Dead to Me’s Linda Cardellini Discusses Her Character’s Fate in Season 3: ‘It’s Winnable’

Linda Cardellini spoke about her character’s fate in dead to me‘s Season three and claimed the writers really “left it open-ended.”

The third and final season of the Netflix black comedy, which was released on November 17, picks up right after the second series’ cliffhanger, in which James Marsden’s Ben Wood drove off after meeting the love interest of Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) and the His twin brother’s ex-fiancee Judy Hale (Cardellini).

While Judy is shown conscious and awake, Jen’s future remains ambiguous.

Warning, potential spoilers follow

In the third season premiere, Judy rides alongside Jen when she is taken to the hospital and eventually wakes up in a stable condition.

After the two undergo routine checkups to ensure there is no internal bleeding or broken bones, the doctor mistakes Jen for Judy and informs her that he found a potentially cancerous mass.

“Again, I’m so sorry, Miss Hale,” he says to Jen, who gasps when she realizes it’s Judy whose scan he’s referring to.

Judy later receives an unexpected diagnosis of cervical cancer, and in the final episode, while on a short vacation in Mexico with Jen, Jen looks longingly out to sea and notices a sailboat.

The scene – which is a reference to Jen’s dream sequence in the season’s first episode – is meant to foreshadow Judy’s unfortunate death.

However, in conversation with Weekly entertainment In a new interview published Monday, Nov. 21, Cardellini said the ending “is winnable.”

“They really leave it open. I think there are different versions of how the story ends for people,” she shared. And Cardellini clarified to Judy, “You never know if she’s telling the absolute truth.”

Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a free 30-day trial

Register

“[Judy’s] mother [played by Katey Sagal] always alludes to it. And I think what you see in her mother is there in Judy too.”

Cardellini admitted she was “excited but also sad” about the ending.

“I kept trying, ‘Okay, maybe there’s a time capsule buried for you to see if we ever want to get back to it.’ We kept cracking jokes about this time capsule idea so Judy could sort of live forever,” she added.

“I think there’s a part of it where you’re like, ‘Well, she could have gone, I don’t know, anywhere,'” Cardellini lamented. “Will she be in San Francisco? You know what I mean? It has an open ending which I think allows people to have their own type of adventure there that they choose.”

Ahead of the latest season’s premiere, Applegate, whose multiple sclerosis diagnosis put production on hiatus for five months in 2021, spoke about the harrowing difficulties she overcame during filming.

Not only did she reveal that she used a wheelchair on set, but also that in some scenes the show’s sound engineer had to hold her legs up to keep her still.

dead to me can be streamed on Netflix.