Linda Cardellini Set To Play Iconic Horror Villain In Peacock's Friday The 13th Prequel Crystal Lake
Linda Cardellini is squeezing in around the Crystal Lake campfire: The Dead to Me star has officially joined Peacock's forthcoming Friday the 13th prequel as Jason Voorhees' mother Pamela, TVLine has learned.
The prequel was ordered to series back in October 2022, being billed as an "expanded prequel" to the long-running horror film franchise with hockey mask-wearing killer Jason Voorhees at its center. In August of last year, the series came back from the dead with a new showrunner following the high-profile exit of Hannibal vet Bryan Fuller. ("For reasons beyond our control, [production company] A24 has elected to go a different way with the material," the producer said at the time.) Picking up where Fuller left off will be Brad Caleb Kane (It: Welcome to Derry), who will serve as the series' creator, writer and executive producer.
The original Friday the 13th film, which followed a group of counselors being murdered at a summer camp, was released in 1980 and become a box-office hit, spawning myriad slasher copycats that flooded theaters in the '80s and beyond. The Mrs. Voorhees character was originally portrayed by Betsy Palmer, who reprised the role in 1981 for a cameo appearance in Friday the 13th Part 2.
Friday the 13th grew a franchise that includes nine sequels, a Nightmare on Elm Street crossover Freddy vs. Jason and a 2009 big-screen reboot. A previous TV adaptation, Friday the 13th: The Series, ran in first-run syndication from 1987 to 1990. The CW also developed an hour-long series based on the franchise, but it never made it past the pilot stage.
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