Perhaps the extended Welsh tribe had become accustomed to theatrics in the family. Welsh’s parents met in New York, on the set of a 1986 made-for-Canadian TV film starring Welsh’s father, Kenneth. (Welsh’s mother was a camera operator.) They split up when Welsh was four, and he moved with his mother from Canada to an ashram in Lake County, California, to join the religious community Adidam—a group rooted in Eastern philosophy and a divine guru worship tradition that has been labeled cultish. Even as a 6-year-old, Welsh felt some discomfort with the “fanatically devoted” Adidam movement. Looking back, he says, “I’ve never identified with putting a lot of faith in something that provides me with certainty that I don’t have to think through on my own.” After two years in California, he returned to his father’s home in the small rural town of Uxbridge, Ontario.

Though Kenneth Welsh is best known for his role as the villain Windom Earle on David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”, he’s also had parts in films by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen and, at 73, he’s still acting. His son acknowledges the profound influence of growing up with a father who was rewarded for the power of his personality, and the unconventional standard of success that came with it.

Welsh got his start performing onstage as a child at Shakespeare Nights, where he read with his dad. He went on to earn the Most Dramatic superlative at his high school senior prom thanks to his drama-class theatrics, as well as dancing and singing roles in Grease and West Side Story. But his father’s renown left him uncomfortable about pursuing acting on his own. Corcoran saw how his friend’s self-consciousness inhibited him back then: “In the small town we’re from, people would only identify him as being the son of this actor.” His father’s influence was undeniable, but Welsh would try to deny it all the same.

His teenage musical palette mostly involved nu-metal and hardcore acts like As I Lay Dying, It Dies Today, and Every Time I Die. He began attending unhinged hardcore shows at makeshift venues, where other people dressed the part—skinny jeans, keys clips, X-ed hands—while Welsh had a more suburban look. He was playing football at the time, primed for aggression. And in his loneliest college years, Welsh was a self-described “gym rat” who dreamt of joining cross-country. But he was eventually drawn back to the stage after starring in a production of Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s Cowboy Mouth, a surrealist one-act play about a couple who transcendentally worship rock’n’roll.

Listening to high school tales from his friends, it sounds like Welsh was always destined to be nothing but a performer. There were those times when he would break up a monotonous lesson by reciting Shakespeare in an incessant clown voice. “People were just like, ‘Devon! It’s not funny! Would you shut the fuck up!’” Corcoran recalls, “That happened all the time.” Once, in the middle of a quiet English class, Welsh—who would go on to major in theater and religion in college—stood on his desk with a copy of the Bible, read some of it aloud, tore out a number of pages, and ate them. Somehow, the teacher didn’t care, but Welsh was punished after a girl ran out of the room crying.