In David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Dern famously prophesies in a quiet church parking lot: “Until the robins come, there is trouble.” It was the start of a fruitful partnership with the twisted director in her 1990 Interview cover story-her second for this magazine-Dern told the artist Gary Indiana about Wild at Heart, in which she starred opposite her mother for the first time. Laura’s early roles reflected an inherited desire to lean into darkness. Her father cut his teeth in some of the darkest movies of the 1960s, from Robert Aldrich’s thriller Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte to Sydney Pollack’s melodrama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Ladd, meanwhile, appeared in the grim, era-defining films of Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese. At first glance, the then-23 year old Dern would seem like a Hollywood golden girl, but her nascent filmography revealed a set of roles shaping up to be as strange as her parents’.

With Wild at Heart, David Lynch gave them the seats. The dawn of the ’90s found two of cinema’s children looking to join the adult’s table: Nicolas Cage, the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, and Laura Dern, the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. In this edition, we revisit our September 1990 cover story featuring the beloved actress Laura Dern, in which she discusses learning a bit about her mother in their first scene together on the set of David Lynch‘s Wild at Heart. That Time When is Interview ’s weekly trip through the pop-cultural space-time continuum, where we return to some of the most overlooked moments from issues past.

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