Widow’s Bay fans rejoice! Creator-showrunner Kate Dippold has a progress report on the Season 2 writers’ room.
“It’s great,” she said during a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio. “Week 3, feeling great. I think it’s fun. I feel like I always look at Season 1 — what was really hard with that is having to lay all the groundwork. ‘Haunted Island’ sounds silly and terrible, honestly. I’m still happy they all signed up. It’s a tough pitch. I feel like a lot of groundwork was laid in Season 1 so you can buy it. So, it’s making Season 2 much more fun.”
Then, with a glance at her fellow panelist and lead actor Matthew Rhys, she deadpanned, “But no Loftis.”
In addition to Dippold and Rhys, the panel chat included executive producer/director Hira Murai and co-stars Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root, Dale Dickey and Jeff Hiller. Watch their conversation below and scroll down for photos from the event.
In Apple TV comedy series Widow’s Bay, Rhys stars as Tom Loftis, the slightly desperate mayor of an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Along with the town’s hard-drinking fisherman Wyck (Root), and the town hall staff of Patricia (O’Flynn), Rosemary (Dickey) and Dale (Hiller), Loftis tries to ignore a centuries-old island curse while attracting tourists to the island.
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Murai recalled facing one of the show’s key challenges going into it. “The immediate thing I thought of is, if you had the wrong actor, this whole thing falls apart. And I’m only saying this because I know Matthew hates getting compliments on-camera. And I honestly wasn’t sure it was going to work until we met Matthew.”
Rhys, who also signed on as an EP, said he was on board from the get-go: “I always knew I wanted to do it because I’d never read anything like it. And it was so ‘other’. It was so needed. It was sort of refreshing. But the most important thing to me is I desperately wanted to know how it would end. Because I was like, “Yes, I know.” And yes, and I was like, “But what’s going to happen?” When so much was teed up in the planning, I was like, “Okay, what’s going to happen here because I need to know. And the only way that’ll happen is if I’m in it.”
He also joked that his friends back home in Wales see exactly why he warmed to Widow’s Bay. “They said, ‘That is Wales. It’s like that’s just a busman’s holiday for you. There’s nothing different about that. That’s like an average afternoon in Fishguard [Wales].’ So yeah, they were like, ‘Well, of course you did that. That’s where you came from.’”
L-R: Stephen Root, Hiro Murai, Dale Dickey, Katie Dippold, Matthew Rhys, Kate O’Flynn and Jeff Hiller
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Matthew Rhys
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Dale Dickey
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Kate O’Flynn
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Stephen Root
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Katie Dippold
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Jeff Hiller
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Hiro Murai
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Matthew Rhys
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
O’Flynn’s character of Patricia has become something of a popular phenomenon. Why does she think people relate so much to Patricia? “She’s like people that are a bit annoying that don’t do the right thing, and then sometimes they step up and they’re brave, and sometimes you see them loving and sometimes you see them being a bit bitchy… That I find comforting TV, which is, real people. And I think that’s what everyone’s responding to. And I’d say that they’re responding to all our characters because all of them are so well written.”
As for what she wishes she could take from Patricia into her own life, O’Flynn says, “I wish I was as smart as her when it comes to the final girl montage creative problem-solving that she does. If I could knit that into my life, that would make it a hundred times better.”
Dickey said she immediately responded to the script and her character of Rosemary. “I was laughing out loud, and I don’t usually do that. It was just, my god. I could picture the people in my head in this world. I could visualize them. And I related to her laidback-ness and her just self-assurance just to be who she is and say what she wants to say, whether it’s annoying or not.”
As for what the cast would like to see in Season 2, Root said, “I would love to know more about the backstory. What made Wyck Wyck? What kind of scenes did he see when he was a kid or a young man to make him to want to be a protector of the island to get him to the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore and he said, ‘No, I’m not sitting back anymore. I’m going to tell this mayor that I don’t respect, that I’m going to come out and I’m going to sound the [warning] siren.’”
Hiller said of playing Dale that his longtime background doing improv with Dippold came into play at times, even when it wasn’t meant to. “That was actually very tempting. And I didn’t always succeed. They said, ‘We’ll cut around that.’”
He did however, sneak a bit of improv into the final cut. “One that I think I’m weirdly proud of that literally no one has said that they liked is when Tom is talking and saying, ‘I don’t think this microphone is on.’ And then I say, ‘I can hear you.’”
He also enjoyed that the town pub, The Salty Whale, became a sort of de facto green room for the cast. “We would sit around in little director’s chairs and it’s just very exciting to be around other actors and especially actors like Dale and Steven are. You just said how many roles they’ve been in, and every role comes with a story. And so, hearing those stories was really good.”