When Emmy-winner Matthew Rhys was pitched TV’s scariest new show, Widow’s Bay, the script’s surprising humor nearly kept him from taking the leading role.
“When I got sent it by my agent, they went, ‘It’s a horror-comedy.’ And you kind of go, ‘Oh god,’ because that’s a tough tone to crack,” Rhys, 51, admitted on Obsessed: The Podcast. “And then I read it, and I was really kind of blown away by it for a number of reasons.”
“I was impressed by the fact that it did both things it said on the tin,” he continued. “I laughed in moments, and then there were other moments like, ‘Oh my god! What’s gonna happen?!’”
In Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay—which the Daily Beast dubbed “the best new show of the year”—the Emmy-winning star of The Americans plays Tom Loftis, a skeptical, mainland-born mayor of a cursed New England island. While trying to turn the quaint locale into a summer tourist destination, Loftis personally encounters the many hauntings that locals have warned him about.
When the show creators pitched Rhys, they laid out the comedy-horror juxtaposition plainly.
“When I spoke to Hiro Murai and Katie Dippold, they were just very honest about it. They said, ‘Yes, it is a tough tone to crack, but we’re not really trying to make a horror-comedy. We’re trying to build a real world with real people, and we play everything for real, and that’s it,’” Rhys said. “And hopefully the comedy is situational or character-driven, as is the horror, so we shouldn’t be playing one or the other.”
Rhys described the show, which largely focuses on the interactions between the island’s municipal workers, as “If you take The Office and put it into a Stephen King setting.” Coincidentally, Dippold, the show’s creator, is a former Parks and Recreation writer.
“In that way, think sometimes small coastal island towns can produce these very unique, salty individuals, which makes for great comedy,” he added.
For some scenes, Rhys, who has spent his career doing dramatic work, forced himself to portray the horror-thriller by using his college acting teacher’s “the incredible as if” approach.
“You’ve just got to lean on your imagination,” he said.
For other scenes, the on-set experience was somehow just as terrifying as it would end up being on screen.
“Some of the images were just very potent. Like the clown racing towards me was terrifying. The sea hag on the lonely road, as my headlights hit her, was terrifying. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is creepy,’” he said. “So you just lean into the feeling it’s giving you, and just try and give it as much of the ‘as if’ as possible.”
Though Apple has not yet officially renewed Widow’s Bay for a second season, Rhys believes the first season is just “taking the Band-Aid off to reveal a very deep wound.”
“So what happens if there’s a Season 2? What happens?” Rhys asked Dippold, the show’s creator. To which she replied only, “I don’t know!”
“I hope he doesn’t crack the island. I hope the island keeps us going for another season, because I could do this for a long time. It’s a lot of fun,” Rhys concluded.
New episodes of Widow’s Bay stream on Apple TV every Wednesday.
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