Kyle

MICHELLE Keegan may have gripped the nation with her new ITV drama The Blame, but there’s one surprising TV appearance that has been doing the rounds on social media again.

It’s not the actress fronting a Netflix mini-series or portraying a soldier in Our Girl, but a forgotten stint on The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Michelle was technically on the now-axed chat show – but as her Coronation Street character, Tina McIntyre.

The soap hilariously did a crossover with Jeremy Kyle’s eponymous show for a special episode back in 2010.

The show tackled family and relationship issues and saw members of the British public work out their drama on air.

And who has more drama than the Platt family?

OH HELLE

Michelle Keegan enjoys public romp with hunky police officer in ITV’s The Blame

show switch

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During the crossover episode, Michelle’s character Tina appears on the show as her boyfriend, David (Jack P. Shepherd) is accusing her of having a relationship with his brother Nick (Ben Price).

In a clip from the episode, which has been unearthed by TikTok users and is now being circulated around the app, the trio are seen at loggerheads.

“Shut up David,” Tina is seen shouting over the stage as the pair go back and forth, with Jeremy getting involved.

Later, Nick and David are seen fighting over Tina as Nick slams: “She doesn’t like him. She doesn’t fancy you, she doesn’t, it’s over!”

“You think you can fly in, Nick, and take a piece of her,” hits back David, as Tina breaks down into tears and he slams her “waterworks”.

A crying Tina then tells Jeremy: “I’m sick of him, he ruins everything. Even the thought of accusing me of sleeping with Nick, it’s not important to me right now.

“And he’s got a cheek to actually question it – you’ve got a cheek David.”

The hilarious crossover, which was to celebrate the 1000th episode of the Jeremy Kyle Show, came in the middle of Michelle’s time on Coronation Street, which she joined in 2008.

As the clip has been circulating around Tiktok, many users on the video streaming app were confused as to whether it was real or for a skit.

One user said: “If I didn’t know this was a special episode with actors, I would’ve thought this was real, it’s well good 👏😂”

“I would not have recognised her…what year is this???,” said a second of Michelle.

A third praised: “Corrie was on another level creating this with JK, it makes it look so more real.”

Michelle was just 23 at the time of filming the scenes.

She eventually left the soap in 2014, as Tina was killed off.

Teoscar Hernández? Sure. Max Muncy? Certainly. Tarik Skubal? Absolutely.

But Kyle Tucker? Are you kidding me?

Of all the heroes in the Dodgers’ 5-3 victory over the Atlanta Braves in their National League Division Series opener Saturday at Dodger Stadium, none was more stunning than the shrugging, somnolent, underachieving right fielder whom Dodger fans have treated like an overpaid outcast.

Just listen to them now.

Booo…Yayyyyy!

Locked in a one-run game on a scorching 100-degree afternoon, Tucker drove an AJ Smith-Shawver fastball 408 feet over the right-field fence in the sixth inning for a two-run homer that essentially ended the Braves’ afternoon and set up the Dodgers for what appears to be a certain series sweep.

Yes, the Dodgers only lead one game to none in this best-of-five deal, but the Braves are clearly out of breath and out of pitching after enduring last week’s wild-card series against the Philadelphia Phillies.

The Braves dug deep in their bullpen for all eight innings Saturday. They may have to dig even deeper in Game 2 on Sunday or desperately start ace Chris Sale on short rest.

Their offense looks wasted, their bullpen is taxed, and they spent most of Saturday in one sweaty mess.

Of course, the Dodger bullpen almost handed the game back to them when Ozzie Albies hit a two-run homer off Tanner Scott in the ninth to close what seemed to be an insurmountable gap. But Scott was mercifully lifted for Evan Phillips, who recorded the final out of the game to save the Dodgers from disgrace.

And to etch Tucker into the rare role of hero.

“Obviously for us it’s about winning a championship,” said manager Dave Roberts when asked about Tucker afterward. “Our fans, they really remember what you do in the postseason. So this is certainly a way to change the story for a season in 2026.”

Indeed, except for the back end of the bullpen, Dodgers old and new rose to the championship occasion.

Skubal in his first Dodger postseason start after being traded here from Detroit on Aug. 2? Six innings of brilliance, 15 batters in a row retired at one point, only one three-ball count in the first five innings, two allowed hits, seven strikeouts, two walks and only nicked by a Sean Murphy homer.

