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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.

Such is the state of appointment TV in the social media era that no one involved can discuss the show except to say that a few years ago, Mr. Lynch met Mr. MacLachlan for coffee and asked him if he was ready to take on the role of Agent Cooper again.

Certainly, there isn’t another character Mr. MacLachlan prefers playing or a director he likes working with more. As he put it one recent afternoon while walking up the High Line on Manhattan’s West Side in a khaki Guess windbreaker, gray zip-up cashmere sweater and Levi’s jeans, “Without David, who knows if I’d even still be acting?”

Their relationship started in 1982, when Mr. MacLachlan, having graduated from the University of Washington, was living in Seattle, acting in a regional production of “Tartuffe.” He saw an ad in the paper about a nationwide casting for the movie adaptation of “Dune,” which Mr. Lynch was directing, and decided to audition.

When he met the director, who was born in Montana and had grown up partly in Washington State, they bonded over the Pacific Northwest, wine and science fiction novels.

“It was a perfect fit from the very beginning,” Mr. Lynch said in a phone interview. “Kyle is a great actor. He can play somebody quite pure and quite spiritual, and he can go to the opposite extreme.”

“Dune” turned out to be one of the biggest flops of the 1980s, but it led to Mr. Lynch’s placing Mr. MacLachlan in “Blue Velvet,” which the National Society of Film Critics named the best film of 1986 and has since gone on to appear on numerous lists of the greatest movies of all time.

Then came their collaboration on “Twin Peaks,” which focused on a small-town It Girl whose murder is being investigated by an F.B.I. agent. The show was unlike anything that had ever appeared on network TV and garnered critical praise and Emmy nominations for its cast members, including Mr. MacLachlan. Then, with Mr. Lynch and Mr. Frost leaving the running of the series to others, it went off the rails in the second season, and ABC canceled it.

“I was angry with him at the time,” Mr. MacLachlan said of Mr. Lynch in a 2003 interview.

His career suffered for a while. In 1995, Mr. MacLachlan starred in Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls,” whose embrace by drag queens and cineaste contrarians only seemed to confirm its grand prize status as the decade’s most reviled film. “I remember seeing the movie for the first time in disbelief of how bad it was,” Mr. MacLachlan said. “But what you do in your brain is you say: ‘It’s got to get better. The next scene is going to get better.’ And then your hopes are dashed in the next scene.”

“Some people have gone as far as to try to defend it as a brilliant movie,” he added. “I’m not so sure, but I appreciate the effort.” Ultimately, he couldn’t bring himself to promote it. “I went into hiding,” he said.

Mr. Lynch didn’t hold Mr. MacLachlan’s frustration against him. “It’s a tough life for an actor waiting for the phone to ring,” he said. “You want to work.”

And at a certain point he did.

In 1999, Mr. MacLachlan went for an appointment with his chiropractor, and spotted a mystery brunette in the waiting room.

Her name was Desiree Gruber. At 31, she was already a world-class connecter who served as a vice president at the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan, with clients including supermodels (Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum) and big companies (Miramax Films, Victoria’s Secret). Mr. MacLachlan talked with her briefly but “didn’t have the nerve” to ask for her number before going into traction therapy.

The next evening, he spotted Ms. Gruber at a Talk magazine party at the Mondrian Hotel. They talked the entire night and decided on an even less low-profile date some 24 hours later: the Vanity Fair Oscar party.

Almost immediately, he said, “I couldn’t imagine not being with her forever.” Ms. Gruber was pragmatic and gregarious in a way that brought him out of his shell and motivated him “to do better.”

“She knows more about my industry than I do,” he said. “I like the creative part. As do all actors. The business side is something that I run from. And she has encouraged me to not run from that and to engage. And that’s been incredibly helpful.”

In 2000, Mr. MacLachlan made his debut on “Sex and the City,” a role he accepted when Ms. Gruber told him to stop vacillating and say yes.

