Kyle MacLachlan’s subtle dread and kind smile made him perfect for Fallout

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: This post discusses Hank’s plotline throughout season 1 of Fallout in detail.]

Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) is smiling. When we first see him in Fallout — Amazon Prime Video’s great TV adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game series — he is pedaling under-the-desk ellipticals with his daughter, Lucy (Ella Purnell), while enjoying a black-and-white Western. Dad shit. But behind his soccer-match-sidelines grin, Hank is hiding a bloody secret. And, since he’s played by Twin Peaks’ Kyle MacLachlan, I knew it.

Actors like Tom Hanks and Ted Lasso’s Jason Sudeikis make great paunchy all-American dads, but only MacLachlan knows how to turn a handsome American man into a warning shot. His most memorable roles — including those in Showgirls,Blue Velvet, and Sex and the City — are all undercut with distinctly capitalistic American aggression, a deep need for excess and domination. His characters all possess a lion’s desire for carnage, though they look like they’ve never hungered for anything messier than a key lime pie. The Fallout games similarly exploit your expectations for shiny patriotism and patriarchy in order to reveal their insidiousness, so who better than MacLachlan to deliver the disenchantment?

There was a time in American history where media preferred men to look humbly to the ground, preferably with a hatchet in their hands, and, ideally, grateful for the warm cereal settling in their bellies. “If you have no Honey in your Pot, have some in your Mouth,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in his 1753 almanac full of maxims, Poor Richard Improved. “He that best understands the World, least likes it.”

The developing nation appreciated scrappiness and, as Lucy often references in Fallout, those who followed the Christian Golden Rule to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But once the U.S. was established, becoming John D. Rockefeller was the whole point of being an employed man in America. “Rockefeller, you know, is reputed the richest man