Crystal Lake showrunner addresses casting Widow's Bay and Gen V star as previously unseen Friday the 13th character

*Warning: Major spoilers ahead for Crystal Lake, which is currently out in the US – the full series will arrive in the UK on 19 October on Sky and NOW.*

Friday the 13th series Crystal Lake has given us plenty of firsts, but perhaps the most important of all is the arrival of a key character who has never been shown on screen before.

The series centres around Pamela Voorhees, the grieving mother of hockey mask-wearing horror icon Jason, after his apparent drowning in Lake Crystal Lake.

In the Friday the 13th films, Pamela's husband Elias is mentioned, but has never been depicted on screen - until now.

In Crystal Lake, however, Hamish Linklater, star of Widow's Bay and Gen V, takes on the role of the menacing Elias, as the show reveals how he manipulated, tortured, and abused Pamela and young Jason as part of cruel experiments.

Speaking exclusively to Radio Times, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane opened up about Linklater's role and revealed exactly what he asked of him.

"[Elias is] a man of his time, really. It was important to me - there's an episode in episode seven, which I wanted to be, like, Douglas Sirk meets David Cronenberg. Like Mad Men meets body horror, basically," he said.

"And we were asking Hamish to basically be a Don Draper type of that time, to be a man of the late '50s and early '60s, ambitious, patriarchal, loving his wife but wanting her to have a very certain place and a very certain role in his life, to live for him to a certain extent. Gosh, he played that perfectly.

"I mean, he's just a total villain in this thing. But at the same time, you do think that he loves his wife, at least from the beginning, but very much like John Cassavetes in Rosemary's Baby, he's willing to do what it takes to further his own career.

"He sells his soul and sells his partner out to further his own goals. So he played that brilliantly and I couldn't ask for a better Elias Voorhees."

All episodes of Crystal Lake will be available exclusively in the UK and Ireland on Sky and NOW on 19 October.

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Authors

Laura Rutkowski is a Commissioning Editor at Radio Times magazine, where she looks after the View From My Sofa slot, and the "What it's like to…" column, which spotlights behind-the-scenes roles within the TV and film industry. She loves finding out how productions are made and enjoys covering a wide variety of genres. Laura is half-American and half-British and joined Radio Times in 2022. She has a degree in Psychology and a Master's in Magazine Journalism.

Louise Griffin is the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Editor for Radio Times, covering everything from Doctor Who, Star Wars and Marvel to House of the Dragon and Good Omens. She previously worked at Metro as a Senior Entertainment Reporter and has a degree in English Literature.