The 2022 The Fabelmans served as a way for Steven Spielberg to tell a semi-autobiographical account (one that was critically well received) of how his love for movies came to be and how his early years of directing went, albeit with the primary characters’ names changed. By the end of this heartfelt and messy masterpiece though, audiences were treated to an almost beat-for-beat recreation of something the filmmaker experienced in real life, with Gabrielle LaBelle’s Sammy Fabelman meeting director John Ford. It turns out that while fellow filmmaker David Lynch almost didn’t accept the role of Ford, Cheetos helped convince him to come aboard. No, seriously!
While Lynch is primarily known for his work behind the camera on movies like The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, occasionally he’s gone in front of the camera to perform roles, like when he played Gordon Cole across the Twin Peaks TV shows and 1992 tie-in movie. However, when Spielberg called Lynch to ask him to play Ford in The Fabelmans, Lynch initially wasn’t keen on portraying the director behind classics like The Grapes of Wrath and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, telling Empire:
