As soon as Linda Cardellini sits down for our interview, she presents as so down-to-earth, so engaged, and engaging, when discussing her craft, it’s easy to forget that on-screen she is an ever-present tour de force.
Cardellini is an actor’s actor, and the list of characters the San Francisco-area native has embodied is as varied as it is compelling. In no particular order, she’s brought Velma to life in the film version of Scooby-Doo, lead math nerd Lindsay Weir in the iconic cult classic Freaks and Geeks (which also birthed the careers of Paul Feig, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, James Franco, and Busy Philipps), and fought for her family in the dark Netflix drama Bloodline. She has also played no-nonsense nurse Samantha Taggart on ER; sultry Don Draper mistress Sylvia Rosen on Mad Men; Dolores Vallelonga and Cassie Cartwright in the Academy Award-winning Green Book and Brokeback Mountain, respectively; Chutney Windham, the permed-out murderer in Legally Blonde; and lest we forget, Laura Barton, the wife of sharpshooting Avenger Hawkeye across three MCU films. She’s also done voice-over roles on Robot Chicken and Gravity Falls — needless to say, if we were to keep going, we’d be here all night.
She's here to discuss her work on the final season of the critically acclaimed Netflix dark comedy Dead to Me as affectionate, lawless Judy Hale, the unlikely ride-or-die of caustic realtor widow Jen Harding (Christina Applegate), in a performance so seamless and nuanced, it earned Cardellini an Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Emmy nomination in 2020.
“It’s the greatest role!” Cardellini enthuses when asked how she felt when she read the first Dead to Me scripts. “I knew that Christina was in it. I just knew when she chose a project, she chose carefully, and she was always good. So, I thought, ‘Wow, that would be so great! Two women in a show made about women, by women. But can I do this?’ It also slightly terrified me because it was very different from all the things that I had been doing. I started in comedy, of course, and I’d done it throughout the years, but I’d just come off something completely different, which I also love to do. Whenever I get a script that is very 180 from whatever I’ve done last, I get super-attracted to it. My friends said, ‘If you’re terrified, then you have to do it.’”
Now in the third and final season of the show, Cardellini readily credits her friendship and the resulting chemistry with Applegate as a “gift.” She says, “I feel so lucky. Our friendship is the linchpin of the whole series, and we just got along immediately. We’d never met before, so you never know how that’s going to go. When you get on set, you go, ‘Okay, great. I like this person. We’re going to be friends. But how does this person work? Do they work like I work?’ The material was hard, but we were able to work together so easily, it felt so great and so right. She’s so brilliant and so good! We’ve been able to have this relationship and chemistry that I’d never found before. It’s rare that you get these two really strong, really different female characters that are in this incredible relationship, and to have that kind of time on-screen to grow and change and also exchange is so special.”
Without giving too much away about the smartly written series, both actors were charged with making an unbelievable relationship believable. “It’s such a fascinating version of friendship in some ways because it’s so familiar and also so incredulous,” explains Cardellini of the plot, which follows Jen, who, after her husband is killed in a hit-and-run, not only embarks on solving the crime but also befriends Judy, who is also recovering from a recent life tragedy. As they get closer, secrets are revealed and traumas rise to the service, further complicating their relationship and the search for the truth of what happened to Jen’s husband.
“You would never expect them to become friends,” Cardellini continues. “I remember thinking if people really believe our friendship after everything Judy has done, we’ve succeeded. So, that’s one of the things that makes us the happiest, because Liz [Feldman, creator of Dead to Me] always talks about how the themes of the show are very important to her and the rest of our writers and producers: friendship, grief, loss, and forgiveness. I think that’s always what we’re doing as we move along, and I think that’s what people relate to too, because that’s what relationships are.”
Cardellini first caught the acting bug by watching old movies with her parents, who weren’t artists themselves but are ardent movie buffs. “My parents raised me on old movies and old movie stars,” she says. “When she was a teenager, my mom worked in a movie theater — she has seen every old movie, like, a million times. Going to the movies back then was a giant event. When I would stay home from school, I would watch I Love Lucy with my mom instead of cartoons. We went to the movies at least once a week, and my parents always took me; I was the baby of four, and they would take me wherever they went. I was a pretty quiet kid, it turns out [laughs].”
She’s determined to keep the magic of television and movies alive for her own daughter. “I’ve never shown my daughter anything I was in until very recently because I wanted her to still love the movies,” Cardellini explains. “There’s something so magical, and you don’t want to watch your mom walk through some magical world. If my mom popped up in E.T. when I was a kid I’d be like, ‘What the heck?’”
As for her own acting heroes, Cardellini settles on Bette Davis after a minute of agonizing over whom to choose. “She seemed like she could do anything, and she seemed like she was always powerful in whatever she was doing, so I think she was an influence, for sure,” she explains. “She could be beautiful, or she could be villainous. She wasn’t afraid. I loved that about her. She could change. My parents pointed out I should look at her in that movie versus this movie. I ended up having an appreciation for people who could change themselves, whoever it was. The idea that somebody could turn into somebody else fascinated me.” As evidence, Cardellini points to an early performance in which she demonstrated a preternatural sense of craft and commitment: “The first play I was ever in, as a little old lady in The Music Man, I was 10 or 11. I stuffed my bra and put flowers on my hat, and I didn’t want anyone to know it was me. That, to me, was the fun thing about doing this job.”
Decades after that first gig and with plenty of credits to her name, Cardellini has a hard time naming a role she’s already played that was so enjoyable, she’d do it again immediately. “That’s a really difficult question to answer — there are so many that I love! I do wish Freaks and Geeks had more seasons. We could’ve stayed doing that for a while. It just wasn’t in the cards. Luckily, we had one whole season that still survives, and that makes me happy. I also loved playing Velma [in Scooby-Doo]. I came off doing drama, and then here’s this broad comedy based on my favorite cartoon, which was famous for decades — it started in the late ’60s. I just had so much fun doing that — I got to see the world because of that movie. We shot the first one in Australia, and back then, you traveled all over with publicity and stuff.”
Reflecting further on my question, Cardellini explains that there are two other ways she could answer: One that names a character she’d want to live with again, while the other might reflect how a role coincided with a certain period in her life. She gives both sides of the equation careful consideration. “My time on ER — those are some of my closest friends. We’re still on a text chain together! Then, something like Brokeback Mountain, which is a beautiful piece that lives on,” she says.
In the end, any role she agrees to play has to meet certain criteria. “There’s lots of different ways you choose [roles]. I usually try to pick roles where I feel like I’m going to have fun doing this, or these people are going to be amazing to work with,” she says. “As I grow older, this really means something to me. When you’re first starting out, you hope to be able to try to choose based on those criteria. As you start to work more, you get the opportunity to choose more [often] or choose better.” She grins contentedly. “I’m lucky because I love my job.”
When asked what we might see her in next, Cardellini stays tight-lipped. “I don’t have anything to say right now,” she says, smiling as if she’s excited about the surprise. She does, however, reveal something she’s developing. “I am writing a project for Amazon with one of my writer friends from Dead to Me, Kelly Hutchinson. I write, produce, and star in that,” she says. “That’s one of the big things that I’m working on when I’m not doing this stuff.” Whatever else she’s up to, add it to the list of her accomplishments. As long as the list already is, there’s clearly room for so much more.
Vivian Manning-Schaffel is a multifaceted storyteller whose work has been featured in The Cut, NBC News Better, Time Out New York, Medium, and The Week. Follow her on Twitter @soapboxdirty.
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