Linda Cardellini

Info

Full Name: Linda Edna Cardellini
Date of birth: June 25, 1975 (51 years old)
Location: Redwood City, California
Country: USA

Linda Cardellini has been active for 25 years, participating in 20 movies that average a 6.8/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

Nearly thirty years into the job, in September 2026, Linda Cardellini finally won an Emmy. It came for Carol Love-Smernitch, one corner of the love triangle in 'DTF St. Louis', the HBO miniseries about a dating app that pairs up married couples in Missouri looking for an affair. Nominations had been coming since 2013, and the show cleaned up on the night with seven awards, Outstanding Limited Series among them.

Linda Edna Cardellini was born on 25 June 1975 in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco. She's the youngest of four children in a Catholic family of Italian and Irish descent, her father a businessman and her mother a homemaker. A theatre arts degree at Loyola Marymount University followed in 1997, and she started out the way most people do, picking up single episodes of other people's shows.

Lindsay Weir and a series that lasted eighteen episodes

Those early credits included 'Boy Meets World' and '3rd Rock from the Sun', and then came the part people still stop her about. 'Freaks and Geeks' (1999) made her Lindsay Weir, the straight-A mathlete who hangs up her letterman jacket and starts knocking about with the school's burnouts. NBC pulled the plug with eighteen episodes shot and only fifteen aired.

Paul Feig created it, Judd Apatow produced it, and the cast list reads like a decade of American comedy waiting to happen: Jason Segel, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps and John Francis Daley. Cardellini and Segel were a couple for years after the cancellation and split in 2007.

Velma, Chutney and six years in the ER

Two very different jobs made her face familiar. One was 'Legally Blonde' (2001), where she played Chutney, the victim's daughter whose fresh perm destroys her own alibi on the witness stand. The other was Velma Dinkley in 'Scooby-Doo' (2002) and 'Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed' (2004), both directed by Raja Gosnell, alongside Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar and Matthew Lillard.

She joined the tenth season of 'ER' in 2003 as Samantha Taggart, the nurse who takes over from Abby Lockhart as the head of the department, and stayed until the final episode in 2009. Six seasons at County General gave her the steady work that films weren't offering, though the same stretch also produced her Cassie, the waitress who dates Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's 'Brokeback Mountain' (2005).

From Don Draper to the Netflix years

Grown-up drama took up the following decade. Sylvia Rosen, the married neighbour Jon Hamm gets tangled up with in the sixth season of 'Mad Men', brought her a first Emmy nomination in 2013. The same year she was up for the Independent Spirit for Best Female Lead for 'Return', as an army reservist back from the Middle East who can't settle into her old life, with Michael Shannon and John Slattery.

Netflix then signed her twice over. First for 'Bloodline' (2015-2017), as Meg Rayburn, the lawyer daughter of a family running a small hotel in the Florida Keys, with Kyle Chandler, Ben Mendelsohn, Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard.

Then came 'Dead to Me' (2019-2022), her most watched show by a distance. Her Judy Hale befriends the widow played by Christina Applegate at a grief support group and keeps quiet about what she knows of the crash. Three seasons brought an Emmy nomination for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2020 and two more from the Screen Actors Guild.

Marvel, the Conjuring universe and a green book

A formidable supporting filmography was piling up alongside all of that. One strand of it is Laura Barton, Hawkeye's wife, in 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' (2015), 'Avengers: Endgame' (2019) and the series 'Hawkeye' (2021), opposite Jeremy Renner every time.

She has played Will Ferrell's wife in 'Daddy's Home' (2015) and 'Daddy's Home 2' (2017), the piano player Ray Kroc leaves his wife for in 'The Founder' (2016) with Michael Keaton, and the mother haunted by a Mexican folk spirit in 'The Curse of La Llorona' (2019), the Conjuring spin-off directed by Michael Chaves.

The most decorated film on her CV is 'Green Book' (2018), the Best Picture winner, in which she was Dolores Vallelonga, wife to Viggo Mortensen's Tony Lip. Smaller turns followed in 'A Simple Favor' (2018), 'Hunter Killer' (2018) with Gerard Butler, and 'Capone' (2020), as Mae to a Tom Hardy in freefall.

There's a voice career running underneath all this that tends to get overlooked. Wendy in 'Gravity Falls', CJ in 'Regular Show' and Lylla the otter in 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3' (2023) all come out of it, the last of those her third job for James Gunn after 'Super' (2010).

Pamela Voorhees and a thirteen-year engagement

2026 has been her year. 'DTF St. Louis' launched in March with Jason Bateman, David Harbour, Richard Jenkins and Peter Sarsgaard. October brought 'Crystal Lake', the 'Friday the 13th' prequel that went out on Peacock in the States and on Sky Atlantic here, with Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, Jason's mother, eight years before the events of the 1980 film. All eight episodes dropped at once, to better reviews than the franchise usually gets.

Before that she had done 'Nutcrackers' (2024) for David Gordon Green, opposite Ben Stiller, and 'Nonnas' (2025), the comedy Stephen Chbosky made for Netflix with Vince Vaughn. Apple TV+ releases 'Way of the Warrior Kid' in November 2026, with her as the mother of a bullied boy and sister to the soldier played by Chris Pratt, and she has already shot 'They Know' for Bill Hader, playing his ex-wife.

Not much is known about her private life, which is how she wants it. Her partner is Steven Rodriguez, a make-up artist and her childhood crush: they were at primary school together when she was ten and he was eleven, reconnected in 2010 and had a daughter, Lilah-Rose, in February 2012. He proposed in June 2013, and that's where things have stayed. Asked about the wedding on the Emmys red carpet, she said maybe, pointing out they've been engaged thirteen years and planning the party for sixteen.