Not long after they met, Ms. Gruber left Rogers & Cowan and started the marketing firm Full Picture. There, she helped Harvey Weinstein and Ms. Klum conceive “Project Runway,” a show she owns a piece of.

In 2002, after a string of gossip items, they married in Coral Gables, Fla. The bride wore Amsale; the groom, a custom Tom Ford tux. Ms. Klum and Ms. Campbell were guests. There was also a Cuban band with a cigar roller.

In 2005, Ms. Gruber helped her husband start a wine business, Pursued by Bear. She took on clients such as Google and AOL and began practicing Transcendental Meditation while assisting the David Lynch Foundation with its benefits and partnerships. The couple had a child in 2008, Callum, and Mr. MacLachlan’s career picked up with roles on “Desperate Housewives,” “Portlandia,” “How I Met Your Mother” and Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

His deep knowledge of Pacific Northwesterners came in handy as he stepped into the Birkenstocks of his perpetually peppy “Portlandia” character, a mayor who not only runs Oregon’s biggest city but also embodies its earnest progressiveness by playing bass in a Dub Reggae band and riding a bicycle to work.

“We both grew up in Washington State, and that’s something we bonded over,” said Carrie Brownstein, who created and stars in the show with Fred Armisen. “There’s a like-mindedness, a feeling of being at the edge of the country, the last stop in this potentially false notion of what the American dream is.”

In fact, Mr. Armisen said, one of the reasons he was happy Mr. MacLachlan agreed to play the part is that “we definitely stole from ‘Twin Peaks.’” The actor’s unique gift, he added, was bringing humor to the character’s “do-good” impulse without ever seeming “sarcastic” or “overly ironic.”

Mr. MacLachlan’s marriage also made him something of an off-camera role model to his co-stars.

“They have an enviable relationship,” Ms. Brownstein said of Mr. MacLachlan and Ms. Gruber. “They’re not threatened by the other’s success. Kyle is the first to admit she is the powerhouse of the two of them, and at the same time, that’s given him an artistic freedom.”

So when a reporter suggested concluding the High Line stroll with a visit to Mr. MacLachlan’s wife, the answer was yes.

We arrived at her Flatiron district office around 2 p.m. Everyone from the doormen to the receptionists knew him. “I’ll be right there, Boo,” Ms. Gruber called out from her office.

We stepped inside her lair. Framed photos showed Ms. Gruber with Warren Buffett, Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama, among others. On a table was a copy of a just-released profile of her included in Variety’s “Power of Women: New York.” Ms. Gruber wore a herringbone one-piece from Prada, Manolo Blahnik slingbacks and her trademark Tom Ford glasses.

She poked fun at his old-fashioned, aw-shucks traditionalism. He poked fun at her inclination to try everything new.

The recent iPhone in his hand, they said, was the result of her overcoming his endless kvetching about how a new device was going to be the death of him.

“Technology to me is like a pattern, and I’ve learned a pattern and I’m comfortable with a pattern,” Mr. MacLachlan said. “Then I get a new piece of technology, and I have to learn a whole new pattern.”

He was more enthusiastic about another of Ms. Gruber’s discoveries, the Allbirds cashmere sneakers on his feet. “I love them,” he told her. “You have an eye.”

She pulled from a small refrigerator a couple of aluminum juice packets that she explained were made by a Silicon Valley company called Juicero.

“Are you sure you don’t want a juice?” Ms. Gruber said. “I’m going to have one.”

“Oh my God,” Mr. MacLachlan said, examining a bag. It had bar codes on it and looked like something from a fancy hospital. “Do you have an IV to go with that?”

“Ha, ha, ha, that’s cute,” she said. “It does look like an IV bag, but it’s not. It’s from the future, honey. From the future!”

An assistant took the packets to the nearby Juicero juicer and soon returned with glasses filled with a mixture of kale, lemon, spinach, pineapple and apple. Ms. Gruber coaxed Mr. MacLachlan into taking a sip.

“It’s really good,” he said, sounding by-gosh, by-golly excited to discover that his wife was right yet again.