The last time I saw Linda Cardellini, she was hugely pregnant and onstage in Los Angeles as a guest star in the Thrilling Adventure Hour’s 2011 Christmas special. (She played space novelist Rebecca Rose Rushmore, sometime para-mour of Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars and… you know, never mind, we’ll be here all day.)
Now we’re sitting down at Netflix’s Toronto press day for Bloodline, a 13-episode drama about a well-off Miami family torn apart by secrets, lies and murder. Cardellini’s part of an all-star ensemble that also includes Kyle Chandler, Ben Mendelsohn, Norbert Leo Butz, Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard – each one playing a character more conflicted and complicated than the last.
Or… are they?
I’m gonna geek out a little: I really love your work with the Thrilling -Adventure Hour. I was actually at the 2011 Christmas show.
Oh, nice! Yeah, it’s really fun. It’s so much fun to get up there with those people. They pick nice, cool people (I’m not talking about myself), so it’s fun to go there and do it. It’s just so different.
It’s always fun to talk to someone who’s done it – everybody speaks so well of the experience. Colin Hanks, Jason Ritter…
Yeah, yeah! Who I do Gravity Falls with.
I know it’s ostensibly for kids, but I love that show.
It’s such a cute show – it’s so strange and so sweet, and Kristen [Schaal] and Jason are great as those little twins. I love it. I’m happy to be part of it.
Bloodline is from the creators of the equally adult Damages, and it uses a similar flash-forward framing device to keep twisting our perspective on the principal players. And in the case of your character, Meg, there are a few things…
Did you get to [episode] three? Did you make it to three? Because once you get to three, you see something.
I made it to three, yeah. I’ve watched the first seven episodes. There’s some pretty complex stuff coming down the pike for this family.
Yeah, which is interesting when you’re playing it, because we shoot them as they’re scripted, you know? So even if you’re shooting something that happens in the final episode [chronologically], you shoot it in the third or the second episode, you know what I mean?
It’d be like shooting the whole series out of order.
It’s out of order for us as well as the viewer. So that is interesting, because you jump ahead in character development in some ways, and then you fill in the blanks later.
How did they pitch it to you? Did you know how many different facets of Meg you’d be expected to play?
The big events that happen and the big twists we were aware of. The smaller twists and the finer details – and the road to those things – were sometimes discovered along the way.
How did that work on the set? Were you and your co-stars shifting loyalties with every new script?
Everybody’s pretty good-natured in terms of working together, and everybody’s highly professional, so working with the other actors was a total joy. And for the times when we were discovering things as they came to us, you rely on each other a lot as actors to -explore those scenes in many different ways so they can fit into any time or space the creators decide to put them in. It’s a gift to work with those people – the cast and the show. I’m an admirer and a fan of so many of them, so to work with them was a beautiful experience.
It took me a couple of hours to realize I’d seen Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard together in Raggedy Man, which was why their chemistry felt so familiar.
It was so beautiful because it should be familiar, and it really is.
And Shepard’s character might be the trickiest of all to play – a patriarch who’s spent his life withholding so much from his own children for a number of reasons we don’t immediately understand.
He’s strong, and he comes across that way. His personality… from all of his writing, he’s got a very strong point of view. And I feel like nobody came to that set who hadn’t been awed and inspired by his plays. I did Mad Dog Blues in college, and to play a scene with somebody who is [both] a playwright and an icon, it’s just…. You forget about it, because what you’re working on feels so good. We had a small scene together [in episode three] at the end of this dock, and it’s one of my favourite moments.
We’re speaking four days after Netflix released all 13 episodes of Bloodline at once. Your previous episodic work was more conventional, rolling out a week at a time over months or even years. Does this feel different, now that it’s all just out there?
Well, the reception of it is really new at this point, so I don’t know exactly what that will be. But I can speak to it from Freaks & Geeks, because that’s having a resurgence – or an emergence of new fans – because of Netflix. People are able to watch the whole thing [now], and back when we were on TV you were hard pressed to find it two weeks in a row [laughing]. Then it got cancelled, and it was only found on DVD, and that was even hard to do. So I feel like because of streaming TV or whatever you want to call it, there’s a whole new appreciation for certain things that would have just gotten lost in some kind of abyss.
I was talking to Dick Miller last week about the movies he made in the 50s and 60s – movies that were designed to play at drive-ins for a couple of months and then disappear. Most of those are back now, too. Everything’s available.
That’s true. For better and for worse. The same thing goes with what you say, too. It lives forever on the Internet. It used to be you would talk on radio and it would just go away, you know? And now you say something and it shows up in a lot of different places – it’s just a different thing with the internet now. And the thing about making this show versus making sort of traditional television as I had made it is there didn’t have to be a pilot where the show proves itself in one episode. The idea that the show, from the beginning, had 13 episodes, and that first episode – or any of the subsequent episodes – don’t have to necessarily stand alone or be able to replay in syndication alone. It makes for a different type of show. I think this show from [episode] 1 to 13 is able to be something as a whole, instead of in pieces, you know?
It does have a kind of novelistic sprawl to it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Although I kind of want to recut the whole thing chronologically – starting with the flashbacks to the siblings’ childhood and ending with all the flash-forwards – just to see how it plays. That could be interesting.
Wow. That would. That’s a really interesting idea. I’d like to see that, too [laughing]! Maybe a DVD extra, as they used to say.
