‘They pulled a guy’s face off. It’s my favourite bit!’ Linda Cardellini on Freaks and Geeks, Mad Men and slasher horror Crystal Lake
‘The first time I had the tooth in my hand,” says Linda Cardellini, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m doing.’” The star of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me, Mad Men and DTF St Louis (for which she recently won an Emmy) is talking about her pivot towards full-blown horror. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th movies, Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the original slasher of the 1980 film. The tooth, by the way, is human and gets embedded in Pam’s knuckle – until she yanks it out with a gruesome, revolting slurping sound.
Casual filmgoers may associate Friday the 13th with Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing serial killer. But aficionados will know that Pam, Jason’s mother, is the villain of the first movie. “He didn’t even have the mask until the third movie,” says Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework. “Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death.” (There is some massaging of previous storylines in Crystal Lake, such as moving Jason’s drowning from the 1950s to the early 70s, but since the franchise is flexible enough to have sent Jason into space at one point, a bit of timeline tweaking feels fair game.)
The Friday the 13th franchise has a devoted audience – and Crystal Lake’s showrunner, Brad Caleb Kane, is among them. “He’s such a fan,” says Cardellini. “I felt he would have an idea of what fans were wanting.” Kane wrote the part specifically for her, after seeing her in Netflix thriller Dead to Me, which came as a surprise. “My biggest question was, ‘How did I become the person at the front of your mind for this?’” she laughs. Did they feel any pressure in taking Friday the 13th on? “It’s daunting, but hopefully it’s an opportunity to see more of something that didn’t really get its own avenue.”
Anyone who grew up in the 1980s and 90s, as Cardellini did (she is 51), will remember sleepovers with rented VHS tapes and a lot of screaming whenever Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees appeared on screen. “It was forbidden fruit, almost,” she says. “You weren’t supposed to be able to watch it, but you would. And not only the gore but the sexuality – all the things you’re not supposed to be watching. I think it is part of the allure when you’re young. It seems off-limits and rebellious.”
She liked the jump scares and the gore, which is handy, because Crystal Lake is full of them. One vivid sequence involves an astronomical amount of blood. “We reserved a whole week for that,” she says, which is highly unusual for TV, as it tends to move quickly. It had to be precisely planned and choreographed, not least because Cardellini’s hair in the show is lighter, and they soon found that the fake blood stained it pink.
“Even the guy’s face coming off is done on the day with prosthetics, instead of CGI. It’s what you’re actually looking at, which helps with your reaction.” So that wasn’t done in post-production? “No! They pulled it off with fishing wire. So I saw it for the first time as it came off. It stuck with me for a while, because it’s disgusting.” It proved to be one of her highlights. “That’s actually one of my favourite parts of the show. It’s like a blood opera.”
Crystal Lake arrives on a new wave of mainstream horror, from films such as Obsession and Backrooms to Carrie and Widow’s Bay on TV. Why does Cardellini think horror is having a moment? “It’s a great question. I can imagine there’s something about the experience of it that is very present – and it’s a controlled fear, because you know that in a few hours, you will have a resolution. Maybe that is digestible.”
Recently, Cardellini was backstage at a screening of the show at New York Comic Con. “There was some gasping and yelling and cheers – and afterwards, a laugh. That’s when you’re like, ‘OK, this is great, because that’s what the movies did.’ They made you afraid, then you laughed out loud. That is what we were going for. That felt good.”
Cardellini grew up in California and started acting in the mid-1990s. Her breakout was Freaks and Geeks, the Paul Feig/Judd Apatow teen comedy in which she played good girl gone bad Lindsay Weir. The early 80s-set series, a fond, witty look at teenage rebellion, burned bright and fast and was promptly cancelled by NBC in 2000, before its first season had finished airing. As well as Cardellini, it rocket-launched the careers of Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and Busy Philipps.
“If you got cancelled, you were just gone,” she says now. “You didn’t even know where it went. The idea that it would live on, once we weren’t going to make any more, just didn’t seem possible.” Through DVDs and word of mouth, though, Freaks and Geeks slowly became a classic of the high school TV genre. “That it had a life afterwards was a shock – and that it still has a life is amazing.”
On the subject of all-time-greatest TV series, Cardellini joined Mad Men in its sixth season, playing Sylvia Rosen, who has an affair with Don Draper. There was such secrecy around this that when she auditioned, names and details were changed. “I had no idea what I would be doing and [creator] Matt Weiner said, ‘Just trust me, it’s gonna get great.’ I think it was the first two scripts I got – I had one line. I thought, ‘What am I doing? What is this?’” But Weiner had told her it would be a great part and he was not lying. Not only does her character go on to remind Don of a sex worker from his youth, she also gets to leave him, triggering an obsession. “It unfolded like a surprise for me,” she says.
In September, Cardellini won her first Emmy for her role as Carol Love-Smernitch in HBO’s DTF St Louis. “I’ve been nominated before, but winning is a very different feeling,” she says. “It was a wonderful moment.” DTF St Louis is a singular series: Carol is married to American Sign Language interpreter Floyd, but is having an affair with his best friend Clark, a TV weatherman who rides a weird bike and likes to pretend to be a robot during sex. When Cardellini first heard about the show, she thought she knew how the story would go. “A love triangle between a married couple and a best friend, and somebody turns up dead,” she recalls. “But when I read it, I thought, ‘I’ve never read anything like this.’ Every time I thought I knew where it was going, it went somewhere else, in this beautiful, nuanced, very human way.”
The show is a strange, sweet meditation on loneliness, with an offbeat streak. Carol, for instance, is a part-time baseball umpire. “Since I’ve played an umpire, I’ve met so many people who have told me they are also umpires, and it’s people you don’t expect. Also, the parent attacks that they have to weather are pretty funny.” Could she still umpire a game? “Maybe Little League. I don’t know if I can handle the parents!”
That Emmy award now lives on the mantel of her fireplace. Her first appearance on TV was in 1994, when she was a contestant on the quizshow The Price Is Right. You can see it on YouTube – she won a fireplace. Hang on, it’s not the same fireplace is it? “I wish! I don’t have that fireplace any more because, oddly enough, I lost it in a fire.” You lost a fireplace in a fire? “I was working and put a lot of stuff in storage. The storage facility caught fire.” But she had kept it for a long time? “Oh, for years and years and years.”
Earlier this year, Cardellini filmed They Know, a psychological horror movie written and directed by Bill Hader, who also stars. “It’s definitely his incredibly extraordinary point of view,” she says, reluctant to give too much away beyond the fact she plays his ex-wife. The fact that it’s another horror does not mean, however, that Cardellini is in her scream queen era. “I like to change it up,” she says. “I went from DTF to Crystal Lake with one week in between. That seemed like a big left turn. So we’ll see what comes up.” She pauses and adds: “But you never know.”