The ‘Widow’s Bay’ Team Reveals Secrets, Stories & Season 2 Hopes

“But I wanted to be the sea hag!”

We’re at the Deadline shoot for Widow’s Bay in a New York studio. The cast are clustered around a table of props and despite her disappointment at the lack of hag wigs, Dale Dickey is flapping a fishing net like a seafaring matador. Then she finds a miniature lighthouse and puts it on her head, changes her mind, grabs a weathered leatherbound notebook and launches into a theatrical soliloquy, to the delight of Jeff Hiller. Behind them, Stephen Root is laughing at Kate O’Flynn holding a plastic owl over her face, while Hamish Linklater quietly tests out a pair of old-timey oars. He’ll ultimately end up with a candelabra, while Matthew Rhys gets the lantern (found at a Lenox Hill hardware store, as it happens).

Being in a room with the cast of the Apple TV comedy series is even more fun than you’d think. Constant laughter almost drowns out the music, until Rhys finds the controller, picks the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and cranks the volume.

A little later, I present Rhys with a gift: a vintage Cape Cod t-shirt repurposed by a fan I found on Instagram called @seattlechainstitchmassacre. The adapted shirt now features Rhys’ immortal line as Widow’s Bay Mayor Tom Loftis: “F—k Cape Cod.”  

“Shall we FaceTime them?” he says enthusiastically, wanting to thank the t-shirt maker.

Lately, the internet is busting with Widow’s Bay shirts, bags, notebooks and hats, printed, sewn and cross-stitched by fans — that’s just one way you know for sure the show is a massive standout. Another sign is that it’s dominating the Emmy polls for new shows, with 19 nominations overall. And all this is not just down to those zinger lines written by creator-showrunner Katie Dippold; it’s that the show somehow comprises both deadpan and slapstick, horror and hysterical comedy, and characters that make us feel seen for every awkward misstep we’ve ever made.

He murdered teenage girls, you’re in your 40s, you’d be fine

“I always feel like as a comedy writer, I’m an anxious person,” Dippold tells me, speaking from the Season 2 writers’ room via Zoom, with executive producer-director Hiro Murai beaming in from his LA home. I notice a white board behind Dippold’s head, hoping for Season 2 clues. Sadly, it’s blank.

“You wiped that clean before I could see it didn’t you?” I say.

She laughs. “Yep.”

So, what’s her theory on why the show has grown such a massive following?

“Anytime I’ve ever had a moment in my life where something’s really bad, but then someone like a comedy friend can make a joke that makes me laugh, even if it’s a very risky joke, that’s my favorite feeling in the world. And I feel like life is just a nightmare right now in the world and I guess, in a way, it always has been. So, laughing and being scared, I don’t know, I think that is resonating with an anxious society right now. That’s my best guess.”

The shot Hiro has in [Episode] 102 when Loftis looks out the inn window and you see the lighthouse. That’s one of my favorite moments in the whole show, because I feel like they were really able to capture that cozy feeling, but also, it just makes you want to go there.

Katie Dippold, Creator-EP-Showrunner

Dippold came up with the Widow’s Bay concept years ago. After her writing stint for Mad TV ended and right before she joined the Parks and Rec writers’ room, she dreamed up a show set on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, populated by an oddball group of misfits, where the mayor’s best efforts to gentrify the place and create a thriving tourist economy are thwarted by an unfortunate ancient curse.

The dream of a homey haunted island began with wanting to live in the cozy opening spaces in her favorite horror films. “I’ll go to sleep watching horror movies all the time. I love the first act of a horror movie when it’s just cozy before everything goes wrong. I always need that element to it. Even in The Exorcist, there’s that shot of Ellen Burstyn walking back to her house. It’s a beautiful fall day outside DC. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is great.’ Even the house is pretty cozy before Pazuzu shows up. So, I just love when a world like that is built. And then in the making of the show, the thing that makes me the happiest looking back at it, is the shot Hiro has in [Episode] 102 when Loftis looks out the inn window and you see the lighthouse. That’s one of my favorite moments in the whole show, because I feel like they were really able to capture that cozy feeling, but also, it just makes you want to go there.”

Her early script was more joke-heavy. “It was different. It played with the horror tropes, but not in any way that you would feel real tension. It felt like the kind of show you would do on network television at that time maybe. But I don’t know, I just didn’t feel right to try to do it then.”

