For a TV show that limped through a single season eight years ago, Freaks And Geeks certainly has a lot of rabid followers. A semiautobiographical series created and co-written by Paul Feig and produced by Judd Apatow (who has since gone on to massive success with films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad), Freaks And Geeks was set in early-'80s Michigan and did a poignant and often hilarious job of showing what life is like for those on the fringes of high-school society. Main freak Lindsay Weir was played by Linda Cardellini, who nailed the part of a girl conflicted over the process of shedding her old skin; it sounds a bit like My So-Called Life, but holds up much better. With a Freaks And Geeks reunion taking place at San Francisco's Sketchfest on Jan. 20, The A.V. Club spoke with Cardellini—now playing nurse Samantha Taggart on ER—about what it was like being pelted with insults at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and why Freaks And Geeks was so great.
The A.V. Club: How did you get involved with Freaks And Geeks?
Linda Cardellini: I auditioned. Nobody really knew who I was, and they said, "She's not sure if she wants to see you." I remember thinking, "If nothing else, I just want to prove to this casting director"—who I'd never met before—"that I can at least act." It was great, because that was really my only goal, and I think that took the pressure off of wondering what they wanted for the role, or what I was going to do. They had us audition for different parts, and they had us improv—as an actor, it was a grueling but fun process, because you actually got to do something really creative in there.
AVC: When you were reading the script, did you notice similarities between Lindsay and Claire Danes' character in My So-Called Life?
LC: No, I didn't. I didn't know of it. I'd heard about it and I'd heard the comparison, but I never had seen the show.
AVC: What initially attracted you to Freaks And Geeks?
LC: I had been reading a lot of scripts, and it was the best script that I had read. There were a few other shows that I was strongly in the running for, and I said, "I really want to do this show. I don't care if the other shows have better deals, or if they have a greater shot of being successful. This show is so good." It had so much humor and so much heart, and was so much more genuine to my experience in school, or my experience as an adolescent, compared to the other shows that I was reading. They all seemed to have a gimmick, whereas there really wasn't a gimmick necessarily with this show, other than it was trying to be as true to how awkward it feels to be that age as possible. It resonated with me. The thing that really drew me to it was, here was this person who was sort of disenchanted and uncomfortable in her adolescence, but she truly loved her parents. There were other scripts, and there were other kids who were sort of indifferent to the world around them, but she really had love for her brother and her parents, but she didn't know how to handle it. It was a character that was really struggling in a way that was very human—it was about her trying to cut the apron strings, and how difficult that is.
AVC: Did you have a similar relationship with your family?
LC: Yes, I'm very close to my family. And being that close to your family, I think you also struggle with how to become your own person.
AVC: You weren't too far out of high school when you made Freaks And Geeks—how much of your personal experience did you bring to Lindsay?
LC: Well, I was one of the older ones. James [Franco] and I were the older of the group, as opposed to Seth [Rogen], who was still 17 and going to school on-set. It really wasn't that hard for me—it's about her feeling comfortable in her own skin, and that's something that you struggle with in the type of business that we're in, [which] sometimes feels like a giant high school. [Laughs.] Some things were nostalgic, but other things were just playing on feeling like you're the outsider, or feeling like you're in that in-between phase. That awkwardness is not so unfamiliar to me.
AVC: Did you feel like it was something special when you were actually filming?
LC: Yes, definitely I thought we were making something special. That didn't necessarily mean I thought it was going to be successful. [Laughs.] I was still pretty green at that point, so I didn't really know. I look back on that as a really special time in my life. We had such a great group together, and we enjoyed each other so much, and we all truly loved what we were doing. We were able to really play, we had a lot of freedom, and yet we had writers who were so talented, and we were sort of thrust into this world in the 1980s. People were calling it a period piece, yet it was only in 1980. We were constantly learning things and having a really good time. We spent a lot of time together, on- and off-set.
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