Dodgers pitcher Tarik Skubal delivers during the first inning Saturday against the Braves.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Teoscar Hernández, almost benched during a rocky regular season? Same old Teo, the guy who leads the Dodgers with 27 RBIs over the last three postseasons, this time opening the scoring with a two-run homer in the fourth.

Max Muncy, the forgotten stalwart who always seems to show up huge in October? Same old Max, blasting a ball over the right-field fence in the sixth to give the Dodgers a 5-1 lead.

But Kyle Tucker? This was not the same old Tucker. Nobody saw this coming. Certainly, he finished the regular season strong with a .969 OPS in September with six homers and 13 RBIs, but he was awful for most of the previous five months after joining the team this winter with baseball’s highest annual salary of $60 million.

Tucker batted .196 at home. He seemingly jogged after fly balls, wildly swung and missed at fastballs, and who would have thought he would take control with one out in the sixth and the Dodgers leading 2-1?

There was one out. This was a big moment. Skubal was out of the game and the Dodgers had lost all their early momentum when Hernández popped a single to center, bringing up Tucker.

On Smith-Shawver’s second pitch, he connected, and after Tucker trotted across home plate, the most amazing thing happened.

He smiled.

“I think that we all know — it’s been well talked about — the struggles he had this year,” said Roberts. “I give him a lot of credit for grinding through it, not running from it, always posting and kind of getting to the other side of it.”

It was an otherwise ordinary Dodger playoff win that began with a rare bit of Dodger second-guessing.

Many questioned the Dodgers choosing to pitch Skubal in Saturday’s opener while slotting Blake Snell into Sunday’s spot and leaving last season’s playoff hero Yoshinobu Yamamoto on the bench until Game 3.

The reasoning was that Skubal could get two starts in this series on full rest while Yamamoto, who requires an extra day’s rest, was only getting one start in the series regardless. Furthermore, by holding him back in this series, the Dodgers ensured that Yamamoto would get two starts in the National League Championship Series.

Still, you have to wonder, how do you take a guy with a 7-0 postseason record with a 2.25 ERA and put him third in the rotation?

Turns out, the Dodgers knew what they were doing, and before the game, even Andrew Friedman acknowledged this was their best pitching staff of this era.

“I feel like this is the best and deepest pitching staff we’ve ever had going into October,” said the Dodgers president of baseball operations. “I think we had some tough conversations in leaving some guys off the roster. That would have never happened before.”

There were also pregame question marks surrounding the health of Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman.

Those questions remain, as the two future Hall of Famers went two-for-seven with two singles and not much power.

Ohtani, fighting arm and leg injuries, entered the game batting .157 since Aug. 18 with zero home runs during that time.

“As of now, it’s something I’m just going to have to manage,” he said through interpreter Will Ireton.

Ohtani and Freeman are going to have to manage better than this for the Dodgers to three-peat.

Maybe they should take some advice from the Dodgers’ latest candidate to be christened Mr. October.

Kyle Tucker? Yeah, him.

Kyle MacLachlan is living up to his reputation as the Internet’s Dad.

It’s an especially warm day in August, and the bespectacled actor, best known for his many projects with the late auteur David Lynch, is approaching with a coffee (black, naturally) in one hand and a massive cookie in the other. The snack, it turns out, is meant for us to share.

“Whatever it is, it’s very healthy,” he says when I ask what sort of confection he chose. “It’s cranberry, oatmeal and gluten-free. Who knows if there’s any sugar in there?”

At 67, MacLachlan isn’t necessarily a health nut. But he is highly amenable and willing to roll with my vegan cafe selection, which is conveniently located near our photo shoot location. “I come from Eastern Washington state — it’s a desert,” he says assuringly when I offer to move us to an indoor seat with air conditioning. Later, as we prepare to leave for the shoot, he clocks my car, a rare station wagon, and dubs it “spec-TAC-u-lar.”

That’s MacLachlan for you — all it takes is one word (he also drops an “Aces!” during our meeting) or enthusiastic gesture (very likely a swooping thumbs up) to channel the type of eccentric and upbeat characters he’s spent the last 40 years playing. Now, with the release of his thoughtful new memoir, “Fictional Selves,” MacLachlan gives us a much closer look at the man behind the chin-jutting grin, and, in doing so, introduces us to his doppelganger, “Other Kyle,” an image-conscious shadow figure constantly trailing behind, questioning his choices.

