One spoiler warning before anything else: this story is about the reveal waiting at the end of Crystal Lake‘s first season, so anyone still working through the finale may want to stop here. Peacock’s Friday the 13th prequel, created by Brad Caleb Kane, arrived all at once on October 15, and its finale, “The Final Chapter,” finally shows Jason Voorhees as a grown man. In a new interview with Deadline, actor Jonathan Tison says that role was his, and that the production kept the secret from him on purpose.
The production filmed under a codename, and Tison, 26, believed he had been cast as a character named Joey. He had never seen a Friday the 13th movie. The truth came out at a makeup test, where he was asked to put his finger into a skull and the effects team complimented his unusually long thumbs, telling him this was going to be exciting. “I was like, ‘Why is this exciting? I’m playing Joey.’ They’re like, ‘Who’s Joey?’ And I’m like, ‘I am,’ and they’re like, ‘Nope, you’re Jason Voorhees.'”
His homework started immediately. “I started watching when I found out that I was Jason,” he said. He built his performance on the sack-hooded Jason first made famous in Friday the 13th Part II, modeling his movement on that film’s chase scenes, and fans have responded to seeing that version of the character again. Tison said the reaction has “been crazy,” adding, “People are really excited.”
Playing Jason meant extensive prosthetics by David Presto. The first time Tison saw himself in the mirror, the size of the role landed all at once: “Oh, I’m Jason.” Pieces of the makeup went into his mouth and over one eye. “I couldn’t hear out of this ear, I couldn’t see out of this eye,” he said. “I kept thinking if Jason actually had to chase someone down, he’d fail. It would not work out.”
Jason never speaks, so Tison played the part from the inside. “I had lines in my head that I was saying to kind of convey emotion through my eyes,” he said. He credited the actors around him, Linda Cardellini as his mother, Pamela, and Hamish Linklater as Jason’s father, Elias, calling them “really great actors to act off of.”
He also pointed back to Callum Vinson, whose young Jason opens the series as a sweet, friendless kid the audience aches for. Viewers carry that sympathy into the finale, Tison said: “They feel almost motherly towards me.” It fits his own reading of Jason as a tragedy first, one he traces to Friday the 13th Part II, when Jenny punctures the campfire legend with “this is actually really sad.” His verdict on Jenny: “She’s the smart one. They should leave the camp.”
Whether Jason stalks again is still an open question. Tison said he has no word yet on a second season, though the cast is hoping for one, and all eight episodes of Crystal Lake are streaming now on Peacock. As TDN reported, Kane’s own career holds a surprise of its own, as the singing voice behind a Disney classic.