Linda Cardellini broke out at the turn of the millennium as the face of teenage angst in Judd Apatow’s “Freaks and Geeks,” a slice-of-life NBC series about high schoolers in suburban Michigan. A quarter-century later, she has returned to the Midwest to delve into a different phase of life as explored by a comedic auteur: the middle-aged malaise that forms the core of creator Steven Conrad’s HBO limited series, “DTF St. Louis,” or what ASL interpreter Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) describes to his stepson Richard (Arlan Ruf) as “grown-up C’s.” Both Floyd and his new best friend Clark (Jason Bateman) are unhappy in their marriages and, by extension, their lives; the extreme measures the two men take to counteract that loneliness will end in Floyd’s death, the investigation of which drives the plot of the show.
“More than anything, it’s about intimacy, whether you do the things that they do in a relationship or not,” says Cardellini, who plays Floyd’s wife and Richard’s mother, Carol Love-Smernitch.
We’re speaking at a co-working space in Hollywood where the actor has just posed for a photo shoot, but she’s changed back into a casual outfit that feels more appropriate for unpacking the humble, low-key Carol, a white-collar worker at Purina’s corporate office who strikes up an affair with Clark over smoothies from Jamba Juice.
“I think everybody longs for some kind of intimacy,” she says. “That’s really what’s happening: these people losing their intimate connections with each other and trying to figure out how to feel that way again, either with somebody else or with the person that they’re with.”
Compared to Clark and Floyd, Carol is initially the least accessible character in “DTF St. Louis.” That’s by design: for much of the series, she’s a prime suspect in Floyd’s potential murder thanks to circumstantial evidence like her entanglement with Clark and a recently established life insurance policy. Only in the final episodes do we understand the full complexity of this love triangle, with revelations casting Carol in a far more generous light. Until then, she can come off as cold, calculating and standoffish — a steep challenge for any performer to take on, and one that requires a deft hand to pull off.
“It’s kind of an impossible role,” says Harbour, who developed the series with Conrad and was involved in the casting process for Carol. (He’s speaking via Zoom from a hotel room in Dublin: “Anything for Linda Cardellini,” he quips.) Unlike Harbour and Bateman, both executive producers on the project, Cardellini auditioned for the part.
“We knew we needed an actress who was going to be extremely smart in her take on how to handle all these different elements” — seductress, schemer, put-upon mom trying to make ends meet — “and put them together in a soup and make it edible for an audience,” Harbour continues. Then he watched Cardellini’s tape. “It was undeniable,” he recalls. “She cracked a lot of the series open for me as well. I stole a lot from just watching her.” Conrad’s scripts have a distinctive, idiosyncratic rhythm; Harbour credits Cardellini with translating his dialogue into a grounded, realistic performance.
In conversation, Cardellini is fiercely protective of Carol, even as she gets — and, to an extent, enjoys — how the character is initially so misunderstood. “I found that the men were much easier to suss out in the beginning,” she recalls of her own first impressions. “You can understand what kind of humans they are, but she was less revealed in the beginning, and I found that fascinating about her. I found myself reading all the scripts and thinking that she was one thing and being pleasantly surprised that I was wrong.”
Still, Cardellini has a firm grasp on Carol’s perspective, even in the moments that cast her in the least flattering light. “Her tryst with Clark, even though people see it as selfish and manipulative, does fill something up in her — an excitement that she’s lacking, and a sort of need,” Cardellini says.
Later, when detectives Jodie (Joy Sunday) and Homer (Richard Jenkins) question Carol in her living room, she’s taciturn and combative, demanding the pair speak up even though they’re clearly audible. “She is looking for a way to feel in control,” Cardellini says of that scene. “So much of her life has felt out of control, and her best-laid plans have not come to fruition.”
