The “DTF St. Louis” star discusses her biggest horror role yet and this career turning point.

By Nick Romano

The first thing Linda Cardellini does upon entering Dante, the loungey lunch spot at the Beverly Hills Maybourne Hotel, is apologize for the noise.

“I didn’t know it would be such a DJ scene in here,” she confesses, nodding to the guy in a camp-collared short-sleeve shirt pumping out synth beats by the bar counter.

There is, admittedly, more of a hip cabana party vibe than one might expect for Saturday afternoon tea in mid-September. The actress, 51, speaks with the waiter about possibly moving to a quieter table on the patio outside. Only, there’s a heat wave. So sitting outside at Dante is hell.

It’s best to keep to the comforts of AC and chalk up the pounding bass as the unconventional soundtrack to a conversation about murder and mayhem — i.e., her upcoming role on Peacock’s Crystal Lake (Oct. 15), the Friday the 13th prequel series in which she plays Pam Voorhees, an icon of horror and the mother of future machete-wielding serial killer Jason.

Cardellini looks, to put it simply, cool among such posh patrons. She wears a simple gray T-shirt and jeans with her hair pulled back, attire she swears is for a makeup trial later in the day in preparation for the Emmys the following Monday.

Six days prior to this luncheon, at the Creative Arts Emmys, she accepted her first-ever award from the Television Academy, sfor her supporting role in HBO’s limited series DTF St. Louis as a complicated small-town wife caught up in a love triangle with her swinger husband (David Harbour) and a local weatherman (Jason Bateman).

The afterglow of that moment, when she rocked a strapless yellow Monique Lhuillier gown on the Peacock Theatre stage amid a swell of emotions, hasn’t yet worn off. She likens the experience to her first TV appearance: winning a traditional cherry-finish fireplace on The Price Is Right back in 1994. Both that and her victorious Emmy night felt “like being on a roller coaster.”

DTF St. Louis, and the recognition Cardellini received with it, are the latest capstones in her thriving Hollywood career, which was defined early on by the comedies Freaks and Geeks and the Scooby-Doos. But Crystal Lake showrunner Brad Caleb Kane says he was inspired to cast her as Mamma Voorhees after her complex performance in Dead to Me, which is arguably where this Cardel-aissance really began.

While writing the scripts, Kane kept replaying reels in his head of Cardellini as Judy Hale, who pretends to be grieving a deceased spouse in order to bond with Jen (Christina Applegate), the wife of the man she accidentally killed with her car.

“The person who was linking the Venn diagram between Dead to Me and Friday the 13th was very obviously Linda Cardellini,” he says.

Looking back, the star sees that role as a professional turning point.

“That was a way that people hadn’t really seen me,” she says of Judy. “She has a heart of gold, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The Netflix series also became a springboard for Dead to Me creator Liz Feldman, who — adhering to Cardellini’s request to write her “a badass bitch” part — crafted her the role of Margo Starling in follow-up series No Good Deed (2024).

Crystal Lake, however, remains a surprise job to Cardellini. She’ll be the first to acknowledge she’s not exactly known for horror, despite a handful of roles in that space. That didn’t bother Kane.

“We went on a three-decade journey with her,” he explains. “She’s worked consistently and she’s put in varied work, from comedy to drama to camp, the Scooby-Doo movies, all of it. You realize she truly can do it all, but in such a humble way. Her humility is her talent, and that just made me want her more.”

Flirting with horror

The Pam Voorhees of Crystal Lake works as a cafeteria lady at the titular summer camp in the 1970s — a slight shift in time period from the established canon. The eight-episode prequel begins with the drowning of her son, Jason (Callum Vinson), a bullied young kid with hydrocephalus (marked by an enlarged cranium); it continues through her own psychological descent into murder and madness to become the original killer of Friday the 13th.

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, ragazza Cardellini (her surname means “goldfinches” in Italian) watched the original films at Halloween slumber parties her parents hosted for the girls in her grade. Cardellini was the rarity among those classmates. She liked horror, even if “it does actually terrify me,” she notes. “I love Jaws, but as a result, I’m terrified of sharks.”

Other killer flicks on their watch list were The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the Michael Myers saga, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. On the latter, everyone thought the tongue that licks actress Heather Langenkamp through the bedside phone was “the craziest thing we’d ever seen,” she remembers.

Cardellini would eventually meet Robert Englund, the man behind Freddy Krueger, through 1998’s Strangeland, her first proper foray into horror. Her parents kept the main movie poster, which featured Cardellini’s face as Genevieve Gage, a teenager lured into an online predator’s trap.

“They were so proud that I was on the cover, but it’s me with my mouth sewn shut,” she remembers. “So it was always a little eerie.”

While she never actively pursued the genre, she landed a small role in Bone Chillers (1996), which was more of a kid-friendly spook fest like Goosebumps. And much later in her career, she starred in The Curse of La Llorona (2019), drawn to the story about a mom protecting her children, she says.

