How Linda Cardellini Was Fiercely Protective of ‘Crystal Lake’ Costar Callum Vinson on Set

Like mother, like actress. That was the story of Linda Cardellini and Callum Vinson‘s relationship on the set of Crystal Lake, it seems. The cast of Peacock’s new Friday the 13th adaptation were on hand to discuss what’s ahead in the spooky new series, and the actress revealed that, like her on-screen alter ego Pamela Voorhees, she was fiercely protective of her young costar during production.

“Callum is an unbelievable actor. I mean, everybody I sit here with is just so wonderfully talented, but he’s so special at bringing that innocence, and you immediately feel for him,” she said in the above interview from TV Insider’s New York Comic Con suite. “To want to protect him and to want to sort of have that relationship with him, I think, is so easy because he’s so good. He has so many hard things to do on the show and wearing prosthetics. The idea was that I wanted to protect him at all costs, and I think that’s what the whole franchise is about. It’s about Jason. So for Pam, it’s about Jason.”

“For the people who are watching, it’s about Jason waiting for him to come. And so just getting to know him is sort of the making of the monster and the making of the mother is also a monster, so the monster making a monster is interesting, and they didn’t start out that way,” Cardellini continued. “They were made to be that way, and I love that part of the story. But he makes it very easy. He’s wonderfully talented, and he had such difficult things to do.”

Executive producer Brad Caleb Kane agreed that Cardellini went full mama bear both on- and off-screen with Vinson, explaining that her protectiveness had a lot to do with the physical challenges he faced with his facial prosthetics.

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“Linda wanting to protect Callum led into real life, too, because we shot during a very, very hot summer in New Jersey, and Callum was under like 18 pounds of prosthetic makeup, and I think we might have been frying his head like an egg,” he said. “Linda was like, ‘Get that thing off!'”

Peacock

Vinson himself agreed that the process was arduous, explaining, “The original cast to make the frame of the head so you could put all of the prosthetic around it took about four and a half hours, and then we eventually just kept workshopping and workshopping. And when we did the first test for Brad, actually putting on the prosthetics on my skin, it took about three hours. And then after we continued to workshop, it eventually got down to one and a half and two.”

Check out more from TV Insider’s chat with the cast of Crystal Lake above!

Crystal Lake, Series Premiere, October 15, Peacock