Matters of Interest In an Archival Interview with Ray Wise

While trying to find an older interview with Sheryl Lee, I accidently found a transcript of an interview with Ray Wise that contains some interesting content I have not read or heard elsewhere. 

The interview is from December 12th, 1990 with Terry Gross for a NPR Fresh Air, which can be heard in full here. Ray Wise discusses his character after the reveal. 

Anni Cordier shared the transcript on her site. I have copy-pasted the information I find the most interesting below. I encourage others to listen or read the entire interview. 

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TG: Did it ease the pain though, knowing that in a way he was innocent? Because after all, he was possessed, it wasn't his own motivation that killed Laura Palmer.

RW: Absolutely. Mark went on to explain my last show and the meaning of the last show. And they also filled me in on some of the background that I hadn't been aware of--that BOB had been inside me for the last four or five years. Leland is a true innocent, in a sense, because he was totally possessed by this evil spirit BOB. So when they told me that it really took the edge off it for me. I was able to accept it a lot better after that.

TG: Did the writers know right from the start that you did it, that Leland Palmer was the vehicle?

RW: Oh yeah. Mark and David promised me that they did. They knew it from the start. I don't think they knew quite *how* they were going to arrive at that point, but I think that they knew who they wanted it to be. And it was me. I was the sacrificial lamb.

TG: Let's talk about that last scene--the death scene, after you confess and then you're barking. Whose idea was it for you to bark?

RW: That's me. That's all me. Tim Hunter directed that episode and Tim did a wonderful job. But I had all these things sort of planned out in my head, the way I wanted to approach it anyway. The times when I was possessed by BOB I wanted to exhibit certain things, and then when I became Leland again I wanted to show certain things. The bark just sort of came out--a very feral thing, very wolflike, very animal-like, and very vicious, and it just seemed to fit with the woods motif.
[TG laughs]
You know, the wolf in the woods--that kind of thing. I did it anyway.

TG: Who came up with the Leland Palmer dance and the weird singing?

RW: The dance, the actual dance that you saw, is mine--it's my creation.

TG: Why don't you describe the dance for our listeners who hadn't been following?

RW: The Leland Shuffle?

TG: Yeah.

RW: Leland, through his grief, has become terribly, terribly sad. Just moping around in corners. And he can't seem to be able to deal with the thought that his daughter is gone, that she was murdered violently. He sort of regresses back to a time in his past when he used to listen to big band music on the record player, that his father introduced him to. He loved that big band music, so he would play these songs from that era, the big band music, and they would soothe his spirit a little bit and calm him down and make him feel a little better. When he played these songs, he would naturally kind of do the dance of the time, which was a kind of a modified jitterbug. He would vary it with some slower steps. If people were watching very closely, they would have seen that the imaginary partner that Leland was dancing with varied in height from time to time and that sometimes that person would get very small. That was little Laura, when she was a little girl. Leland taught her how to dance. She would stand on his feet, and he would take the steps for her. So all of these things were going through Leland's mind at the time: the soothing music, dancing with his daughter. Then it would become too much for him and he would start to cry and to wail, and hold his head in his hands. That was the beginning of the Leland Shuffle--doing that modified jitterbug holding your head in your hands and wailing and crying, and dancing with yourself.