By the time Dippold called on Murai, it had evolved into something more horror-centric and real in tone. Murai says, “When we started talking, I realized that the things that we were interested in were very similar. It was about hiding our hand a little bit, so you buy into the reality of this place and then both the jokes and the horrors sneak up on you. It was like, I haven’t really seen anybody pull that off. So, the ambition of it really, really excited me.”

Casting Rhys as Mayor Tom Loftis was the first of many big swings — he’d never done comedy before, typically taking on complex and often dark dramatic roles, like suspected wife killer Nile Jarvis in The Beast in Me, for which he’s also Emmy-nominated this year. When casting director Allison Jones brought the idea of Rhys to Dippold and Murai, they talked about “if we cast someone that was comedy-forward, the show would feel different, and we really wanted it to feel real and believe that this place could exist,” Dippold says.

I said, ‘Can I draw the shark that Quint has in Jaws?’ And there was much hilarity because the first one looked like a mole coming out of the ground. Hiro Murai went, ‘Why have you drawn a mole?’ I said, ‘It’s a f—ing shark. Look at the gills.’

Matthew Rhys (Mayor Tom Loftis)

In the show, Tom is so anxious to bring tourism to the island and yes, compete with Cape Cod (and Martha’s Vineyard actually), that he’s desperate to sweep the curse under a very large rug. But the key to this comedy would be playing it straight. This, despite the absurdity of, at various points, Tom falling backwards under a heavy painting, running into an It-inspired clown in a basement, inadvertently taking hallucinogens, and trading insults with an 18^th-century corpse. As Murai puts it, “A man being chased by a sea hag who’s trying to sit on your face — the funniest thing you can do is to treat that completely seriously.’” 

Rhys remembers an early chat with Murai. “I said, ‘How do you see the tone of this?’ And he goes, ‘Well, it’s an incredibly tricky tone to get, but I’m not reaching for a tone. I’m going to attempt to create a very real world with real situations, real backstories, real scenarios, and everyone plays it for real. And that’s it. No one’s here to play a comedy or play a horror comedy, or to play a horror. We’re just playing a straight drama.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’” He signed on both as Tom and as an executive producer.

He seems slightly reluctant now to talk about his process of finding the character. Is it because it’s private? “Oh no, it’s not private, I find it deathly boring. Also, when you go home [to Wales] and your mates go, ‘Oh, your process.’ And you just get the sh-t kicked out of you. At home in Cardiff it’s, ‘I read about your arc. Noah, is it? Noah, is that your f–king name? Shut up.’”

You can file that under ‘deal with it the f–k later’

The central tension in the show lives between Tom and the island’s resident drunk mariner, Wyck. Wyck thinks Tom is a weak wet blanket; Tom thinks Wyck is a liability, because he wants to ring the island’s alarm bell to warn everyone of the curse, including the tourists Tom worked so hard to attract. When Wyck is proven right by, among other things, that sea hag that tries to kill Tom by sitting on his face, he and Tom unite and Wyck becomes an unexpected hero, with shades of Robert Shaw’s legendary Quint character in Jaws, especially when he’s singing sea shanties at the helm of a violently rocking boat alongside Rhys’ Tom and Hamish Linklater as the island’s long-dead founder Richard Warren.

“I was like, ‘I want to be Quint. Why does Root get to be Quint?’” says Rhys. “And then it was me and Hamish going, ‘Wait, does that make me Dreyfuss? Who’s Dreyfuss here? Am I Roy Schneider?’”

And who better to play Wyck than the brilliantly versatile Root. “Stephen Root is just so incredible at everything,” says Dippold. “He can do the funniest thing in the world and then just break your heart the next.”

Root had also worked with Rhys on Perry Mason and was quite literally along for the ride with his behind-the-scenes pranks on that show. Root recalls Rhys appropriating a golf cart on set and making himself a surprise fixture on a guided studio tour. “He would drive as fast as he could go, pedal to the metal, stop in front of the tourists, and say, ‘Hi, I’m Matthew Rhys, The Americans. You remember me?’ Hysterical. So, I knew he was a funny guy and could do funny stuff. I didn’t realize how wonderfully subtle and brilliant he is at comedy.”

The Jaws reference pops up again during one of Tom’s town hall staff meetings. Exactly like the town meeting in Spielberg’s movie, someone has drawn a shark on the blackboard. That someone in Widow’s Bay was Rhys: “I said, ‘Can I draw the shark that Quint has in Jaws?’” Rhys says, “And there was much hilarity because the first one looked like a mole coming out of the ground. Hiro Murai went, ‘Why have you drawn a mole?’ I said, ‘It’s a f—ing shark. Look at the gills.’”

