‘Widow’s Bay’ Breakout Kate O’Flynn Knows Patricia Is a ‘Weirdo’ — and That’s Why People Love Her Character

The evening before “Widow’s Bay” breakout star and newly-minted Emmy nominee Kate O’Flynn logged on to Zoom with this very excited fellow Kate, the British actress was in attendance at what seems to be a regular occurrence this TV awards season: a clever FYC event that leans on the humor, horror, and serious charm of the Apple hit.

The event in question? “Sunset Cocktails with Patricia,” spinning off the inciting incident of Episode 4, “Beach Reads,” in which O’Flynn’s Patricia Moyer throws an extremely well-considered (and iffily-executed) cocktail party to shore up her popularity in her insular hometown of Widow’s Bay. (The episode also reveals why Patricia is such an outcast amongst the very people she’s known her entire life.)

When I told beaming O’Flynn that it was impossible to convey just how sad I was to not be in Los Angeles for the bash, she smiled even wider. “Isn’t it bonkers? It’s nuts! Nuts,” she said of attending a party organized around her breakout character. “There were people going, ‘I feel really seen [by her]. I really identify with Patricia.’ That whole thing has just surprised me so much. I find it really heartwarming that … it seems like everybody is a weirdo, or I don’t know, that we all feel that.”

The tiny community of Widow’s Bay is populated by all sorts of lovable weirdos, from striving mayor Tom Loftis (fellow nominee Matthew Rhys) to seen-it-all historian Rosemary (Dale Dickey, also a first-time Emmy nominee). Patricia, like nearly every person we meet on the island, has only ever lived on the remote island, but that’s not necessarily a choice born out of her love for the place. As the first season unfolds, we learn plenty more about the enclave’s deeply weird history, much of it rooted in a low-simmering horror that is tempered by wonderfully comedic beats.

And there’s also the bone-deep sense that we’re watching a group of real characters who — in between very funny stuff and very scary stuff — have extremely genuine desires. As fellow nominee Betty Gilpin recently told IndieWire, one of the things she loves most about the show is that “you feel these characters wanting things so desperately. … Part of the horror is, will they not get the thing they want most in the world? It’s the monster chasing them and also their dream that’s just out of reach, whether it’s not to feel lonely anymore or to feel like you have a family or to feel like you can provide peace for the people that you are leading.”

No one quite captures that as well as O’Flynn as Patricia. Everyone on the island is running from certain demons, but Patricia — who has long held that she was nearly the victim of a murderer who terrorized her high school class — is often the one doing that most transparently. And, yes, that’s funny and scary.

Kate O’Flynn in ‘Widow’s Bay’

“What I find comforting to watch is, not the stuff where everyone sort of adheres to the rules of the cool person or the perfect person and then there’s the baddie and it’s all very reductive. For me, it’s comforting to watch the the quiet emotional chaos that is kind of everyday,” O’Flynn said. “I think ‘Widow’s Bay’ does that with the horror, with the comedy, with the pain, with the light and the shade of it. It’s cozy, but I wonder if there is something, like what Betty’s saying about seeing the wants, seeing the desperation actually, and it just being aired, that is comforting.”

While O’Flynn has long been a steady presence in British entertainment — films, TV, theater, even radio — she’s a newbie to most American audiences. Had she been looking for more stateside work?

“I had just gotten a manager for the first time in the States, and this was the first script that came in my email box,” she said with a laugh. “I met my manager for a few minutes on Zoom, and for him to go, ‘I think you might be right [for this]. I think Allison Jones might respond to you’? I know that’s not how it goes. And it’s not how it’s gone, by the way, in my career up until that point.”

When O’Flynn was first invited to self-tape an audition, she said the primary reference point for the series’ tone was Bill Hader and Alec Berg’s HBO series “Barry.” “It was like, ‘Don’t play the comedy,'” she recalled. “And that made sense to me. I found it very liberating, because the world that had been built, I could see how much it could hold in terms of tone. It could hold that humor because it was character-driven. It could hold the horror. It could hold the pain…It was like being able to stretch and go, and that is life.”

O’Flynn said she suspects it was “in my favor that no one knew who the hell I was, so they could see the tape and not have any prior knowledge of this actress.” She added, “I remember that first Zoom [with creator Katie Dippold and the team], and my manager was like, ‘Look, they just want to check that you’re not a weirdo and that you’re nice,’ and I was like, ‘God, if I don’t get this, I’ll have to have a real word with myself about how I come across.'”

If she came across as a weirdo, that might have been for the best. Patricia is, after all, a weirdo. But O’Flynn also recalled thinking deeply about the character even during that seemingly basic chat. “[New] ideas were coming to me in that meeting, and then they were like, ‘Who do you think Patricia is?,'” she said.

Kate O’Flynn in ‘Widow’s Bay’

Some of the words that came to O’Flynn? Brave, but also vulnerable. “Someone said to me the meaning of the word vulnerability, it’s open to be wounded,” she said. “When she goes into that party with the mean girls, there is a bit in her that’s probably like, ‘Am I invited? Maybe not.’ But she goes in there, making herself open to be wounded. But there is a bravery in that.”

When she got the role, O’Flynn thought a lot about the physicality of Patricia, how she moves through the world, how others see her. Like when she runs (for her life!) in Episode 8? How did she find that already-iconic Patricia shuffle?

“The boots! Those slipper shoes,” O’Flynn said with a laugh. “And it was my intrusive thought of ‘don’t roll, I can’t sprain my ankle right now. I’ve got to get through this. So I guess that informed the sort of clip-clop. I think, by that point, I got the physicality of Patricia and it was just felt quite natural to run around.”