Generally, the parts that got her attention were the ones outside the horror zone. So what’s different now? Cardellini wants to be challenged.

“Typically, if I’m doing something that I haven’t done before, that’s my favorite spot to be, because I’m nervous,” she says. “That means I’m more present and I’m exploring something.”

Horror ticked that box.

Making a murderess

Cardellini first met Kane at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel cafe in 2025. The showrunner, who also works on It: Welcome to Derry, came aboard the project with the intent to start fresh after a number of false starts and production woes.

Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies) spearheaded one incarnation but cited creative differences with his departure. Another incarnation could have seen Charlize Theron play the part of Pam Voorhees, but that, too, never materialized.

What was expected to be a 45-minute pitch meeting with his hoped-for star ballooned to five hours.

“He gives great advice,” Cardellini says of their conversation, which mostly centered on life and family. “I was in a transition period, and we just sat there and talked and had a really heartfelt conversation.”

They also glossed over the thing that made Kane a household voice: Disney’s Aladdin. He landed his first professional entertainment job when he was just 18, providing the vocals for the Agrabah “street rat,” singing songs including “A Whole New World” and “One Jump Ahead.” (Full House alum Scott Weinger provided Aladdin’s speaking voice.)

“At first, you don’t know if you should bring it up, because you’re like, Does he want to talk about that?” Cardellini notes. “But eventually it comes up.”

Music became another topic of discussion for him and Cardellini, who has to sing as Pam on Crystal Lake. Prior to slaughtering a bunch of horny camp counselors, Pam had a career behind the mic that she gave up to focus on her son. (Kane also composed the Camp Crystal Lake jingle that plays over the trailers.) It was one of many layers to the character that intrigued the actress.

“She’s a mother, she’s grieving, she’s filled with rage, she’s a singer, she has her own sexual feelings, she has a connection with these people in town. Is the connection real?” she explains. “There’s so much for this character to do, how do you not try that?”

They also discussed Betsy Palmer, who originated the role of Pam in Friday the 13th. She appears only briefly when she’s outed as the killer, but those scenes were iconic enough to warrant her haunting the events of the sequel (1981).

Cardellini didn’t want to mimic Palmer in any way, noting how beloved she is.

“It’s more an homage than mimicry,” she says of her approach.

And in that spirit, the team wanted to incorporate some iconography, like the blue sweater. But not her hair, though they considered it.

For a time, Cardellini was convinced she would wear a hairpiece similar to Palmer’s iconic style.

“We were trying wigs to see how it would look, and then we realized it’s 10 years before. Your hair in the ‘70s was not necessarily the same hair that it was in the ‘80s,” she says. “So it kinda didn’t make sense to keep that hair going for so long.”

She concedes, “It’s a pretty iconic look. That’s why I was really interested in it, but nobody else was going for it. Nobody else wanted it.”

Inside Camp Crystal Lake

It’s all about the homage. That seems to define Kane’s larger vision for Crystal Lake, which gives as much of a nod toward Friday the 13th as it does to the pop culture of America around 1980, the year the first movie was released in theaters.

Mixtape is a word he uses often. If you watch an old episode of I Love the ‘70s and ‘80s, you’ll get a quick glaze-over of everything he’s talking about: The ABC Afterschool Special, paranoid conspiracy thrillers, The Feminine Mystique, but also martial arts movies.

Yes, martial arts movies. Dorf, a police officer who pops up briefly in Friday the 13th while on the hunt for Crazy Ralph (another character expanded for the show, via actor Nick Cordileone), is a conduit for that particular genre. Cameron Scoggins succeeds Ron Millkie as Dorf, whom the actor describes as a product of “that ‘70s masculine bravado.” But also, “He’s got the nerd in him,” Scoggins notes.

That plays out through an ongoing bit involving ninja stars and nunchucks.

“I went right to Chinatown and bought some nunchucks,” he recalls. “Turns out, in New York State, ninja stars are illegal, but in Jersey, they’re legal. So I just had to go across the river to get some ninja stars to work with.”

Meanwhile, as Police Chief Levon Brooks, actor Will Catlett might as well be the star of his own detective procedural as the bodies start to pile up in the town of Crystal Lake. His sister, local journalist Briana Brooks (Devin Kessler), is also on the case, hoping for more substantive stories that can break the malaise of covering fast-food trends. Lee is determined to get to the bottom of it, unaware that the woman he’s courting, Pam, is the one behind it all.

Sidney Poitier (In the Heat of the Night, A Raisin in the Sun) was a guiding light for Catlett, even when an early wig treatment initially made him look closer to Shaft.

“[Pam] doesn’t fall in love with Shaft, you know what I mean?” he remembers thinking. “Once we got the Sidney Poitier look right, and the mustache, then it was easy to fall into the tone. I felt like I was in a True Detective vibe, trying to figure it out and then trying to bring depth to the story, and really see her as Levon’s dealing with some grief, too, and some shortcomings that he had. And then what is an African man in the ‘70s?”