Other classic horror Easter eggs roll throughout the show — heavy on the Stephen King East coast vibes — with nods to The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, The Mist, Salem’s Lot and 1408, plus The Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Wicker Man, Friday the 13^th and Halloween, with this last making a full-body appearance in Episode 8, directed by Ti West, as Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia is pursued by a relentlessly-plodding masked slasher.

Patricia has become a massive fan favorite. She’s both a people-pleasing irritant and an eyebrow-raising mid-life woman who’s just had it. She’s tired — of her clueless boss Tom, her mean-girl high school nemesis and the ineptitude of local food delivery. For god’s sake, she’s just going to have to do it all herself, including dispatching that tiresome zombie slasher, before calmly returning home for a quiet night in with a glass of wine. As O’Flynn says, “Patricia’s approach to all of these weird happenings on the island is met with an eye roll and a shoulder shrug like, ‘Well, here we go again.’ I really loved her passive-aggressive quiet attention-seeking, bringing attention back to her, like being the victim. I thought that was a really great characteristic that’s very recognizable because I don’t think Patricia is just trying to help. I think there is also an underneath that is like, ‘I want you to think that I’m really helpful.’”

RELATED: HOW WIDOW’S BAY WAS BUILT, FROM BOARD GAMES TO BOATS

O’Flynn — a Mike Leigh film regular and this year starring in his latest and probably last feature, Tender Loving Care — recruited a friend to help her make a Widow’s Bay self-tape audition with “some weird close-ups.” “They wanted me to do it a couple different ways, one of which was with a dash of Shelley Duvall, and when I heard Shelley Duvall, I thought, ‘OK, if that’s what they want, I’m definitely in with a shot.’ And they went for that. Alex Bovaird, our amazing costume designer — working with her was really integral to coming up with Patricia, figuring out who she was. But there was a lot of Shelley Duvall in the initial looks of Patricia with the pinafore dresses and the patterns.”

“I remember Allison Jones, when I met her finally on the first day, she goes, ‘You look like you’re from here.’ Going to Boston for the first time flying in, I did look around and go, ‘Yeah, I’m sure I’m related to a lot of these people — Irish background.’ So, I felt like I looked right in a way I wasn’t expecting.”

Other preparation included watching horror movies on flights between the U.S. and her native U.K. “I terrified myself in the air watching these films like Bring Her Back and I Saw the TV Glow and Ti West’s MaXXXine.”

I remember with Matthew, he would just suddenly turn into Tom Loftis and then I would just kind of turn into Patricia and we’d just be chatting as characters, having not said, ‘OK, why don’t we try a bit?’ We’d just do it.”

Kate O’Flynn (Patricia)

“I don’t think there were even any rehearsals,” she says. “I think we just turned up. Hiro and Katie just created an environment where it felt like we were just keeping it loose and just finding it on the day and discovering it. And because they cast it so specifically, everyone got in their lane and there was a natural playfulness. I remember with Matthew, he would just suddenly turn into Tom Loftis and then I would just kind of turn into Patricia and we’d just be chatting as characters, having not said, ‘OK, why don’t we try a bit?’ We’d just do it.”

That’s not to say there weren’t a lot of laughs on set. “Jeff Hiller could just crease you with a look,” Rhys says, “I didn’t have the scenes with Jeff I did with Hamish, but god, both of them. Jeff could crease me with a look and Hamish would do it with a line.”

Hiller’s comedic chops go way back with Dippold — they met in 2002 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York. “I know Katie so well,” he says. “And this tone, which is so unique and so specific, it couldn’t be more Katie Dippold. She organizes groups of people to go to Universal Horror Nights and Haunted Hayrides. And every time there’s a horror movie, we’re there on a Friday night as a big group watching it. And she likes to watch people be scared and laugh. And also, we’re doing bits the entire time too.”

At first, he didn’t even tell her he’d sent in a self-tape. Then she said there was only a small role available — Dale, who works in the Mayor’s office. But he dies. “I was like, ‘I’ll do it.’ This was before the Emmy nomination [for Somebody Somewhere]. I was like, ‘I need health insurance. Please. And that would be so fun to be in Boston with you.’ I mean, she’s sort of our most successful friend. She was doing movies with Sandra Bullock decades ago. So, we all are like, ‘Oh, Katie’s the fancy one.’ And so, it was like, ‘How exciting that I get to be a part and watch you be in charge.’ And it was so cool to see her be a boss. She’s great at it.”

