These ‘Dead to Me’ stars are protective of each other. ‘Take you down’ protective

Hello! I’m Yvonne Villarreal. and welcome to another edition of the companion newsletter to “The Envelope: The Podcast,” where my cohost, Mark Olsen, and I are bringing you highlights from each week’s episode throughout awards season.

It’s Golden Globes nominations morning, so that means two things: I’m bleary-eyed as I write this and an unprecedented Hollywood awards season has officially kicked into high gear, with the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. setting the tone for what’s in store on the film side after a year of cinema closures, theatrical delays and streaming releases. (For its part, TV mostly kept right on trucking, though the Globes are a chance to honor series, like “The Queens Gambit” and “Ted Lasso, that premiered after the Emmy nominations window closed at the end of May.)

On the film side, “Mank” led with six nominations, while other top contenders included “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “Promising Young Woman” and “Nomadland.” The top TV players include perennial favorite “The Crown,” departing comedy “Schitt’s Creek” and recent binge favorite “The Undoing.” Notable acting nominees included Anya Taylor-Joy, who was recognized for the the film “Emma” and her TV role in “The Queen’s Gambit,” and Sacha Baron Cohen, a double-nominee for his roles in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”

The Golden Globes ceremony will air live on Feb. 28 on NBC, with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler returning as hosts. The pair previously emceed the ceremony in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

In the meantime, nominations week will continue Thursday when the contenders for the Screen Actors Guild Awards are announced.

On this week’s podcast episode, we have two guests who are no stranger to the awards circuit: Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, the dynamic duo of “Dead to Me.” (In fact, they were both nominated for lead actress in a comedy at last year’s Emmys.) The pair are expected to fare well when SAG Award nominations are announced.

Both performers made their breakthroughs on television with wildly different depictions of teenagers — Applegate with her turn as can’t-be-bothered Kelly Bundy on “Married ... With Children” and Cardellini with hers as shy and brainy Lindsay Weir, who is trying to find her place in high school, in “Freaks and Geeks.” These days, the actresses have teamed as unlikely besties with a deadly streak in the Netflix dark comedy.

Applegate plays Jen Harding, recently widowed, and Cardellini plays Judy Hale, the woman who accidentally killed Jen’s husband in a hit-and-run. Although developed under unusual (and deceptive) circumstances, their friendship blossoms into a mutual dependency and something profound — even as bizarre situations continue to engulf them.

“The trust that we have with each other in life, and on screen, which just happened magically, kind of instantly for us, I’m so grateful for,” Cardellini said. “It’s a gift in my real life and it’s a gift in my professional life. I love when we’re on set together. I couldn’t even hope for a better partner. The idea of playing these two characters — two women [who are] such great and separate and layered and rich characters, and then to be playing them with Christina ... it makes it so much fun when we have to do the things that we do. Even the terrible things.”

“We didn’t have to develop it because we were protective of each other from Day One — as women, as friends,” Applegate said. “And when you feel protected, you feel safe enough to go places that you need to go. And I feel like we protected each other on a personal level. That trust let us be able to feel safe of where we had to be and where we had to go as characters, as people. I’m very protective of Linda. I would hurt anyone who hurt Linda. I would take them down ... with a ceramic bird.”

(Viewers of the show will get that reference.)

Created by Liz Feldman, the series returned for its second season last May, a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be back for a third and final season.

Thanks for reading/listening/subscribing. We have lots more to come, including conversations with Josh O’Connor about “The Crown,” Lee Isaac Chung for “Minari” and Garrett Bradley about “Time.”

Listen to the podcast here and subscribe to “The Envelope: The Podcast” on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice.