Lynch Pin - Brief Article

Justin Theroux doesn't spook easily. And it's good thing, since he's starring in a film by David Lynch.

"There's nothing creepy about David Lynch," insists Justin Theroux, the 30-year-old star of Mulholland Drive, a fetishistic film noir in which Theroux plays a cocksure Hollywood director tussling with the mobsters backing his film while his wife warms the sheets with the pool guy. Although Lynch packs the film with his usual ominous misfits--an amnesia victim, a lip-synching lounge act, and one psychotic cowboy--Theroux maintains that the director is more cornball than carny. "He says things like 'By golly!' I was expecting a hunchback with a withered left hand. But he's an Eagle Scout." The saturnine actor, a nephew of writer Paul Theroux, seems like anything but an Eagle Scout. Born in Washington, D.C., Justin got to New York by way of Bennington College. He braved Broadway (Three Sisters), film (American Psycho), and TV (The District) before Lynch flew him to L.A. for an audition. On the side he's writing two comedies with buddy Ben Stiller--one about Vietnam, the other about rehab, neither of which, to ou r knowledge, he has personally experienced. Not that he's completely unflappable. In the Berkshires this summer the decidedly urban actor stumbled upon a bucolic scene that really got under his skin: a guy painting a picket fence. Psycho cowboys he can deal with, "But I was like, 'Fuck. This is unreal.'"

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