Linda Cardellini swaps Don Draper for dentures as Friday the 13th gets its origin story

From Draper’s rival to Pam’s rage

Linda Cardellini has built a reputation on range rather than repetition - Freaks and Geeks, ER, Mad Men, Dead to Me, and most recently an Emmy win for DTF St Louis. Her latest move, however, is the most calculated pivot yet: playing Pamela Voorhees, the original killer of the 1980 Friday the 13th, in the franchise prequel series Crystal Lake. As Cardellini tells the Guardian, the job comes with an unglamorous physical reality - fake teeth embedded in prosthetic knuckles, yanked free with sound design built to repulse.

It is a useful corrective for anyone who assumes Jason Voorhees, hockey mask and all, was always the franchise’s engine. He wasn’t even masked until the third film. Pam, avenging her son’s death, was the killer audiences actually met first - a detail Cardellini is keen to point out, and one that suggests she has done more homework on the mythology than most actors bother with before signing on to an IP revival.

The timeline problem nobody minds

Crystal Lake reportedly shifts Jason’s drowning from the 1950s, where the original films place it, to the early 1970s - a tweak that matters to nobody outside a small and devoted fan base, and arguably not even to most of them, given that the series has previously sent its villain into space. This is the unglamorous truth about long-running horror IP: continuity is whatever the current rights-holder needs it to be, bent to fit casting, budgets and streaming schedules rather than any sacred internal logic. Friday the 13th has survived four decades precisely because nobody involved in making it has ever treated the lore as fixed.

The economics behind the gore

What’s less discussed, because it rarely is in profile pieces built around a star’s enthusiasm for a severed tooth, is why a studio commissions an origin story for a nearly 50-year-old slasher franchise in the first place. Prequels of this kind are low-risk, high-recognition bets: the IP is pre-sold, the audience pre-converted, and a name actor with awards pedigree - Cardellini now has an Emmy to put on the poster - lends a project prestige cover it might otherwise lack. Horror remains one of the most reliably profitable genres relative to production cost, and franchise prequels let rights-holders generate new content without the expense of inventing a new audience from scratch. None of that makes Crystal Lake a bad show. It does mean the enthusiasm on display - Cardellini’s evident delight in the gore, her fluency in franchise trivia - is doing real promotional work, not just colour for a profile.

The takeaway

There’s a genuine, checkable development here: a respected television actor taking a calculated swing at a legacy horror franchise, backed by a fresh Emmy and a career built on avoiding typecasting. Whether Crystal Lake earns its place alongside the better Friday the 13th instalments is unknown until it airs. What’s certain is that the project exists because the economics of reviving dormant horror IP are currently excellent - and Cardellini, whatever her genuine enthusiasm for prosthetic teeth, is also the face selling that proposition.