Linda Cardellini is killing it.
The star transforms into a full-fledged slasher villain in the bloody "Friday the 13th" prequel series "Crystal Lake" (streaming Oct. 15 on Peacock), fresh off her Emmy win for HBO's "DTF St. Louis."
Cardellini, 51, had just one week between filming the two shows. It was "quite a transition," she says, though it may have been for the best.
"Sometimes in my career, I have found that when I have less time to think about something, I have less time for fear to creep in," she says.
With "Crystal Lake," the fear was the idea of disappointing "Friday the 13th" fans, who have waited 17 long years for the return of Jason Voorhees. But any horror nerd could tell you Jason wasn't the killer in the original movie: It was his
mom, Mrs. Voorhees, who slaughtered teens to get revenge after Jason drowned as a kid while camp counselors weren't paying attention.
So "Crystal Lake" goes back to where it all began to trace how Pamela Voorhees transformed into a cold-blooded killer. Cardellini was the only person showrunner Brad Caleb Kane considered for the role, which the "Dead to Me" actress found slightly perplexing.
"She said, 'Why do you see me as Jason Voorhees' mom?'" Kane recalls. "[I said], 'You're good at keeping secrets. I can see things behind your eyes, that you're doing all this mental math and all these calculations, while your face is doing a whole other thing and your mouth is saying completely different words.'"
Kane also needed someone viewers could connect with despite her horrific actions. "The audience is questioning themselves, going, 'How am I able to relate to this generally unrelatable person?' Well, it's Linda,'" he says. "There's just this effortless likability about her."
The show allowed Cardellini to tap into something she usually doesn't get to play. "There is a rage in her that has not been in any other character that I have found," she says, noting the physical demands were both exhausting and cathartic. "There's a few moments where I'm punching, hitting, screaming, and crying, that almost is like scream therapy."
As a "Friday the 13th" fan, Cardellini was surprised by some of what the show introduces, especially the idea that Jason was not necessarily a troubled kid.
"He starts out as this innocent child, which I didn't expect," she says. "I thought, 'Oh, maybe he was the type of kid where you were worried to begin with that he was going to do some bad things.'"
There are also many unexpected twists in Mrs. Voorhees' backstory. For one, it turns out she's a former lounge singer, allowing Cardellini to flex her musical chops. "A lot of the things [Kane] pitched were not things I had imagined when somebody originally said the title to me," the star says.
Though "Crystal Lake" isn't a traditional slasher, there are plenty of gory kills. Cardellini describes a sequence in the premiere as a "blood opera" and says there was so much fake blood, "We were afraid my hair would turn pink."
Speaking of which, one aspect of the first movie the show doesn't retain is Mrs. Voorhees' iconic haircut. Cardellini was "gunning" to wear the original hair, but "nobody else wanted it," she says. "Maybe she works her way towards that hairdo."
"Crystal Lake" is a somewhat rare horror project for Cardellini, though she did start in the genre: Her first major role was the kids' horror show "Bone Chillers," and one of her earliest films was the 1998 horror flick "Strangeland." She returned to horror in 2019 with "The Curse of La Llorona." Outside of that, it "just didn't align" for her to do more in the genre, she says, unless you count "Scooby-Doo."
"I meet kids who've grown up now [that say], 'That movie scared me when I was little,'" says Cardellini, who notes not a day goes by without someone telling her Velma was part of their childhood. "I never anticipated thinking I would be part of someone's childhood. What a gift!"
Cardellini herself grew up loving horror: As a kid, she'd host slumber parties for Halloween and watch scary movies with friends.
"We would get into this giant couch, this big playpen couch that was big in the '80s, and we would all stay on it," she says. "We'd watch scary movies all night. Eventually, I would be up with one or two of my friends watching it, while everybody else had the covers over their heads."
"Crystal Lake" continues a big year for the actress, who won her first Emmy in September for "DTF Louis." For Cardellini, the award had been out of reach for years – in one case, literally. She was nominated for two Emmys for "Dead to Me" in 2020, the ceremony where stars stayed home due to the pandemic.
"They came to your house and brought the award, and because it was COVID, they didn't come inside," she recalls. "It just sat outside on a bench until they announced that I did not win, and then they took it away. It was as though it was within reach, but I couldn't touch it. So then actually holding it and feeling the weight of it and having it in my hand for the very first time was really something."
Cardellini feels grateful and lucky to be doing so many new things "at this point in my career and at this age," adding that her "career goes through cycles, and this is a great moment in this cycle right now."
It's something she couldn't have predicted when 1999's "Freaks and Geeks," her first big show, was canceled. She was "heartbroken" and wondered if she'd ever work again.
"It's the best job in the world when you have a job, and when you don't, you're always thinking, 'Am I ever going to have another job?'" she says. "It's whimsical, and it's sort of illogical at times, what works and what doesn't work, and who works and who doesn't work. You can never quite count on it. But I think if I did have a job that I could count on all the time, I don't know that I'm suited for that, either. I think maybe I'm suited for the uncertainty."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Crystal Lake' star Linda Cardellini once wondered if she'd ever work again