She also noodled with how Patricia presents herself even when she’s alone, including a flirtation with an updo that didn’t pass the actress’ own sniff test. “There was a period where I was like, ‘Maybe she wears her hair up at home,'” she recalled. “We tried it with the look of it, and I was like, ‘Yeah, Katie, I think maybe she wears her hair up,’ and she was like, ‘…OK.’ I went into my trailer and I put my costume on and I was like, ‘I don’t know who Patricia is with the hair up. In fact, I think all I’ve got for Patricia is hair down. That’s the character or it’s gone.’ So then I said to Katie, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve scrapped that,’ and she was like, ‘Thank God.'”

Kate O’Flynn in ‘Widow’s Bay’

But Patricia at home, alone, with no one watching her also helps form much of what we know and love of her. Consider earlier in Episode 8, when Patricia orders a delightful takeout dinner (chicken parm, slice of pie), only to discover she’s been given a dry turkey patty and a single sausage link. In that moment, no one has ever been more put out than Patricia.

“It’s funny you’re seeing that at home when there’s no one there,” she said. “With Patricia, [she is] very easily finding offense in things. That is subconsciously a way for her to get attention, so she’ll find offense so that the attention is on her. It’s like guerrilla tactics with her, but it’s funny that it’s even in her own home, she’s like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

But Patricia in a group? That’s the best, as she tries to find her place amongst her co-workers, fellow townspeople, and the same mean girls she’s known her entire life. The series’ stacked cast (including nominees Rhys, Dickey, Gilpin, Stephen Root, and Hamish Linklater, plus Kevin Carroll, Jeff Hiller, and many more) just might be O’Flynn’s favorite part about the project.

“It’s the best,” she said of her co-stars. “It’s just really energizing. It’s exciting. I’m a complete acting nerd. I want to be in the room acting with scene partners who are just delivering really surprising, hilarious, specific performances. They are all theater actors as well, and I think there is a generosity of spirit with all those actors, which makes them so good. … It felt like I was joining the elite. The first read-through, the specificity of everybody, it was like playing table tennis or something, the way they would hit the laughs and they’d land.”

While O’Flynn knew the show was special from the start, she didn’t always know it was going to become such a breakthrough hit. Asked when she realized that the TV-loving world was getting officially “Widow’s Bay”-pilled, she admitted that it took awhile.

Katie Dippold, K Callan, Dale Dickey, and Kate O’Flynn seen at a Special Screening and Q&A of Apple TV’s ‘Widow’s Bay’ at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on August 13, 2026 in Los Angeles, CaliforniaApple TV via Getty Images

“Episode 6 and 7, when they came out, it was like, whoa. It had been received really well critically, and I knew that I’d watched all of it and I loved it as a viewer,” she said. “But suddenly it was like everybody was getting on board with it. Also, I had that thing of getting texts from people that I’ve worked with over a course of a 20-year career saying, ‘I’m watching this show.'”

One of the people watching from the start? O’Flynn’s old pal Jonathan Bailey. The pair starred in a 2009 production of “The House of Special Purpose” and have been thick as thieves ever since. But what luck for O’Flynn to have Bailey, one of the few people who keenly understand what it’s like to be the star of a sudden cultural juggernaut and be thrust into the wilds of awards season, to be by her side.

“He’s my best friend and he has been guiding me through it, holding my hand, because he understands it in a way, that it is such an unusual experience,” she said. “And obviously, it’s fantastic, but everything is new about it. I’d never been to LA! He has been so kind. He’s just a proper best mate. He has really been there for me. I also think, wow, he had to do that on his own, [during] COVID with ‘Bridgerton,’ they were dealing with an exceptional level of fame because everyone was watching it. So he had a different experience and he had to do that on his own, so this is not the same, but it’s really nice to just have someone that I’ve known forever. We go way back, before any of this kicked off.”

The show has already been picked up for a second season, and the bubbly O’Flynn clams up a bit when asked about it. “I know nothing!,” she said with a smile. “I’ve not asked Katie anything. They’re in the writer’s room. I have no idea where it’s going. We’ll see!”

Not that O’Flynn is in need of any more to do. Next month, just as Emmy season is wrapping up in advance of the September 14 ceremony, she’ll be on the film festival trail with Mike Leigh’s “Tender Loving Care.” Expected to debut at Telluride, O’Flynn will then hit TIFF for its Canadian premiere (just two nights before the Emmys, of course), with NYFF screenings to follow later in the month.

‘Tender Loving Care’Bleecker Street

O’Flynn’s admiration for Leigh runs deep. The master British filmmaker cast O’Flynn in her first film role, with a supporting part in 2008’s “Happy-Go-Lucky.” She later appeared in his “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo,” and now takes a starring role in what is likely to be Leigh’s last film.

“It’s about how we navigate caring for people and society and everything that comes with that and how difficult it can be and how loving it can be,” she said of the film. “‘Tender Loving Care’ says it. It’s like it does what it says on the tin, but everyone will have their own reaction to it. It was really special to work with Mike and work as part of an incredible ensemble with Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson and Alice Bailey Johnson. He’s a director who’s had, what? Thirty-three films? And he’s had total creative control over all of them. He’s made what he’s wanted to make, he’s cast who he’s wanted to cast, and somehow he’s been able to get the funding for them. Will that ever happen again? I don’t know. One of a kind, really.”

She feels similarly about “Widow’s Bay,” the kind of truly original television series that seems to be in worryingly short supply. But people love it. That’s reward enough.

“It makes me feel very hopeful, actually, that something [this] lovingly made — and we didn’t know how it was going to go down — but made with such care and intelligence and imagination has gone down the way it’s gone down. … If I could have dreamt of a role that I would want to do and a project and creatives that I’d want to work with, it would be ‘Widow’s Bay,'” she said. “It does feel like a strange kind of fairy tale.”

The first season of “Widow’s Bay” is now streaming on Apple TV.