Then, one day, as Hiller was walking down the street in LA, Dippold called him. “Do you mind if I don’t kill you?’’ she said.

Hiller cites some of the most Dippold-coded moments in the show: “Even in the pilot, the part where Patricia goes, ‘What are you asking me to do?’ It’s such an improv line from Katie. And there’s this one line — it’s just a throwaway line — where my character says, ‘Do you think it’s skin cancer?’ And Dale Dickey says, ‘Yes.’ Just blows right past it. And I was like, ‘Katie, how’d you think of that?’ And she goes, ‘Oh, that happened with me and Neil.’” (Referring to her longtime collaborator Neil Casey, Widow’s Bay supervising producer, writer and the actor playing Kurt the innkeeper).

Hiller’s character Dale is also the purveyor of the show’s most infamous scream. As Dale realizes the depth of depravity on the island he yells, “This place is a death trap! RUN!” His mouth opens so wide, the tone is so zero-100mph, it’s impossible not to laugh. “I have a shorthand with Katie,” Hiller says, recalling their improv years. “She liked when I would melt down and scream. The whole team would always make me do these dramatic monologues where I would end up screaming and crying on the ground. It was a funny bit. And when I read that, I was like, ‘Oh, she wants this.’”

Apparently, there’s no age limit on syphilis

As Rosemary, the sardonic, smoking secretary, Dale Dickey somehow made reading a genealogy map off a projector screen into one of the most celebrated TV scenes in recent memory. “Dead baby, dead baby, lesbian,” she intones, as she traces back the bloodline of the curse, with Tom, Wyck and Patricia held hostage by her meandering delivery. The writing is tight as a drum, but it also feels like Dickey could make the phone book funny.

Rhys says, “I remember when she read it, she was like, “I can’t do this. F–king kill me.”

In fact, Murai was nervous about pulling off such a long scene of an actor effectively just reading out names and circling them with a marker pen. “I thought it was going to be too long, and Katie didn’t, and Katie was right,” he says.

Dippold decided to double-down. “There were so many stunts in the show,” she says, “like a man was set fire to, there were boats, there were so many stunts and stressful situations, but the genealogy scene I think was the most stressful thing. It was so hard for every department, like the writers, the props department, Hiro and [DP] Christian [Sprenger] shooting it, Dale memorizing it all. It was weirdly the hardest thing. But I could just tell the way they were shooting it and the way Dale was performing. I’m like, ‘OK, they got it. This is great.’”

I haven’t even told my husband this. My sister-in-law who lives in a tiny town in Michigan, she sort of knows everybody’s business. And she’s a real go-getter. So, some of it came from Anne. And then Katie Dippold told me on set that [Rosemary] is very closely based on an aunt of hers.

Dale Dickey (Rosemary)

Dickey was offered a teleprompter but decided it might throw her off, so she memorized the scene, which meant the entire genealogy of the island, going back hundreds of years, plus plenty of asides. “Now I’ve done huge lead roles on stage,” Dickey says, “I did Blanche Dubois in Streetcar. That dialogue’s a whole other story, but it was lengthy. And then when you start adding all the technical aspects, the mere fact that it’s on an audiovisual machine, so it’s upside-down. And then I have the slides to bring in, the 10 slides with different generations, and then the circling and X-ing. It was a challenge. Towards the end, Stephen Root and Nancy Lenehan, who plays Gerrie at the historical society, they came out to my place, and we all ran lines together. It was like being back in history class in junior high where you learn the facts and the figures, and these people did that, but with a sense of humor and with some dead babies and lesbians involved.”

Rosemary has seen it all. Like Wyck, she’s lived through all the curse shenanigans. When Patricia accidentally gets possessed via an ancient book, throws a deranged Sunset Cocktails party, poisons half the town with demonic punch, and emerges from a fugue state surrounded by butchered wildlife with antlers on her head, she demands, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I was trying to be supportive,” Rosemary says, unmoved, still smoking.