“There’s definitely another entity, an observer, the ego, the harder self,” MacLachlan says of how he would describe Other Kyle, whom ghostwriter Jon Sternfeld first identified after noticing the way MacLachlan tended to fall into conversation with himself while recounting his life. “[He’s] the kind of person that I’m not comfortable leading within the world. But he’s definitely in there commenting on the things that I do.”

Other Kyle first began to taunt MacLachlan after he saw himself on a gargantuan billboard for “Dune” in Times Square. (In his early 20s, MacLachlan was famously plucked from obscurity to lead David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic.)

Well before his alter ego materialized, and well before Hollywood found him, MacLachlan was prone to anxiety and fears of never fitting in. Born in Yakima, Wash., MacLachlan grew up the oldest of three boys; his parents were solidly middle-class, with his father working as a lawyer, and then stockbroker. His mother was a homemaker known in the community for her civic involvement, particularly in local arts programs. In fact, it was MacLachlan’s mother who first encouraged him to try a “Teen Theater” program, drawing him in with the promise that there might also be girls in attendance.

But it took a minute for MacLachlan to genuinely embrace his calling. As a young adult, his father pushed him to study business, while his mother urged him to try PR or communications. His studies at the University of Washington weren’t going well, so he dropped out and worked at a manufacturing plant back in Yakima. It wasn’t until a girlfriend recommended a summer theater program in North Carolina that MacLachlan leaned back into his first real passion, eventually returned to school with a newfound focus, and was accepted into the University of Washington’s professional acting program.

Kyle MacLachlan at the glass and mirror shop LA Mirror Man on La Cienega Boulevard.

(Christopher Patey / For The Times)

Fast-forward 40 years, it’s impossible to imagine that MacLachlan would have anything else for Other Kyle to latch onto. For one, his acting resume is the stuff of thespian fantasy. Sure, “Dune” infamously flopped hard upon arrival, and all planned sequels were immediately canceled. But it wasn’t long before MacLachlan had teamed back up with his mentor, with whom he had developed an almost telepathic bond on “Dune,” to lead Lynch’s much more kindly received 1986 neo-noir arthouse entry, “Blue Velvet.” A few years later, the overwhelming success of the TV mystery series “Twin Peaks” propelled the actor to the upper stratosphere of celebrity.

“When we were working together creating Jeffrey in ‘Blue Velvet’ or [Coop in] ‘Twin Peaks,’ we would sit and talk or not talk, we melded together in some weird way, we were like one person,” MacLachlan says of his bond with Lynch, who died in early 2025 of cardiac arrest due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “It was this very symbiotic kind of thing in front of the camera,” MacLachlan continues. “It was like this weird circular energy. … He’s the only director I share that with.”

And yet, breaking out of what MacLachlan refers to as “The Black Suit,” worn by his unceasingly chipper “Twin Peaks” character, Special Agent Dale Cooper, proved challenging. By the time “Twin Peaks” left the air in 1991, MacLachlan had grown ambivalent about the job that changed his life, partially because he felt Lynch didn’t fight hard enough to keep artistic control of the show’s second season, which saw the network upping its creative involvement and Lynch distancing himself until the final few episodes.

MacLachlan longed to diversify his output — to show that he was capable of being a mainstream Hollywood leading man, one who could interface with a variety of directors. In the book, he writes about jobs he comes so close to booking — roles in Robert Redford’s “A River Runs Through It” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula” — but losing out at the last minute.

Kyle MacLachlan explores his alter ego “Other Kyle” in his new memoir.

(Christopher Patey / For The Times)

He took these rejections hard at the time. Many decades later, however, he can see how he was the one holding himself back. “I felt like people were only seeing the black suit,” MacLachlan says. “Now, the truth is, they would probably have been more than happy to see me as somebody else, but I was not able to deliver. … I think there was a lot of insecurity,” he continues. “I was like, ‘Maybe it’s not the suit. Maybe it’s me.’”

As the 1990s played out, MacLachlan fought an on-again, off-again existential crisis regarding the type of actor he was really meant to be. His friend and former “Doors” co-star Val Kilmer urged him to accept a lead role in a BBC adaptation of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which didn’t move the cultural needle in the States, but did put him in the same room as enormously pedigreed actors like Anthony Hopkins and Alfred Molina. He snagged a role in a Paul Verhoeven film about topless dancers — a career risk he hoped would pay off but ultimately felt like “walking into a buzz saw,” as he writes in the book.

Despite the cult reappraisal of “Showgirls,” and the lasting popularity of “Sex and the City,” Other Kyle had a few things to say about both of these roles, but the Kyle sitting across from me has a much more measured approach, particularly to “Showgirls.”

