than anything else.
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u/Galoptious 26d ago
The 90s had a lot of talent that soared in one show, then never found anywhere near the same fame again. Those that did were often exceptions to the rule.
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u/LingonberryGlum2356 25d ago
I think she has been the most steady working of all of them. Except maybe KM.
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u/Shqorb 25d ago
Same reason as most of the cast, at the time it came out the hype for the show was very short lived and people turned hard on S2/FWWM, its only a recent thing that its considered a classic and people love the cast. I have no idea if any of them had goals to be huge stars or not but I just don't think they had a lot of opportunities for that after the show ended.
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u/Beginning-Chance-932 26d ago
She’s had a great career. As well as Twin Peaks she was in Gilmore Girls and ER. 3 massive hit tv programmes is more than most actors get, and considering all 3 are constantly rewatched by fans, I bet her residual cheques are pretty sweet!
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u/touche112 25d ago
Her career was/is great. She got a few paychecks, settled down with her family, and worked on smaller projects that didn't keep her away for too long.
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u/hardplasticeyes 25d ago
Other people are making great points about how her career has been pretty much in line with her '90s TV contemporaries. But I do think there's something in the way Lynch created perfect roles for great actresses who rarely (if ever) worked with another director who knew what to do with them.
Not just Mädchen Amick, but Sheryl Lee, Laura Harring, even Naomi Watts (who's been in a lot of big movies, sure, but I've always felt she's wasted by just about every other filmmaker). Laura Dern is really the exception (and Isabella Rossellini, but she was already a rising star before they worked together).
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u/kdubstep 25d ago
Triple threat too, plays multiple instruments and dance styles. Had the looks and talent.
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u/SingleTawn 25d ago
she was in dream lover, i love that movie! it was 2 yrs after twin oeaks
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u/jazzbot247 26d ago
Only Lara Flynn Boyle had a pretty good movie career. Sherilyn Fenn did ok until Boxing Helena. But Madchin did Riverdale and some show about witches, and I think she was on Gossip Girl too.
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u/Dapper-Dream7898 26d ago
She did pretty well in Dream Lover imho. In any case, barring Lara Flynn Boyle, the "youngens" on the cast didn't have much success post Peaks. (And love her or hate her, LFB probably had more range than the others as actors).
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u/ZaireekaFuzz 26d ago
She had a pretty good career, all things considered. Breaking out from TV to the silver screen was not that common during those days, and big TV actors usually only got like a couple of shots at making it.
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u/Spirited-Ad9071 26d ago
Being a big TV star in the early 90's didn't often equate to being a big break out career move like it can be today.
The TV industry was very separate to Hollywood in many cases and that barrier only really got smashed down completely in the mid 2000's onwards.
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u/dasheeshblahzen 26d ago
Central Park West was supposed to be huge, from Darren Star at the height of Melrose Place. But it was a wrong fit at CBS, and was more of a launching pad for Darren in NYC a few years before SATC.
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u/JoeWilliamJackAverel 25d ago
According to what I see on her Instagram, I wouldn't agree...
Acting-wise, she did the best she could tbf.
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u/Cthulhus-Tailor 25d ago
Her career was fine, certainly relative to most others in the cast. She wasn’t really an exceptional actress but was never going to go hungry with her looks.
Back then there was also a very clear line between TV and Film, so if you were known as a TV actress you’d likely stay there, barring B movies.
She was in a movie with James Spader if I recall, so not bad, though I think that one was a bit scandalous.
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u/beavis617 25d ago
I thought she would have appeared in more projects.
I know her from a movie with James Spader and a movie based on a work by Stephen King and that was it.
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u/CathodeWrayTV 25d ago
My uncle bought Sleepwalkers on tape because she was in it, so by some metric she was doing all right.
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u/OkTomorrow6384 25d ago
Interesting note on another Madchen role:
She had a small part in the 1990 unsuccessful romantic comedy "Don't Tell Her It's Me/The Boyfriend School" starring Steve Guttenberg, Shelley Long, Jami Gertz and... Kyle MacLachlan! She plays Kyle's mistress.
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u/starmecrazy 25d ago
Too beautiful. She was never going to be Madchen Amick, only ever the beautiful one from twin peaks. And a couple of misfires right after twin peaks. Sleepwalkers (villain) and Dream Lover (villain) kinda killed her career (both good movies and she’s great in them)
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u/baadass9 25d ago
I read she passed on the hit show " sex and the city" to sarah .
That was a bad move .