Not just Dorf and Lee, but everyone in the town exists within their own cinematic genre until they start melding into Linda’s, which, for a show set around Camp Crystal Lake, appropriately has some camp to it. If you think that’s too far away from the spirit of Friday the 13th, then you haven’t seen Jason Goes to Hell (1993).

“There’s always some wild moments in those movies from the ‘80s,” Cardellini remarks. “I did know that Brad wanted to keep it very Friday the 13th. And I think, in Friday the 13th, in the ‘80s, it was campy.”

Mama’s boy

Kane knows fans have concerns about that overall approach, as questions emerge about how much Jason and how much blood we’ll get over the course of eight episodes. And he gets it, because he, too, is a fan. He remains the same guy who dog-eared all his Friday the 13th novelizations, who wanted to become a filmmaker after seeing Friday the 13th Part III in 3D.

“I wanted to let my imagination and my general fandom be my guide,” he says. “What did I wanna see in a Friday the 13th prequel?”

Jason was definitely on that list.

“I knew that you couldn’t have a Friday the 13th prequel without Jason, without Jason’s presence looming large, and without ultimately seeing him do what you want Jason to do — and in a spectacular way,” he says. “I knew I wanted those two killers from the movie, [for] their emotional thread to be tight. I wanted to understand their relationship at a cellular level, the real mother-son relationship between Pam and Jason.”

Crystal Lake is, he continues, a Pam Voorhees prequel, but the episodes tease Jason over the course of the season. We meet him early on as a boy before the fateful drowning and disappearance, though Vinson’s prosthetics transformation is a reveal Kane will largely save for when the show premieres — apart from a long-distance shot of the kid in the water seen in the trailer. Kane teases “pounds and pounds of makeup” were applied.

“It’s a lot, but it makes you feel so cool,” the 12-year-old Vinson says. “It’s like you’re putting on Iron Man’s mask, you’re putting on Spider-Man’s mask.”

According to Kane, “We wanted to see the evolution of how he went from a boy with differences, a boy who’s othered and a boy who does not fit in with the kids at Camp Crystal Lake, to a monster.”

You won’t see Jason don his famous hockey mask on screen — the producers have been forthright about that — but off screen, the crew did give one to Vinson.

“Brad would give me the machete, and also the makeup team would give me the mask,” the young actor recalls. “I would walk around and chase people around with it.”

“In my opinion, everything she does is for Jason,” Cardellini notes of Pam — including the kills. “She has to feel justified every time she does it,” she continues. “Even if it’s not the truth to the outside, it’s the truth to her.”

And true to any Friday the 13th: blood. To anyone fearing a lack of hack ‘n’ slash, Kane turns to Dave Presto, the effects guru behind coating Cardellini head to toe in red.

“Whenever we do remakes, they change it slightly in the gore factor,” Presto points out. “I was like, ‘So are we going to go full on, like level 10 gore? Are we gonna do 5, 6, 7?’ He’s like, ‘No, we wanna go 10.’”

Presto estimates the team used “probably 50 gallons of blood” to make the show, “if not more.”

“Which is an obscene amount of blood,” he adds. “A gallon of blood is a lot.”

Cardellini commends the crafts teams that made Crystal Lake a true bloodbath, but confirms “it’s sticky.”

“I was happy those images were put on film, and then I was happy when those scenes were done. I was ready for those scenes to be completed.”

It’s partly why Cardellini considers the EW cover shoot at the Benedict Estate “triggering.” Much of that production reminds her of things she endured shooting in and around Blairstown, N.J., which was also the original filming location for Friday the 13th.

The EW shoot also has fake blood — as well as a black-and-yellow spider the size of Cardellini’s fist that briefly paused operations when the critter crawled up the photographer’s shirt.

“Everybody freaked out. It was enormous,” she remembers now of that late Tuesday afternoon in August.

The Crystal Lake crew, meanwhile, had snakes, bears, “all kinds of insects” to contend with, she says. “Maybe even more scary than Jason was the idea of ticks in the woods.”

Has all this triggered a newfound interest in horror moving forward? Potentially. What’s next for Cardellini involves starring in her pal Bill Hader’s “psychological horror” film They Know, about a divorced dad (Hader) who’s suspicious that the mysterious man secretly dating his ex-wife (Cardellini) has a strange influence on their children. She can’t say too much, but calls the Barry alum “singular” in the way he looks at situations.

Beyond that, her eyes abruptly begin to tear as she ponders what’s to come. Part of it is exhaustion as she prepares for the live Emmys broadcast on her latest stop for DTF St. Louis, while also juggling trips to the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Comic Con for Crystal Lake. Part of it is immense gratitude.

“What a wonderful journey to be on,” she says. “I’ve been in the business for a long time, and I know that there are ups and downs. So to be on this part of it, things are exciting and new. I feel like I’m still learning and doing and exploring.”

Source – Entertainment Weekly