Three decades after the release of Resident Evil 2, fans have finally figured out who STARS agent Jill Valentine was romantically entangled with at the time of the Raccoon City incident: none other than Twin Peaks and Fallout star Kyle MacLachlan, according to a new discovery. While Capcom has since retconned that supposed relationship, the proof that “Jill’s friend” is the original silver screen Muad’Dib is a shocking and welcome revelation.
In the original Resident Evil 2, and in subsequent ports of the 1998 survival horror game, players can take a peek at Jill Valentine’s desk in the STARS office at the Raccoon City Police Department. On her desk is a framed photo, and Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield will comment on the object: “It’s a picture of a young man. There’s a good chance it’s her boyfriend…”
Resident Evil fans have debated who the subject of that photo is for the past 28 years, and whether or not Jill was actually dating that “young man.” It took the exhaustive research of a fan who’s been documenting the background art in Capcom’s games to figure it out. On Monday, a Resident Evil scholar who goes by the name Morio revealed, “Alright, that’s it then. The guy from Jill’s desk is Kyle MacLachlan. Years of searching finally over.”
The photo of Kyle MacLachlan identified by Morio is a pin-up from a vintage Japanese movie magazine, possibly the long-running Roadshow. (MacLachlan was featured on the cover of Roadshow in 1992 to promote the recently released movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.) In the photo used in Resident Evil 2, the pin-up mentions that he’s about to appear in 1993’s The Trial, adaptation of Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel of the same name.
Incidentally, the photo used in that pin-up actually appears to come from a photo shoot that MacLachlan did for Subaru; he was a spokesperson for the Subaru Impreza in the early ’90s and appeared in a promotional video and calendar for the car brand. (MacLachlan also promoted another Japanese brand in the early ’90s, shilling Georgia canned coffee as his Twin Peaks character Agent Dale Cooper.)
There’s been some debate about whether or not Jill Valentine had a boyfriend at the time. Some players have interpreted the player’s interaction with the framed photo to imply that Claire and Leon simply assume that the man in the framed photo is her boyfriend. In a 2019 playthrough of the original Resident Evil 2 featuring commentary from game director Hideki Kamiya, however, he refers to the young man as Jill’s boyfriend and teases his identity.
“This is supposed to be Jill’s boyfriend, but in the remake it’s her dog,” Kamiya says, as translated by Resident Evil expert and author Alex Aniel. “[I] would have been fine if they left the boyfriend in the other one. Nobody knows who he is… Sorry, guys.”
Clearly, Claire and Leon don’t know who he is, which is certainly possible if it is the Hollywood icon. MacLachlan was definitely not at the height of his popularity in 1998, when Resident Evil 2 takes place. In the years leading up to RE2‘s release, MacLachlan starred in fare like Showgirls and The Flintstones, as well as a slew of made-for-TV movies (including The Trial). Twin Peaks had been off the air since 1991.
That said, as pointed out by Morio in the following video, the STARS office is full of photos of Hollywood celebrities. One STARS team member’s desk has a framed photo of Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence, while other photos from Back to the Future Part 3, Maverick, and Benny & Joon adorn corkboards in the office.
When Capcom remade Resident Evil 2 in 2019, Jill’s “friend” was changed from (allegedly) Kyle MacLachlan to a smiling Golden Retriever, canonically changing the supposed “boyfriend” to “woman’s best friend.” In a 2019 video featuring an alcohol-infused roundtable discussion from the Resident Evil 2 remake team, developers address the change.
“In the original, it was like her boyfriend,” says an unidentified member of the RE2 remake team. “This time, after some thought, we made her boyfriend a dog. And everyone likes dogs, don’t they?”
Yes, that is correct.
Polygon has reached out to Kyle MacLachlan’s publicist for comment on any relationship the actor may have had with Jill Valentine in the late 1990s. But according to a 2000 story in The Guardian, MacLachlan split up with girlfriend Linda Evangelista in 1998, leaving a gap in his dating resume. Hmm…
We’ll update this story should MacLachlan’s team reveal any further details.
[Ed. note: If you want the original Kyle MacLachlan pin-up photo for your own desk, an eBay seller of vintage Japanese movie memorabilia is currently selling one.]
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