Madeleine "Maddy" Ferguson

Laura Palmer's cousin from Missoula, Montana, Maddy arrives in Twin Peaks to comfort the grieving Palmer family and finds herself living in the house where Laura grew up. Bespectacled, brunette, and gently awkward next to her cousin's photographs, she is warm, a little uncertain, and unnervingly similar to the dead girl everyone keeps describing to her.

The trick is casting: Sheryl Lee plays both Laura and Maddy, so every scene carries a quiet double exposure, the town and the camera treating a living, ordinary young woman as a ghost's understudy. Lee makes Maddy distinct anyway, softer and more tentative than Laura, which makes the resemblance eerier rather than redundant.