“I think it’s fun that it’s still around,” MacLachlan says. “I’ll still argue with anyone that [says] it’s a good movie. It’s not a good movie, but it’s definitely an appreciated movie, and that is kind of where I leave it.”

In the early 2000s, his wife, Full Picture founder and chief executive Desiree Gruber, pushed him to accept a role in HBO’s “Sex and the City,” playing an Upper East Side doctor with erectile issues.

Portraying Trey MacDougal was a mixed bag for MacLachlan. On one hand, he was thrilled to be part of such a cultural juggernaut, and he delighted in the emphasis the show placed on female friendship and sexual agency.

“I want to keep being challenged,” says Kyle MacLachlan, looking ahead to the next chapter of his 40-year career.

(Christopher Patey / For The Times)

At the same time, he had mixed feelings about playing an old-money mama’s boy with a Freudian Madonna-whore complex. Not to mention the sheer ridiculousness of the things the writers would have him do: One scene had him bent over a bathroom sink, masturbating to a pornographic magazine. A passage of “Fictional Selves” also recalls the cringe-inducing moment when Trey gives his wife, Charlotte (Kristin Davis), a cardboard cutout of a baby in an effort to make light of their struggle to conceive.

In the book, MacLachlan recalls being utterly dumbfounded at having been asked to do something so oblivious at best and cruel at worst. Eventually, however, he writes that he realized the writers just needed a way to foist him off the show. (His and Davis’ characters get divorced soon after the cardboard baby incident.)

“Every time I got a script, I’d be like, ‘Oh boy, OK, what’s going to happen here?’” MacLachlan says. “And then it would be, like, whatever they’ve come up with, ‘how can I shape it? What is it that [Trey’s] wrestling with? What are the issues here? Then, you know, realizing that in some cases it was just going to be a sight gag. Like, the Juggs magazine is going to be a sight gag. And as I said in the book, in my mind, I would sort of float away. I would be like, ‘That’s not really me. I don’t know who that is down there doing that.’”

As MacLachlan moved into middle age, he gradually grew more comfortable with the clean-cut oddball characters he’d so often be asked to play: a refined but possibly murderous dentist on “Desperate Housewives,” an idiosyncratic boat obsessive on “How I Met Your Mother,” an over-the-top civic leader on “Portlandia,” and, once again, Special Agent Dale Cooper (plus his doppelgängers) on “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

The 2017 “Twin Peaks” reboot would be the last big project MacLachlan would work on with Lynch, but MacLachlan would frequently visit the director in their shared Hollywood Hills neighborhood. “It’s many things,” MacLachlan says when I ask what he misses most about his friend and mentor. “The voice on the phone — ‘HEY, KALE! Come on up for coffee!’” he continues in a pitch-perfect Lynch imitation. (“Kale” became Lynch’s nickname for MacLachlan, referencing “Dune” producer Dino De Laurentiis’ Italian pronunciation.)

“Towards the end, I would go to visit him, and I would sometimes take my phone and record things. I still have these stories loaded in my iPhone — about ‘Dune,’ or a story about a moment in ‘Blue Velvet,’ or a story about when he met John Huston, or when he got a kiss from Elizabeth Taylor. … I have these little gems, and I savor those.”

Lately, Other Kyle has been replaced by Online Kyle, a goofy, lighthearted version of MacLachlan who primarily lives on TikTok and Instagram — thus the wholesome, Gen Z title of “Internet’s Dad.” And when he’s not playing a father to Ella Purnell on Prime Video’s hit “Fallout,” or interviewing a younger generation of entertainers on his podcast, “What Are We Even Doing,” MacLachlan is also someone’s real dad. One of the most endearing moments in our afternoon happens when his teenage son, Callum, calls looking for something around the house. “Oh, it’s in the fridge in the gym. In a foil. And there’s chicken in the fridge. Love you too,” MacLachlan tells his son.

There’s certainly no doubt that this Kyle doesn’t get in his head — or in his own way — the way earlier versions did. He’s still eager to test his limits as an actor, but he’s comfortable with the thought that there is no plan. “I want to keep working with interesting people,” he says with his trademark buoyancy. “I want to keep doing fun things. I want to keep being challenged. … I don’t really know where I’m going, but something will excite me, and I’d be like, ‘OK, what the hell?’ And I jump in.”

Brodsky is an L.A. culture and music writer. Her biography of Stevie Nicks “Lessons & Lace” is out now.