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.
[pagebreak]
AVC:
When it comes to American comedies, it seems like making something great goes
hand-in-hand with fearing that you're going to be cancelled. When did you get
the sense that the show wasn't going to make it?
LC: [Laughs.] Well, we always
sort of talked about it, and it always sort of had been a joke. I remember
going to the upfront, and we were sitting with The West Wing and another new show that
NBC had on, and we really felt like the freaks and geeks of the bunch—a
bunch of kids sitting around in this room full of successful people. One of my
funniest memories about the show and its obscurity was, John Daley and I were
sent, and I think maybe Samm Levine, to do the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
We were up on top of some kind of float and we were waving to people. We were so excited—I had never
seen a crowd like that before in my life, and to be on a float coming down the
street in New York on Thanksgiving Day in that parade was crazy. It was
freezing and it was raining on us, and people were yelling out terrible things,
cursing at us, and it was finally dead quiet for a split second, and one person
yelled out, "Who are you?!" We just looked at each other and started laughing,
and John Daley, who was 13 or 14 at the time, said, "I'm John Daley! This is
Linda Cardellini! We're on a show called Freaks And Geeks! You should watch it,
it's really good!" It made me laugh so hard. We had a great time all day, but
nobody knew who we were or what our show was about. Thank God for the DVD,
because some people would have never seen it.
The
real time I knew when it was dying was when we had no food at craft services.
[Laughs.] When we first started, we had a buffet—when you're young and
you're struggling in Hollywood, a table full of free food is a godsend. Toward
the end of it, we jokingly took a picture with a Polaroid that said, "Come to
craft services and have a bite," with A underlined—they had taken
away so much of the funding that we really didn't even have that much food to
eat.
AVC:
Did that put a cloud over the show while you were making it, or did you ignore
the business side of things and just get down to work?
LC: There was definitely a
sadness thinking that we weren't going to be able to continue what we'd been
doing, because we loved it so much. But for me, there was sort of the feeling
of, "Well, sometimes bright lights burn fast, and you really can't count on
anything lasting too long." Which is funny, because then I went from doing that
show on NBC to a show that's been on for 14 years. [Laughs.] It's anybody's
guess, really.
AVC:
Do you have a favorite episode?
LC: That's hard. The last
episode is maybe my favorite. We knew that there was a 95 percent chance that
the show was going to be canceled, so we shot that last episode—the last
airing episode—two before we actually finished shooting. We shot it out
of sequence so that would always be—which was so brilliant of Paul and
Judd—the last episode of the show. It's funny, because people always ask
me, "What ends up happening to Lindsay after the Dead?" But that's how they
wanted to end the show, sort of in that ambiguous way. That episode, I think we
all knew what we had was special and there was a chance that it wasn't going to
happen, and we were ending it before anybody truly told us it was over. I've
only seen parts of the show in recent years. That show seems to be about her
saying goodbye, in some small way, to that version of her life. One of my
favorite moments to act in that show was when she's getting on the bus and she
stops to say goodbye to her mom—it's that minute of, "After I leave on
this bus, things will never be the same." That's sort of an interesting time in
your adolescence, where you choose to grow in your own way. I think the same
thing with her and the Nick character was, she knew that something was ending—it
had already ended, and there was something bittersweet about it.
AVC:
Why do you personally think that a show that was canceled so early on still has
such a rabid following?
LC: I really believe that it
was just a very special combination of a lot of different people's hard work,
if that makes any sense.
AVC:
Probably the same reason why you were attracted to it in the first
place—the realism.
LC: Yeah, it just seems true.
I felt very lucky to be part of that, and I still feel very lucky. I am so
grateful that people are still finding it, because I think it's got so much
heart and it says so many things about so many of the overlooked people that go
through high school. The geeks aren't the smartest kids in school—they're
not those
geeks—and the freaks aren't the worst kids. It's about the people in
between, and how you feel when you're in that in-between phase.
AVC:
A lot of your Freaks And Geeks castmates have continued working with Judd
Apatow, but you haven't. Is there a reason why?
LC: No, I've seen Judd a
bunch of times. I just ended up working—I work on ER a lot, and I think it
just sort of hasn't happened. But there's no hidden reason.
AVC:
With the writers' strike, obviously nothing is happening with ER right now. What else
are you working on?
LC: [Laughs.] Pretty much not
a lot right now. I've just been working on myself, I guess. This is the first
time in a long time that I haven't been working. I don't think I've had more
than a month off in years. So it's interesting.
AVC:
Have you been taking advantage of that?
LC: I just got back from
Switzerland, which I've never been to. I went to Switzerland and Amsterdam.
Some friends of mine were playing music in Switzerland, so I went up to some
small mountain town and had New Year's up there.
