Peter Weir shot the Midsummer Night's Dream sequence of Dead Poets Society on location in Delaware over a month in late 1988. Lara Flynn Boyle was eighteen, cast as Ginny Danbury — Chet's sister — with a second role as Hermia in the staging that anchors the film's middle act. She filmed her Ginny scenes. She filmed Hermia. She went home and waited for the release.

Then she watched the film with her mother, Sally. "Here comes my scene, here comes my scene. No scene, no scene." That's what she told People in 2024. Ginny had been cut. No one called. No one wrote. She found out because the movie was playing on a television in front of her, and she was still sitting there when the credits ran.

The Danbury subplot was a full piece of scaffolding. Ginny was a friend of Chris Noel's, a third young woman in a film that otherwise pushes its women to the edge of the frame. Cut her and you cut the character who was going to give Chris someone besides Knox to talk to, the one who was meant to play Hermia, the one who might have given the film a female friendship. The Midsummer Night's Dream scenes survive because you can't drop a staged Shakespeare sequence without breaking the film's rhythm, so Boyle walks through them wordlessly, a credited extra in what was supposed to be her role.

People didn't ask the counterfactual. If Ginny had stayed at Chris's screen weight, Boyle would have been the breakout young actress of summer 1989. Peter Weir films have a habit of making careers. Ethan Hawke's did. Robert Sean Leonard's too, for the short run he had left. Josh Charles went quiet for a decade and came back to television. Instead, Boyle got the cleanest dispatch Hollywood issues: a credit on a film that contains almost none of her.

She was already familiar with the shape of the edit. Ferris Bueller's Day Off had cut her three years earlier. Dead Poets made her two-for-two.

A year after watching her mother's screen skip over her, she was in Washington state playing Donna Hayward. "Twin Peaks gave me everything I have as an actor," she said. It's hard to picture the timeline where Ginny survives the edit and Lynch still casts her. There aren't many universes where the 1989 breakout of a Robin Williams vehicle signs on to a strange little ABC pilot about a murdered homecoming queen.

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