Before Crystal Lake, These Are Linda Cardellini's Essential Film & TV Roles
Linda Cardellini is set to play Pamela Vorhees (aka Jason’s mom, aka one of horror's most iconic roles) in the upcoming Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake.
That means you still have plenty of time (until this October) to brush up on the actress' best and most essential movies and TV shows.
Since breaking out with her performances as Lindsay Weir in Freaks and Geeks 27 years ago, Linda Cardellini has been a consistent presence on our screens, and a welcome one in our lives, too. In that time, her eclectic career has taken her to the peaks of network and prestige TV, thanks to shows like ER and Mad Men, and also into some of the biggest movies of all time, thanks to her portrayal of Laura "Mrs Hawkeye" Barton in the MCU.
In the list below, you’ll find Cardellini's eight most iconic roles to date, leading up to Crystal Lake, which we’ve arranged — purely for the plot — in chronological order.
As well as being an incredibly funny and occasionally poignant series, Freaks and Geeks is also famous for two notable things: one, being inexplicably and infamously cancelled after its first season; and two, launching the careers of Judd Apatow, its creator, and an entire generation of comedy stars.
This was where Seth Rogan, James Franco, Busy Philipps, Jason Segal and Martin Starr all got their first leg up in the industry, and Cardellini, as the army jacket-wearing Lyndsay Weir, was the star of the show. Put it this way: no Freaks and Geeks, no Superbad. It's really that simple.
It must be baffling for a young actor to lose a job like Freaks and Geeks after only 18 episodes, but Cardellini dusted herself off right away by landing the part of Velma — another brainiac character surrounded by goofballs — in the first-ever live-action version of Scooby-Doo.
This seminal slice of early ‘00s nostalgia featured one of the most aughts-coded casts ever assembled, with Freddie Prinze Jr. (as Fred), Matthew Lilliard (Shaggy) and Sarah Michelle Gellar (Daphne) rounding out the human members of the Mystery Inc. team.
The movie will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, just in time for the release of Netflix’s Scooby Doo: Origins — in which Abby Ryder Fortson, of Ant-Man and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. fame, is set to take over the Velma role.
Following her memorable turn in Legally Blonde and two box office successes thanks to the Scooby-Doo franchise, Cardellini made a huge return to television, landing a central role in what became the final five seasons of ER.
Granted, Cardellini's time on the show came a little bit after the Clooney-era heyday, but as the nurse and single mother Samantha Taggart, she made a whopping 126 appearances and further cemented her TV legacy in the process.
Aside from Scooby-Doo and the MCU, Cardellini’s biggest parts have mostly come on the small screen, but she’s usually managed to squeeze in a memorable movie role or two along the way.
The catch of taking on smaller roles was that she usually had to play a wife (as she with Michael Keaton in The Founder and with Will Farrell in the Daddy’s Home movies) or girlfriend, as she did with Heath Ledger in Ang Lee’s 2005 masterpiece Brokeback Mountain.
As Cassie in that landmark film, Cardellini only appears in a couple of scenes late on, but she makes each of them her own.
Another memorable Cardellini role from the same era was her performance as Sylvia Rosen in Season 6 of Mad Men.
By this point in the endlessly stylish AMC series, Don Draper (John Hamm) had already fallen out of love with his second wife, Megan, and so began a dangerous affair with Rosen, the wife of a doctor who lived downstairs from their Park Avenue penthouse.
By this penultimate stretch on the show's 7 Season arc, viewers had gotten used to seeing Draper get involved with various women, including Maggie Siff’s department store owner Rachel Menken and Rosemarie Dewitt’s free-spirited artist Midge. Cardellini’s wonderfully restrained turn as Sylvia made her one of the show’s most memorable recurring characters, despite only appearing in nine episodes.
Both Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini were TV veterans long before Dead to Me dropped its first season on Netflix in 2019, which is exactly why the show feels like such a breeze to watch.
The 30-episode series is both a black comedy and a crime caper, with a story that's able to go all over the place thanks to the grounding presence of its two seen-it-all-before stars.
Applegate takes the lead as Jen Harding, a widow who is determined to find the person responsible for her husband’s death. Cardenelli plays Judy, a laid-back woman who meets Jen at a support group (or the Louise to her Thelma, if you will) and decides to help her on her quest. Naturally, she also has some secrets of her own.
Having appeared briefly in two Avengers movies as Mrs Clint Barton, it would be wrong not to include at least one MCU joint on this list, and if you are going to include one Clint Barton-focused story, it may as well be his headline act: ie. the Hawkeye limited TV show.
The series introduced Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop as Barton’s arrow-shooting protege; and it was also the closest the MCU has come to making a genuinely rewatchable Christmas story — references to Big and Home Alone very much withstanding.
In truth, the show still didn’t give the over-qualified Cardellini a lot to do — she mostly shows up on video calls — but the actress still made sure to pop up in five of the six episodes.
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Future generations might look back on DTF St. Louie and wonder what the hell was going on with us all in 2026.
The bleakest show of the year centres on a love triangle between a weatherman (played by Jason Bateman), a sign language interpreter (David Harbour) and his wife (Cardellini) — one of whom is found dead at the end of the first episode, which makes another of them the chief suspect of a local detective's (played by the great Richard Jenkins) investigation.
The series was created by Steven Conrad, the man who wrote the scripts for both the 2005 Nicholas Cage movie The Weather Man and the 2013 Ben Stiller flick The Secret Life of Walter Mitty — either of which should give you an idea of the kind of sad dad energy to expect here. Thankfully, Cardellini is on hand to even the boys out.
