Freaks and Geeks may have gone off the air 19 years ago, but Linda Cardellini would still be ‘down’ to revisit her role as Lindsay Weir — if the opportunity presented itself.
“You can never say never,” the Avengers: Endgame actress, 43, told Us Weekly exclusively while attending the premiere of Netflix’s Dead to Me in Santa Monica, California, on Thursday, May 2. “You know, if everybody was on board and … everybody came up with a great idea,” she said. “But I don’t know how they would do it.”
The show’s writing has certainly stood the test of time — Cardellini said one fan, who was seemingly unaware that the series was a throwback, recently told her he hoped there would be “a second season.” “I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not,” she said.
Still, she agrees that the show held a certain type of magic for viewers. “I think that the idea that it still resonates is something that’s very beautiful about it,” she said. “Everybody in that cast was so talented and everybody in the [writer’s] room, on-screen and off-screen, everybody was so talented.”
As for Cardellini’s own character, the California native called her “really special.” She continued, “[At that time for that a girl … to be at the center of a show, it was totally [unusual]. … And she wasn’t beyond her years. She was really sort of uncomfortable in her own skin but in a teenager’s skin. I think she was a really smart and fun depiction of that.”
Freaks and Geeks aired on NBC from 1999 to 2000, but was canceled after one season. It developed a cult following years later, however, with Cardellini telling Good Housekeeping in March 2016 that the show gets “new fans all the time with Netflix.”
Should the series get a reboot, there may be some awkwardness on set: Busy Philipps (Kim Kelly) wrote that James Franco (Daniel Desario) allegedly assaulted her during filming in her 2018 memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little.
“He grabbed both my arms and screamed in my face, ‘DON’T EVER TOUCH ME AGAIN!’” she wrote. “And he threw me to the ground. Flat on my back. Wind knocked out of me.”
The Dawson’s Creek alum, 39, later clarified her comments online. “The Franco story is used to illustrate a larger point about the way women are treated in this business in life,” she wrote on Instagram. “There are no ‘allegations’ and no ‘accusations.’ It’s a story that I have been telling for years. James apologized. I accepted. And I still get to tell it because it f–king happened to me.”
With reporting by Nicole Pajer