“My husband Steve and I, we have a joke about a certain kind of role,” says Dickey. “It’s a ‘Dale role’. I played so many really rough characters. You put dirt on my face and throw a garbage bag on me and I go. Like the Skank [in Breaking Bad]. We had a whole thing of Polaroid pictures of me and my most charming characters on the refrigerator. And we’d go to a movie and Steve would go, ‘That’s a Dale role’ — some hag crossing the heathers in some Scottish movie. So, he’s looking at my script, and he sees the words ‘sea hag’. And he goes, ‘Oh, you’re playing the sea hag?’ And I’m like, ‘No, but I should.’”

Dickey based Rosemary on an amalgam of real people, she admits. “Actually, and I haven’t even told my husband this, my sister-in-law who lives in a tiny town in Michigan, she sort of knows everybody’s business. And she’s a real go-getter. So, some of it came from Anne. And then Katie Dippold told me on set that this is very closely based on an aunt of hers, and she showed me pictures of the aunt. Then I’ve spent a lot of time on a little island off the coast of North Carolina called Ocracoke Island. It’s at the bottom of the National Park. I’ve known the locals there, people that were born on the island. And you get to know the local way of life when you’re down there, particularly off-season, and hang out with those folks. So, there’s some characters on Ocracoke Island I haven’t told yet that I’m thinking of as Rosemary.”

Are you mad at something I said?

Linklater’s first job on set was as the recently dug-up zombie corpse of Widow’s Bay founder Richard Warren. Since this version of him was shot a month before the 18^th-century-era episode where he and Betty Gilpin enter into a marriage that’s doomed in more ways than one, Linklater went straight into corpse makeup, incapacitating contacts and fake nails.

“It’s really wonderful wearing those masks and having crazy dentures, and having a funny way to talk and stuff, because then you’re really not responsible for it,” he says. “You’re sort of in hiding. It’s like, ‘No, that was somebody else, actually.’ I have less and less of a sense of whether an audience or a crew is hiding their grimaces or smirks behind their hands as I perform. It’s a great advantage. So, if I have contacts, then I’m basically a panic room where you can’t see anything that’s coming for you.”

When O’Flynn first met him, she says, “It was like he was going method with the 300-year-old zombie. He didn’t speak to us initially. In that scene where Patricia’s like, ‘I forgot my purse,’ he was just haunting and we’re like, ‘Oh god,’ but it was such a great move, because then throughout the day, we’re in the green room and he was being Hamish and being really, really lovely and stuff. But it was just such a confident move of a brilliant actor to come in and go, ‘I’ve got to hit this right and commit to this 300-year-old zombie.’ We were all terrified.”

It was very disgusting food, which would get stuck inside of the dentures. So, I was eating it even when I was done eating it. The taste never went away. Vienna sausages, which are not from Vienna. They’re from a city in Pennsylvania called Vienna or something like that, that time’s forgotten.

Hamish Linkater (Richard Warren)

Then there’s the sausages. Rhys had a hard time dealing with Linklater’s enthusiastic consumption of canned Vienna sausages in character. “Frankly, I thought he was acting disgusted, and that he was actually blown away by my conviction,” Linklater says. “It was very disgusting food, which would get stuck inside of the dentures. So, I was eating it even when I was done eating it. The taste never went away. Vienna sausages, which are not from Vienna. They’re from a city in Pennsylvania called Vienna or something like that, that time’s forgotten.”

Also, the singing. “There was an actual tune that we were supposed to learn and I can’t. I basically have contacts in my eardrums. I can’t actually carry a tune at all. And Stephen is, of course a professional, and totally knew the tune. And I would be like, ‘You know this one,’ and then he actually could sing the song.”

Add to that, the practicality and physical rocking of the set – built on a soundstage, while the exteriors were shot on location in Rockport, Gloucester and surrounding towns, the soundstage set for the “Seasickness” episode says Rhys, was “completely black because it was in nighttime, so, it’s not like they’re lit for day in green screen, it’s black, so it’s weird. And also, you’re on a pneumatic boat, this gimbal. You’re kind of moving constantly.”

Did he get seasick?

“I’m lucky I’m a boater.”

But didn’t he say ages ago that he was trying to sell his boat?

“Literally for about three and a half years. No one wants to buy it. Please somebody, contact Deadline. If you want to be Ernest Hemingway, get it done.”

Rhys tried to make friends with the locals, he says. “I would bother them and talk to them, and they’re like, ‘Yeah. OK, Hollywood.’ Those salty towns like Gloucester you just can’t recreate. I loved being in Gloucester. It’s the real deal.”

