Sherilyn Fenn Didn't Actually Perform Audrey's Most Iconic Twin Peaks Moment

"Twin Peaks," like just about any work by the late, great David Lynch, contains multitudes. Even the worst-rated and most straightforward episodes of the seminal TV mystery series are filled to the brim with memorable moments and strange occurrences. And when the show gets really weird — "Twin Peaks: The Return" part 8, take a bow — no amount of rewatching and explainers can clue you in to every single secret packed within. Lynch, after all, was a highly unorthodox artist; the kind whose sole condition to make "Twin Peaks: The Return" was a fixed budget and no set episode count, which amounted to what's effectively an 18-hour art movie split into individual episodes. 

The great thing about "Twin Peaks" is that even some of its most offhand, casual moments are memorable enough to become classics. Take the scene where Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) goes undercover as a new employee of the One Eyed Jacks brothel, and ties a cherry stem into a pretzel-style knot with her tongue to convince the madam (Victoria Catlin) to hire her. This takes place in "Twin Peaks" season 1, episode 6 ("Realisation Time"), and is easily one of the defining Audrey moments. 

However, behind the scenes, Fenn wasn't particularly enthused about the cherry stem trick. In an interview with the A.V. Club, she revealed that she didn't actually do the deed herself, even noting that she was surprised to find out that the stem trick is reasonably well-known:  

"No. I thought it was silly! I didn't understand why we were doing it. I was like, 'Nobody does that!' And they said, 'Yeah, they do it in college,' blah blah blah. I had no idea that was going to become a thing. No idea."

As Fenn said in her interview with the A.V. Club, Lynch's vision of Audrey Horne was based on Fenn herself, only filtered through Lynch's own uncompromising vision, which could sometimes be eerily accurate. Fenn's own choice for the most important Audrey moment, in fact, is the one where the character puts a pencil through a styrofoam coffee cup and pulls it out in the "Twin Peaks" pilot episode. This is specifically because it was the kind of thing she might very much do herself:  

"[Audrey] was who she was because of  [Lynch]. What you read on a piece of paper is one thing, but when I got there, they couldn't find saddle shoes, and he's like, 'You have to have saddle shoes!' And you see that there are these certain things that are so specific to him. One of the biggest things, though, was taking that pencil in the coffee cup. [Laughs.] One of my two older brothers was like, "That's so like you!" He meets me, this stranger, and sees something, knows what it is, and puts her in. That was really kind of cool."   

Memorable though it may be, the cherry stem trick indeed doesn't rank among Fenn's personal favorite Audrey moments. This may be because it wasn't particularly like her, while some of the other things Audrey did hit far closer to home.