Talking to Sherilyn Fenn About Playing Audrey Horne from 'Twin Peaks'

In the second season of Twin Peaks, Audrey Horne attempts to strangle minor sleaze character Emory Battis with the cord of a vacuum cleaner. Gasping for breath Battis calls her "insane" and Horne just laughs. "I'm insane? I'm Audrey Horne and I get what I want."

Horne, who finally returned to the show this week, is the daughter of morally bankrupt and financially wealthy Benjamin Horne. She might still be a teenager in the original Twin Peaks series, but she is already confident and emotionally complex. She is Veruca Salt with a beauty spot. Her eyebrows are shaped into deathly high arches because having a raised eyebrow is her default setting. With saddle shoes and a thick dark bob, she sways, precociously, through the first few episodes. There's the moment when she stabs a pencil through a polystyrene cup, pulling it out and letting the liquid run everywhere, just to be obstinate. Or when she tells a room of her father's potential clients – while slinking like a brat along the wall – that her friend Laura has just been murdered. Everything Audrey Horne does is magnetic.

Sherilyn Fenn, the actor who plays her, still loves the character as much as Twin Peaks fans. She credits Audrey's success to putting so much of herself into the character, although she was 24 at the time of getting the role and Audrey was just 17. "David wrote the role for me after we met," she remembers. "I was having issues with my own father and men in general; I was absolutely wanting to be in love. I was learning my own power as a woman in her early 20s, which you can see in Audrey. When my brothers saw the show they said I was just like her, such a little brat."

Audrey's sexual strength comes from seeming worldly, coquettish and innocent at the same time. This contradiction is reflected in her fashion choices – she always wore lipstick and tight womanly jumpers but paired with schoolgirl style skirts, socks and shoes (Fenn says the saddle shoes were a specific request of Lynch's and her pink sweater was instructed to be bunched "tighter and tighter until it pretty much broke"). Every straight guy you've ever dated probably had a crush on Audrey Horne and every girl has wanted her hair. But Fenn insists this wasn't forced on her part. "I remember Roy [London, her acting teacher] used to joke 'Did we ever work on sexy Sherilyn?' and I said 'Of course not'. Later on in the show some of the other girls started doing what they thought I was doing but I was never trying to be sexy. There's nothing less sexy than trying to be sexy. Sexy is an intangible thing, it's authentic, someone who's joyful, whose heart is open."

That may be the case but it's undeniable Audrey had a sensual energy different to that of the average Twin Peaks 17-year-old. She knows how to tie a cherry stem with her tongue. When she's at the RR Diner after meeting Agent Cooper for the first time, she seems transcendental. "Do you like coffee?" she asks, running her finger around the rim of the cup. "I love this music. Isn't it too dreamy?" she adds, getting up to dance in the middle of the diner, while Donna can only look on awkwardly.

"But Audrey wasn't another bad girl," Fenn points out. "She wasn't doing cocaine every weekend. I'm glad she was demure in some way. She was a virgin when we meet her so her threat was not overt, it was wanting what she wanted. It was: 'Oh my god! I'm nearly out from under my father's wing and I'm going to have a beautiful life, I'm going to make it happen'."

Instead, the bad girl of Twin Peaks was dead Laura Palmer. She acted as a mirror for the girl Audrey could have been – doing drugs, sleeping with numerous men, going off the proverbial rails. Fenn agrees with this, calling the pair "equally haunted and equally lonely".

"It's important to have some people who stay towards light, not everybody has to go towards dark. In a weird way Audrey was a part of that and I'm pleased," she says.

Some of that influence came from her infatuation with older man, Agent Cooper. Fenn says that the relationship was never planned by Lynch, and that Audrey was supposed to be going off with someone else's character. But the second Fenn as Audrey saw him, it was fate. "I never really crushed on Kyle, but when Audrey spotted Dale Cooper it was all over, it was done. When I see him now I still get giggly for Audrey. That's her one true love, absolutely." This forced Audrey to show bravery and pragmatism that none of the other characters in the show possess, such as when she selflessly goes undercover as a sex worker at One Eyed Jacks. Her character experiences the biggest growth of them all; losing the insolence that makes her great but replacing it with imaginative grit. "I think that's the way that love always matures us," says Fenn. "She was going to get it together because Dale was an older man, so had to let go of childish things. Audrey was being bold for high school girls. She was putting herself in mortal danger for the man she thought she was in love with. To me that really spoke to how desperate she was to get away from her family."

In particular, Audrey wanted to get away from her father. Everything about her attachment to Coop screams daddy issues. You can see it in the way she switches from talking about her dad to Cooper within a sentence. Who can blame her? Ben Horne had an affair with Laura, a girl the same age as Audrey.

"Dale was so different from Ben and he did everything the right way and by the book. He's an honourable man and the polar opposite of her daddy," says Fenn. "We walk through life trying to heal these relationships, don't we? I've seen it in people around me – if somebody's like our father or the opposite of him we heal something. It's not a weird want to sleep with your father. It's just a desire to heal things whether conscious or unconscious." After weeks of new Twin Peaks episodes with Audrey nowhere to be seen, she's finally back, but where does Fenn think she'll be as the new season develops? "I think when we left her, she was full blown trying to escape, you know?" after a pause. "It's always in her, this abandonment and this need to abandon; this feeling of 'I gotta get out of here, there's got to be better, there's got to be better than this.' Maybe she's still searching. I think we search for ourselves until we take our final breath you know, in a lot of different ways. I hope she finds it."

@hannahrosewens

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