Linda Cardellini looks back on her “Price Is Right” debut —and the ironic way she lost the fireplace she won
Linda Cardellini looks back on her “Price Is Right” debut —and the ironic way she lost the fireplace she won
Nick RomanoWed, November 11, 2026 at 2:20 PM UTC
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Linda Cardellini made TV debut on ‘The Price Is Right’ in 1994Credit: JC Olivera/Getty; CBSKey Points -
Linda Cardellini reflects on her 1994 television debut on The Price Is Right.
The actress likens he feeling of her named called to winning the Emmy for DTF St. Louis.
She also shares what happened to the fireplace she won.
Before starring as Pam Voorhees on Friday the 13th prequel Crystal Lake, before winning an Emmy for miniseries DTF St. Louis, and even before entering the cultural zeitgeist with Freaks and Geeks and Scooby-Doo, Linda Cardellini was a game-show girly.
The actress made her television debut on The Price Is Right in 1994 while enrolled in her late teens as a student at Loyola Marymount University. She walked home with a fireplace, though it wasn’t quite the practical prize for a California college kid.
“It was one of the most exciting things,” Cardellini tells Entertainment Weekly. “Number one, I’d never been on television before. I’ve watched that show since I was a little kid with my grandmother, and the idea of being on that show just seemed other worldly. And then to win a prize, it was all of the things at once, but that moment of somebody actually saying your name and that moment of surprise and glee was so present. It’s like being on a roller coaster.”
Linda Cardellini at the 2026 EmmysCredit: Randy Shropshire/NBC via Getty
She admits she was “pretty terrible” when first called up to one of the podiums, but her winning bid of $1,000 on a hardwood cherry fireplace earned her a place on the stage with host-at-the-time Bob Barker. Cardellini likens the euphoria of having her name called to winning the Emmy for DTF St. Louis, in which she played Carol Love-Smernitch, a woman in a love triangle with her husband, (David Harbour), and a local weatherman (Jason Bateman).
Cardellini won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie during the 2026 Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony in early September. Though, The Price Is Right wasn’t without stress.
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“I feel like the pressure and the people yelling in the audience for you to get it right is intense,” Cardellini says. “Also when you don’t know the price of something! I didn’t know the price of Sue Bee Honey or whatever it was. I just was looking out at the audience and there’s 200 people screaming numbers and doing gestures at you. I was looking for my friends — we were all in college — trying to find somebody who I could be a touchstone. Somebody I thought had a realistic version of the supermarket. It was fun.”
Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees in ‘Crystal Lake’Credit: Peacock
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Cardellini kept the fireplace she won for quite a while, she shares, but not anymore. “I lost it in a fire, funny enough,” she says. Specifically, a fire that broke out in a storage facility containing the fireplace. “Not funny,” she follows up, “but fire.”
Decades later, the star can be seen now as Pam Voorhees, the mother of future mask-wearing serial killer Jason Voorhees and the original killer of the Friday the 13th movies, in Crystal Lake. The eight-episode series begins with her son’s drowning at summer camp and continues through Pam’s slow descent into madness as the past she’s been running from all these years resurfaces.
All episodes are available to stream now on Peacock.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