I thought I could pick her up… She goes into my arms, and they don’t say cut. So, I lifted her up, and the second I lifted her up, I went, ‘I’m going to fall,’ and I just went. She landed on top of me and laughed like a drain. My leaving gift from Katie Dippold was a mug with a screen grab of me falling with K Callan.

Matthew Rhys

Then, recently, he created a fan frenzy at Comic Con when he admitted he’d “dropped someone” on the set by accident. Who could it be?

“I dropped K Callan,” he says. “She’s fine and everything.” It all went down during the scene where the 90-year-old Callan’s character June lies on the floor of her home after a confrontation with Sheriff Bechir (Kevin Carroll). Rhys was supposed to wait for the stunt woman to replace Callan before he tried to lift her in his arms. “The stunt coordinator was like, ‘If they don’t say cut, do not pick her up.’ I was like, ‘But she weighs like 90 pounds.’ I thought I could pick her up… She goes into my arms, and they don’t say cut. So, I lifted her up, and the second I lifted her up, I went, ‘I’m going to fall,’ and I just went. She landed on top of me and laughed like a drain. My leaving gift from Katie Dippold was a mug with a screen grab of me falling with K Callan.”

You had your qualms?

I tell Rhys I talked to Dippold while she was in the Season 2 writers’ room and he immediately asks, “Does she have an idea for 2?” Not that she would tell me, I say, but where does he think Tom is headed next season?

“It’s the ultimate setup, I think, for a Season 2,” he says. “Massive cliffhanger. I’m just talking personally now. A father who now knows the folklore is true. Therefore, if he suddenly leaves the island, his son will die. He realizes he has the Scooby-Doo mission. It’s like, OK, how do we figure this out? What breaks the curse?”

For Hiller, Season 2 is also a mystery. Previously, he’s said that if he lived on this island for real, he would have been killed off years ago.

“I did say that,” Hiller says now, “and my husband goes, ‘But remember how the sea hag kills you?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ …Or it’s beautiful, if that’s your thing.”

Dickey, however, has some strong Season 2 ideas. “I was talking to Jeff Hiller,” she says. “I would love to do a boat scene where Rosemary and Dale are out searching for the sea hag to get some answers. I thought that would be fun. And then we tip over and there’s only one life jacket. Who’s going to live?”

I’ll forward you the email. I sent it to Katie. I’ve pitched it five ways from Sunday how a box of dust can become a three-episode arc in Season 2.

Hamish Linklater (Richard Warren)

Could Wyck be teaching, say, a demon-slayer class down at the high school gym? Root nods at this. “He’s researched it for so long,” he says. “But I also hope we get more backstory from everybody, whether it’s romance when I was younger, or more about Dale Dickey’s character, or anybody. And I’m hoping that whether Katie does that in the flashback or in exposition, I don’t know, but I’m really hoping that you get more backstory. Because the more backstory you get, the more you’re engulfed in being interested in these characters.”

Personally, O’Flynn fancies some time travel, she says. “Next season, I don’t know, but I would love to play a British ancestor of Patricia or something… I like the idea of wigging up and doing a bit of period drama. Why not?”

And for Linklater, is there a way to bring him back? “I’ll forward you the email,” he says. “I sent it to Katie. I’ve pitched it five ways from Sunday how a box of dust can become a three-episode arc in Season 2.”

Dippold confirms receipt of said email. But as for her, the woman holding all the cards, she’s playing it pretty close to the vest for now.

“It feels like Tom’s arc up until now has been about acceptance?” I suggest.

“Exactly. And now it’s endurance,” she says. “I really feel like we took this approach of following what’s fun. In Season 1, we all talked about, ‘It would be fun now to go to 1702 and just be in this dry colonial horror piece.’ And so, it’s taking that same mindset to Season 2. So, there are some things that have been mentioned that I’m like, ‘It’d be really fun to actually revisit that and do that.’ So, I think the spirit will be the same, of just like, ‘This feels fun to do. This feels fun to show this now,’ and that makes sense.”

Just then, a burst of loud laughter comes from the writers’ room behind her.

“Oh god. I hope that’s something fun in the show,” she says.

Widow’s Bay cast shot exclusively for Deadline at Splashlight Studios in New York.

Director/ producer/ editor: David Ferino; DP: Nausheen Dadabhoy, chief lighting technician: Chris Varga; asst. camera: Yasmeen Jawhar; production assistant: Owen Hindes.