Welcome to a celebrity profile in which you learn almost nothing about the project the subject is promoting. As your tour guide, I do apologize. So does Kyle MacLachlan, and it’s hard to be mad at him.

The guy exudes a Pacific Northwest joie de vivre, one he has used to great effect over the years playing men who are all chipper surfaces — high-I.Q. Mr. Cleans — with edginess or daffiness, or both, lurking beneath.

In “Blue Velvet,” he played an innocent-seeming college student who didn’t mind stumbling into a sadomasochistic murder mystery. On “Sex and the City,” he was a blue blood incapable of getting aroused without an issue of Juggs at hand. And on David Lynch’s creepy, brilliant “Twin Peaks,” he played Dale Cooper, the cherry-pie-inhaling, coffee-swilling F.B.I. special agent who waxes poetic about the majestic beauty of Douglas firs and turns out to have a dangerous past.

Now, after a 26-year hiatus, “Twin Peaks” is gearing up for a new 18-episode series on Showtime starting May 21, with every episode written by its co-creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, and directed by Mr. Lynch. Mr. MacLachlan, 58, is elated to be stepping back into his black suit and working with co-stars old and new — Sherilyn Fenn, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, David Duchovny — save for one thing: “We all signed N.D.A.s,” he said.