Steven Spielberg casts David Lynch in The Fabelmans

By Blair Marnell February 4, 2022

For the first time ever, directors Steven Spielberg and David Lynch are going to collaborate. It’s just not happening in the way that anyone expected. Variety is reporting that Lynch has been cast in a role for Spielberg’s upcoming film The Fabelmans. Details about Lynch’s part were not disclosed in the story.

Lynch is best known as a director of critically acclaimed films including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, The Straight Story, Wild At Heart, and Lost Highway. He is also the co-creator of Twin Peaks, a wildly popular cult series from the 1990s that was revived by Showtime in 2017 as Twin Peaks: The Return.

Recommended Videos

While famous for his work behind the camera, Lynch has been known to occasionally perform on camera as well. In both incarnations of Twin Peaks, Lynch portrayed FBI agent Gordon Cole. He also lent his voice to The Cleveland Show and Family Guy, and guest-starred in FX’s Louie. Lynch also had a supporting role in John Carroll Lynch’s feature film Lucky.

David Lynch in Twin Peaks: The Return. — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Spielberg co-wrote the script for The Fabelmans with Tony Kushner (Angels in America), and it is a semiautobiographical story inspired by Spielberg’s youth in Arizona. Spielberg is also directing the film, which will be his first project after his recent West Side Story remake, which was a hit with critics (and less so with audiences).

Gabriel LaBelle is playing the leading role in The Fabelmans, alongside Seth Rogen, Paul Dano, Michelle Williams, Julia Butters, Judd Hirsch, Sam Rechner, Oakes Fegley, Chloe East, Jeannie Berlin, Robin Bartlett, Jonathan Hadary, and Isabelle Kusman.

Universal Pictures is expected to release The Fabelmans in November of this year.

Topics

Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…

Entertainment

The 10 best Steven Spielberg movies, ranked by Rotten Tomatoes

A T-Rex at the climax of Jurassic Park.

Steven Spielberg is an undisputed master of cinema. He has directed many movies throughout his life, and while he has had failures with some of them (we're looking at you, Always), many of his films are now considered to be some of the greatest of all time.

With a filmography including sci-fi blockbusters, serious historical dramas, and globe-trotting adventures, Spielberg made his mark on multiple genres and showed his skills as a diverse storyteller. Spielberg has now directed 36 feature-length films, with the autobiographical The Fabelmans the latest in a long line of hits. The movies below have been ranked the best of the filmmaker's illustrious career.
10. Bridge of Spies (2015) - 91%

Entertainment

Henry Thomas on E.T. turning 40, Steven Spielberg, and that notorious Atari video game

Elliot stares at E.T. in "E.T."

If you're a horror fan, chances are you've seen Henry Thomas a lot in the last few years. The veteran actor has starred in a multitude of projects by writer/director Mike Flanagan, including The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and most recently, The Midnight Club.

Yet the greater public still remembers him as young Elliot, the boy who befriended an alien and made Reese's Pieces a popular candy to consume. In celebration of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial turning 40 years old this year, Thomas sat down with Digital Trends to talk about the film's lasting legacy, working with Steven Spielberg, giving one of the best auditions of all time, and whether or not he played the notoriously awful E.T. video game by Atari.

Entertainment

The Fabelmans review: an origin story of Steven Spielberg

Paul Dano and Michelle Williams watch The Greatest Show on Earth.

Steven Spielberg has spent his entire career channeling the heartache of his childhood into movies. He’s never really hesitated to admit as much, confessing publicly to the autobiographical elements woven through sensitive sensations like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Catch Me If You Can, and especially his now 40-year-old E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, an all-ages, all-time smash that welcomed the world into the melancholy of his broken home via the friendship between a sad, lonely kid and a new friend from the stars. By now, all of that baggage is inextricable from the mythology of Hollywood’s most beloved hitmaker: It’s conventional wisdom that Spielberg’s talent for replicating the awe and terror of childhood comes from the way that his own has continued to weigh, more than half a century later, on his heart and mind.

With his new coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans, Spielberg drops all but the barest pretense of artificial distance between his work and those experiences. Co-written with Tony Kushner, the great playwright who’s scripted some of the director’s recent forays into the American past (including last year’s luminous West Side Story), the film tells the very lightly fictionalized tale of an idealistic kid from a Jewish family, growing up in the American Southwest, falling in love with the cinema as his parents fall out of love with each other. Every scene of the film feels plucked from the nickelodeon of Spielberg’s memories. It’s the big-screen memoir as a twinkly-tragic spectacle of therapeutic exorcism.