Toby Jones Was Set to Lead David Lynch’s ‘Unrecorded Night’

We already knew Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, and Kyle MacLachlan were supposed to star in David Lynch’s “Unrecorded Night,” but this is quite surprising, and the way things turned out is rather depressing.

It’s been revealed that Toby Jones was set to lead “Unrecorded Night,” as confirmed by Lynch’s longtime collaborator Sabrina Sutherland in an interview with Boston Hassle.

Is there a current actor more perfectly suited for a David Lynch project than Jones? The look, the vibe—it would have been wonderful to see Jones added to the Lynchverse. Sadly, that will never happen, which is why it always feels painful to write about “Unrecorded Night.”

Jones himself never collaborated with Lynch; it was his father, Freddie Jones—who died in 2019—who appeared in “The Elephant Man,” “Dune,” “Wild at Heart,” and Lynch’s television projects “On the Air” and “Hotel Room.”

Yesterday, I reported on Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer, confirming plans to publish the “Unrecorded Night” scripts—so now, when we get to read them, we’ll have Jones in mind for the role he never got to play.

We never really got plot details for “Unrecorded Night,” but based on interviews DP Peter Deming gave, it would have been another “LA canon” installment for Lynch—joining “Mulholland Drive,” “Lost Highway,” and “Inland Empire”—an original mystery blending filmmaking and Old Hollywood, likely intended as a sprawling, multi-episode narrative much like “Twin Peaks: The Return.”