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| “ | This is gonna hurt you. | „ |
| ~ Leo while beating his wife, Shelley |
Leo Johnson is a major antagonist in Twin Peaks and its prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. He is a drug dealer who frequently evades the law around Twin Peaks, Washington, and is closely involved in the murder of Laura Palmer. He is also the abusive husband of Shelley Johnson, and associates himself with violent criminals such as Jacques Renault and Windom Earle.
He was portrayed by Eric Da Re.
Overview[]
Leo is one of the major players in Twin Peaks, Washington's illegal narcotics trade, using his day job as a long haul trucker to smuggle cocaine from Canada and sell them through One-Eyed Jack's, a bar and brothel owned by gangster Jacques Renault. He employs high school students Bobby Briggs and Mike Nelson as dealers. While he has a lonmg criminal record, with arrests for such offenses as assault and drunk driving, he always manages to avoid serious prison time, a source of frustration for Sheriff Harry S. Truman.
He is the abusive husband of waitress Shelley Johnson (née MacCauley), Briggs' ex-girlfriend who was only 16 when they married; he beats her with his bare hands or blunt objects for the smallest mistakes or challenges to his fragile ego, or for no reason at all. Even when he isn't physically harming her, he treats her "like a maid he doesn't have to pay for". He also has an on-off sexual relationship with Laura Palmer, a 17-year-old high school student who is secretly a prostitute working for him and Renault,
Appearances[]
Twin Peaks[]
When Laura is found murdered, Leo becomes the chief suspect in her death, with Truman and FBI Agent Dale Cooper opening investigations into his crimes. He also begins to suspect, correctly, that Shelley is cheating on him with Briggs, his suspicion fueling his increasingly vicious abuse, including an incident in which he gives a savage beating with a bar of soap in a sock because he blames her for misplacing a T-shirt.
The following day, he meets with Briggs and Nelson, demanding the $10,000 they owe him, but Briggs tells him that Laura took the money before she died. He menaces Briggs by saying that he has a feeling that Shelley is cheating on him, and then gives him a football filled with cocaine to sell, telling him and Nelson to "go long for a pass" and throwing it to them.
Soon afterward, Renault calls Leo and tells him that his brother, Bernard, has been arrested, and orders him to "pick him up". Understanding what Renault is really asking for, Leo bails Bernard out of jail and then kills him to stop him for informing on Renault. He shows Bernard's body to Benjamin Horne, Twin Peaks' richest citizen, and then takes money from Horne to burn down the Packard Sawmill, owned by Horne's business rival, Josie Packard.
Hank Jennings, the ex-husband of Shelley's employer Norma Jennings, beats Leo up as he leaves a bar, warning him that he will kill Shelley himself if he doesn't toe the line with Hank. Leo returns home and takes his humiliation out on Shelley, shoving her to the floor when she asks about his bruises. Shelley, finally fed up with his abuse, shoots him in the arm and throws him out of the house. Enraged, Leo starts stalking Shelley as she begins openly dating Briggs, at one point attempting to shoot them before a police broadcast informs him of Renault's pet bird, Waldo, who he targets and shoots.
One night, he breaks into Shelley's house and kidnaps her, taking her to the remains of the sawmill and tied her up. He set the timer for a makeshift gasoline bomb for one hour and lured Briggs inside the mill, where he attacked the teenager with an axe. Before he can kill Briggs, however, an unseen assailant shoots him in the back, rendering him unconscious. Deputy Andy Brennan finds him and brings him to the hospital, where he is in a coma for several weeks.
He regains consciousness, but he is left paralyzed and mute, capable of communicating only by moaning in pain and dependent on a kazoo to help him breathe. Shelley takes him back in their house, where she and Briggs punish him for abusing her by carrying out their affair right in front of him, "accidentally" running his wheelchair into doors and walls, and dropping heavy objects on his paralyzed legs. He partially regains the ability to speak, moaning, "New shoes!", which leads to Shelley, Briggs, and Cooper finding a microcassette in the heel of Leo's boots containing evidence that helps Cooper discover the identity of Laura's murderer: her father Leland, who was possessed by the demonic serial killer BOB.
Eventually, however, Leo regains the ability to walk and attacks Shelley. Briggs comes to her defense, but Leo overpowers him, once again preparing to kill him and Shelley with an axe. Shelley stabs him in the leg, however, allowing her and Briggs to get away. Leo limps into the nearby woods, where he is found by Cooper's archnemesis Windom Earle, who forces Leo to do his bidding by putting a shock collar on him and torturing him with electric shocks if he disobeys. Leo helps Earle kidnap Shelley and Briggs' father, Garland, as part of Earle's larger plan to destroy Cooper. When Briggs tries to save Shelley and his father, Leo, in a rare moment of humanity, frees the captives and allows Briggs to escape with them. Angered at being betrayed, Earle binds Leo with a string between his teeth that holds up a nest of tarantulas, which will come down on Leo's head if he opens his mouth. Earle then leaves him to die; his death is later confirmed in the book Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier.
Twin Peaks: Fire Come Walk with Me[]
The prequel film to the TV series, which portrays the last week of Laura Palmer's life, Leo is first seen hitting Shelley and refusing to give Briggs any more cocaine to sell, saying that he owed him $5,000.
Near the end of the film, Leo has a cocaine-fuelled orgy with Laura, Renault, and prostitute Ronette Pulaski in which she and Renault rape and brutalize the girls. Leo and Renault get into an argument in which Leo hits his boss in the head with a liquor bottle, and Renault uses Leo's t-shirt to soak up the blood from the wound - the same t-shirt that Leo would later blame Shelley for losing and use as an excuse to beat her. Jacques ties Laura up against her will and goes outside to pass out. Laura begs Leo to untie her, but he refuses and leaves her there for a possessed Leland to find and kill.
Trivia[]
In a 1991 Saturday Night Live sketch parodying Twin Peaks, Leo Johnson was portrayed by the late Chris Farley.
External links[]
- Leo Johnson on the Twin Peaks Wiki
[]
 Villains
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BOB | Cooper's doppelganger (Woodsmen, Hutch, Chantal Hutchens, Duncan Todd, Anthony Sinclair) | Judy | Windom Earle | Leo Johnson | The Arm | Richard Horne | Jacques Renault | Jean Renault | Bernard Renault | Steven Burnett | Hank Jennings | Thomas Eckhardt | Blackie O'Reilly | Mitchum Brothers | Chad Broxford | Evelyn Marsh | Malcolm Sloan | Jonathan Kumagai |