Widow’s Bay, Apple TV’s horror comedy hit, revolves around the titular coastal Massachusetts island, which is under a curse that keeps native residents trapped there permanently, on threat of death. This is a hindrance to local fishermen, who dare not venture beyond a buoy that marks the border of their explorable universe.
But conditions are also tough for local government employees like Patricia (breakout star Kate O’Flynn), stuck having to continue living among her high school bullies, who remember her worst moments and intend to hold them against her until either she dies or they do.
Fortunately, O’Flynn, who spoke to the Daily Beast’s Obsessed, says her own experience shooting in the region was a lot more pleasant.
“It was just beautiful,” says O’Flynn of the landscape. “I remember going to a shack to get a lobster roll and it being like these bleached wooden panels. I felt like I’d been there in another life, but I think I’d just watched a lot of films.”
The role was in the “incredible” first script Tony Lipp, her first U.S. manager, sent to O’Flynn. After a Zoom meeting with series creator Katie Dippold and executive producer Hiro Murai, who directed half the season’s 10 episodes, “it all actually happened very unusually quickly,” O’Flynn says. Though she’d had a busy career in her native U.K., O’Flynn had been “a bit scared” to try to break into the U.S. market before Widow’s Bay, her first role in an American production.
“You have to shoot your shot at the right time,” she says. “I’d been a theater actor for so long that it took me a long time to actually have anything on screen that I felt represented what I could do.”
That came in her mid-thirties with Landscapers, a true-crime miniseries that aired on HBO in the U.S. and won three BAFTAs: Olivia Colman and David Thewlis play murder suspects under investigation by O’Flynn’s detective. “That was the first thing really that opened doors for me for other stuff on screen,” O’Flynn says.
Though she’d seen such classic horror films as “Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie, Wicker Man, all of that,” O’Flynn had to give herself a crash course in fictional horror for Widow’s Bay, sampling Bring Her Back (with her Happy-Go-Lucky co-star Sally Hawkins), Hereditary, Mandy, and the films of Ti West, who directed the past week’s 18th-century departure episode “Our History.”
Patricia gets her first big showcase in the season’s fourth episode, “Beach Reads,” when we find out that, as a teenager, she was targeted by a serial murderer locally known as The Boogeyman. Because she managed to evade discovery in the house, peers who were friends with the classmates who weren’t so lucky are convinced Patricia lied about the encounter for attention. Mean girl ringleader Kris (Lauren Bittner) is determined not only to keep Patricia out of her social circle but to turn a new town resident against her.
“They were not mean girls in real life,” O’Flynn assures me. “But shooting it, yeah, it’s painful.”
O’Flynn says that even though she’s not a Method actor, being bullied “in a sort of childlike way is sort of even more humiliating that it’s happening as an adult.”
Patricia tries and fails to turn things around with a self-help book full of extremely detailed party-planning instructions, not knowing it’s a grimoire in disguise. Turning the town’s season-opening Sunset Cocktails into a near-mass suicide doesn’t do Patricia’s social life any favors.
“Beach Reads” was the last script O’Flynn received after signing on, so she didn’t know it would get a sequel of sorts in this week’s new episode, “Your Baggage.” After teaming with town mayor Tom (Matthew Rhys) and fisherman Wyck (Stephen Root) to drown undead town founder Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater), Patricia and her fellow ad hoc ghostbusters believe they’ve broken the curse.
Patricia finds out otherwise when The Boogeyman returns to her house, and then pursues her on a slow-speed foot chase all over town.
“The only concern I had was the footwear,” says O’Flynn, “but Alex [Bovaird], our costume designer, is a genius and came up with a great solution of those mad, slipper socks combo that I could run in, because it wouldn’t have made sense for her to be scared out of her wits, but trying to put her shoes on. She has to be ready to go.”
Patricia ends up “just screaming and running”—something O’Flynn shot “for two nights solid”—but none of her neighbors comes to her aid or even seems curious about what’s happening. She eventually ends up at her nasty former classmates’ latest hangout, where Kris gets in her face, ordering her to leave. Patricia responds by calmly zapping Kris with her Taser.
“It’s perfectly Patricia because it’s too much for what’s required, but it’s really satisfying,” says O’Flynn. “You get the motivation, but then afterward, the guilt of, ‘Oh god, I’ve gone too far there, but never mind.’ I just thought that was perfect, and maybe will be quite satisfying for the audience.”
As The Boogeyman’s Final Girl, Patricia takes her position very seriously, holding him at gunpoint in the ambulance, at the morgue, and in the crematorium, only dropping her weapon when she’s satisfied that he has definitely been reduced to ash.
All the while, Enya’s “Caribbean Blue,” which Patricia had been playing while cleaning out her closet when The Boogeyman appeared, plays over the montage, to O’Flynn’s delight. She says she’s not sure if showrunner Katie Dippold or director Andrew DeYoung came up with that detail, but she thought it was a perfect choice, adding that she thinks Enya is probably a favorite of Patricia’s: “It makes so much sense, this Irish reclusive musician that lives in a castle.”
Though Apple has yet to announce a second season, the buzz around the series makes renewal seem very likely. O’Flynn doesn’t have a wish list for Patricia’s possible further adventures, confident in Dippold’s vision.
“I do just have complete trust in her,” says O’Flynn. “I’m watching it week by week and going, ‘Oh my god, the layers to it.’” She admires both the story arc of the season, and the fact that viewers who choose to could also treat it like an anthology: “You could tune into an episode if you fancied one episode here, one episode there, on its own. And, I mean, that’s so difficult to achieve.”
Since O’Flynn’s been steeping in the uncanny world of Widow’s Bay, has her work on the show affected her beliefs about the supernatural?
O’Flynn cops to a baseline level of superstition as an actor, “and just a belief in not being able to see everything that’s going on, that there’s an energy that is not easily categorized or identifiable.”
Beyond that, O’Flynn doesn’t seem to lean woo-woo: “I went to a primary school that used to be an orphanage run by these Belgian nuns…. It got shut down because of cruelty, and there was a fire, and there was a nun. When they were looking at the wreckage, they found these rags, and it was a dead nun. And we all thought we were haunted by the nun, but I don’t think I did actually have a supernatural experience.”
Back in England, O’Flynn seems more haunted by memories of American treats. “The ice cream shops in New England, oh my goodness!” she enthuses. “The ice cream farms, the farm shop, Bedford Farm Ice Creams, Kimball Farm ice creams. You guys know how to do ice cream.”
