The Man Behind Winkie's, Mulholland Drive (2001)
Two men sit in a booth at Winkie's on Sunset Boulevard. Dan tells Herb about a dream set in this same diner, and about someone out back: "I hope that I never see that face, ever, outside of a dream."
Lynch's only note for the performance was that the character "just had a bad dream". The camera drifts over the actors' shoulders throughout, to keep the scene nervous.
The figure is played by a woman, Bonnie Aarons. Lynch refused a mask because he wanted to see her bone structure and her eyes. Instead she was covered in real dirt, moss, oatmeal and steel wool, applied with tweezers over twelve hours.
In the 1999 ABC pilot the figure appears once, staring into the camera at night. In the film it returns at the end, with the blue box in a paper bag.
Winkie's was never on Sunset. Lynch remembered a diner at Sunset and Gower, and the scene was shot at a former Denny's in Gardena, since closed and boarded up. The menus from the set sold at the David Lynch estate auction in 2025.