Carol and Floyd are mired in debt, and they can’t afford a new school that might better serve Richard’s unspecified but apparent special needs. It’s also implied that both Carol’s childhood and her first marriage were unstable and even violent, a backstory that’s crucial to how Cardellini understands the character. “I think people’s behavior is a reaction to previous behavior,” she says. “So, the idea of trying to make herself better, listen to self-help, get somebody to listen to her instead of constantly being put down, is part of her prescription for herself to be better for herself and her family. And it does not come across as very warm to anybody. I don’t know if she thinks that warmth serves her.”
Per Cardellini’s longtime collaborator Liz Feldman, such rigorous empathy for potentially unpalatable people is old hat for her colleague turned friend. Feldman is the creator of “Dead to Me,” the Netflix dramedy in which Cardellini played Judy, a woman revealed in the pilot to have killed the fiancé of her new friend Jen (Christina Applegate).
“I knew that whoever this person was that was going to play her was going to have to be instantly lovable, and that’s how I felt about Linda,” Feldman says. “She was able to harness this soul that I didn’t necessarily imagine a person would be able to imbue in a role like that. Linda is such a special actress, because she always finds a way, even in her darker characters, to love them herself — to understand why they’re acting the way that they are.”
That love is evident in how Cardellini talks about Carol, but also the joy she recounts in bringing her to life on set. Courtesy of Conrad’s singular tone, “DTF St. Louis” is both a deeply sad story about alienation and a perversely funny farce. The very first scene Cardellini and Bateman shot together is one where Carol sits on Clark’s face in what he dubs “weight placement.” (“Getting that scene out of the way, let’s just say, opens it up,” Cardellini says of her partnership with Bateman.) The actor cracks up recalling another instance of indulging Clark’s extremely specific sexual fantasies: Clark, play-acting a sex robot, emerges from a box filled with packing peanuts, vibrating his hips in a Bateman-added flourish.
“DTF St. Louis” employed an intimacy coordinator for these encounters, but Cardellini is particularly appreciative of how Conrad — who directed every episode in addition to writing them — coordinated the sex scenes. “They were storyboarded, so we knew exactly what would be seen,” she says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Just go for it and we’ll see what we use.’ It was, ‘We are going to use a shot like this, a shot like this, a shot like this.’ It was the first time I had seen it mapped out so precisely, and it led you to feel really comfortable in the situation.”
Not all of Cardellini’s slapstick comedy in “DTF St. Louis” was sexual in nature. To make ends meet, Carol takes a side gig as a Little League umpire, and her ungainly uniform contributes to the demise of her sex life with Floyd. (Though the Peyronie’s Disease Floyd developed may have been a bigger factor.) Montages of Cardellini crouching and crab-walking in her turtle-like getup are a welcome reprieve from the show’s heavier material, though the performer is also able to connect them with the core story. “It’s such a metaphor for all the things she’s carrying — the idea that that’s the job that she has to do to make extra money,” Cardellini says. “If you really think about it, she’s doing it for her family. She’s doing it for Floyd, and it’s the one thing that Floyd can’t bear.”
After obscuring Carol’s intentions for so long, “DTF St. Louis” eventually confirms they’re fundamentally good. Spoiler-phobes beware: Floyd’s death is confirmed to be a suicide when Linda tells Richard his final gesture — signed through a pool house window after Floyd consumes a poisoned Bloody Mary — was ASL for “I love you” in front of the detectives, thereby guaranteeing they won’t get the insurance payout. “To me, that’s a very Carol moment,” Cardellini says. “She decides it’s better for him — even though it may hurt — to know that he really loved Richard than [it is] for us to have that million dollars.”
Cardellini has her own ideas about Carol’s future, believing she’ll carry on for Richard’s sake while learning to live with her grief for Floyd. In real life, she’s heading into the rollout for “Crystal Lake,” the “Friday the 13th” prequel series airing this fall on Peacock. Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, mother of Jason and antagonist of the first film. Unlike Carol, there’s no ambiguity over whether Pamela is a proper monster — but adding nuance to women who come off like villains is work Cardellini knows well.
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