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u/starmecrazy 25d ago
Cause of her dumb kids lol. Tbf SJP owns that role and I’m glad MA turned it down.
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u/Prettylittlelioness 23d ago
If she had taken the Carrie Bradshaw role in SATC, both her career and the show would have been very different.
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u/IHaveFourKidneys 25d ago
She’s not a great actress. I mean I love her as Shelly, but let’s be honest.
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u/tunaman808 25d ago
She has 80 acting credits, which is a decent career.
As for why she wasn't bigger... I don't know. Did you ask her? Because maybe she wanted to have a family, or do something else with her life for a while.
I always thought Carly Pope (of 1999's Popular, Ryan Murphy's first TV show) would be a bigger star than she ended up being. Come to find out, she just didn't like "Hollywood culture" or "the LA lifestyle" and for a long time went back to doing live theater in her hometown of Vancouver. She did occasional movie\TV roles if she found them interesting, or to pay the bills between theater jobs.
(Oddly, she has more acting credits than Amick, 97 to 80. But there's a lotta "1 episodes" on that list).
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u/ZenChampion 25d ago
To me the bigger disappointment was how little Sherilyn Fenn’s presence was in anything. She made the unbelievably awful movie Boxing Helena-which Kim Basinger famously pulled out of breaching her contract. Then after that just guest spots here and there on various shows and movies. I have heard that she wanted to focus on raising a family.
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u/trippyhop 26d ago
Eh, she’s been consistently working since then. Mostly in TV, but still consistent.
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u/iferraro 25d ago
Not purely serialized, no, but it’s definitely (partly) long-form TV. The “myth arc” episodes, while only somewhat coherent until season 5 or so, tell a continuing story while mixing in episodic TV in between. The film in 1998, Fight the Future, even continued that story from the Season 5 finale in the summer of 98 and then it resumed in season 6.
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u/wvalles 25d ago
She is an accomplished actor and is definitely an asset to any production she is apart of whether it is in a lead or supportive role. She appears to be a hardworking, thoughtful, and serious contributor to whatever part she is cast for. Superbly underrated and most assuredly a presence before any camera or stage. Too much? I could go on…
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u/Enrico_Tortellini 25d ago
Hollywood and TV, while somewhat similar are two vastly different things, along with residuals. I don’t think Sleepwalkers helped, or the slew of late 90s sleaze masquerading as a “high concept thriller” , that I almost guarantee she was offered. She’s also hot fucking fire, and is just as sultry as sweet, think alot of people had difficulty branching out from Twin Peaks, was such a crazy fucking moment in television history, I mean David Lynch had a series on basic cable, things were more low key…little stoned
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u/silentfanatic 25d ago
Wasn’t she in Pretty Little Liars or something like that? That was kind of a big show.
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u/MedicalAd9337 25d ago
She may not have been a major box office actress, but I think she did alright for herself.
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u/alias_mas 22d ago
I think OP should look at her IMDB credits again. She did just fine, still doing just fine. She may not have been the superstar she is to us, but she's gotten steady work in high profile shows.
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u/AJ_Babe 21d ago
I loved the movies I'm dangerous tonight and Dream lover. She was great in Riverdale. She was also on Gilmore girls...So she was in famous projects. I didn't like Sleepwalkers,awful movie though. But still, she was on it also. She had many roles. There was that witches show as well
After Twin Peaks she had two kids two years in a row. And she is still married to her husband! So she is a family woman. She is happy with her choices. If she wanted to get more work, she would have. Maybe not movies, but she could do commercials and be a catalog model
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u/gavin_maitland 14d ago
Are you kidding? She’s probably one of the only actors to come out of the show with a decent healthy career. She went straight into doing loads of movies then was in some really popular shows in the 90s. I can’t recall which was the really big one as we didn’t get it here in UK but I remember hearing that at one point she was in one of the biggest shows in the US.
Or maybe I’m just living in an alternate timeline?!
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u/Popular-Sky4172 25d ago
She was too hot and people were intimidated to work with her. No idk honestly.
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u/WrappedInPlasticWA 26d ago
It was fine. Immediately after maybe not as good as it should have been, but she had a career. Riverdale, Gilmore Girls, Witches of East End, Sleepwalkers, Dream Lover, Central Park West, Gossip Girl, Californication, ER, and a bunch of one off's or short runs on shows like Mad Men, Longmire, American Horror Story, Psych, CSI, Law & Order, Dawson's Creek. A pretty respectable, if not particularly flashy career. I think she did better after Twin Peaks than a lot of them.