Linda Cardellini Trades Emmy Glory for Gore in Crystal Lake

Linda Cardellini, fresh off an Emmy win for DTF St Louis, is now pulling human teeth out of her own knuckle on screen. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th films, she plays Pamela Voorhees — the killer of the original 1980 movie, not the hockey-masked Jason most audiences remember.

"The first time I had the tooth in my hand," Cardellini said, "I thought, 'Oh my God, this is what I'm doing.'" The tooth is human. It embeds itself in Pam's knuckle, and she yanks it out with what the Guardian, which interviewed the actor, describes as a gruesome, revolting slurping sound.

Cardellini's career hardly predicted this turn. She starred in Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me and Mad Men, where she played Sylvia Rosen, the mistress who tormented Don Draper. Then came the Emmy for DTF St Louis. Now comes the gore. By her own account, nothing fully prepared her for horror's practical demands.

Who is the real villain of Friday the 13th?

Casual viewers associate the franchise with Jason, the masked serial killer. Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework, corrects the record.

"He didn't even have the mask until the third movie," she said. "Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death." Jason's mother, not Jason, drives the 1980 film.

Crystal Lake takes liberties with the established timeline. The series moves Jason's drowning from the 1950s to the early 1970s. That is a significant retcon of the franchise's founding event, and the production has not publicly detailed why the change was made. The Guardian notes, reasonably, that a franchise flexible enough to have once sent Jason into space can absorb a bit of timeline tweaking.

What does this change for Cardellini?

It marks her first lead role in full-blown horror after a career built on drama and comedy. An Emmy-winning actor moving into slasher prequel territory is also a signal for the genre: prestige television talent is now flowing toward horror franchises, not away from them.

The caveat is obvious. A prequel to a 46-year-old slasher film carries built-in risks — fan scrutiny, franchise fatigue, the shadow of an icon. Whether Cardellini's Pamela Voorhees can stand beside the original remains untested until audiences see the finished series.

For now, Cardellini sounds certain about at least one thing. Of the show's gore effects, she said: "They pulled a guy's face off. It's my favourite bit!"