Why Linda Cardellini Relished That Last, Nasty ‘No Good Deed’ Twist

This article contains spoilers for the season one finale of No Good Deed.

When Linda Cardellini asks to play a “badass bitch,” there’s only one writer she knows will listen. The ER and Freaks and Geeks alum earned her first lead-acting Emmy nomination for her warmly amusing performance as the good-natured, gently homicidal Judy Hale in Liz Feldman’s Dead to Me. So when Feldman let Cardellini know she was at work on another darkly comic modern series and asked Cardellini who she wanted to play next, Cardellini gave her answer.

Next thing she knew, Cardellini was playing Judy’s opposite in No Good Deed, which centers on a well-to-do Los Angeles couple (Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow) disarmingly eager to sell their dream home. The premiere episode introduces three sets of couples expressing interest at an open house, one of which is the washed-up actor JD Campbell (Luke Wilson) and his gaudy modern wife, Margo (Cardellini). Over the course of the series, Margo starts a brazen affair and fakes a car accident; we learn she’s changed her name and lied about her gloomy past. The finale reveals that Margo is actually the reason why the homeowners are so desperate to leave their home: She killed their son, Jacob, to protect herself after he threatened to take their affair public. When she’s found out, JD burns her house down, and our last glimpse of Margo finds her back up to her aged conning tricks—with some pretty severe facial burns.

So yeah: in all that chaos, there’s a whole lot for Cardellini to play. And while she’s been known for decades on TV as a reliably likable face, in No Good Deed, she relished the chance to break bad.

Vanity Fair: What was your process of discovery with this character? What did you know and when did you know it?

Linda Cardellini: I knew quite a bit about her trajectory from the beginning. I didn’t know how it was going to happen. Thinking about the character too, it was like, is this a whodunit? Is it a how-done-it? And where does she find her way in all of that? There’s a little bit of both in that for her, in the way that she’s presented throughout the show. In true Liz fashion, you never know when the twists and turns are going to come, and even if you know the substantial twists, there’s all these little micro twists and deceptions and strange relationships and other nuggets that come out.

She’s such a fun, wild character. How did you find your way in? What notes were you excited to play?

To build her from the outside in. She’s a very superficial person in a lot of ways—the makeup and the hair and the clothes, I mean, that part was really fun. I got to work again with Trayce [Gigi Field], who was also our wardrobe designer for Dead to Me. Liz and I talked about what we wanted her to look like: You could go to any supermarket in Los Angeles and see somebody who looked like her. Specific to Los Angeles.[Laughs] And the thing I loved about Margo is that she really thinks about herself first. It’s delicious as an actor to think about: It doesn’t matter to me what anybody else wants in this scene. It’s all about what I want.