Widow’s Bay: Matthew Rhys, Kate O’Flynn and Stephen Root on the horrors of new streaming series

If you’re filming a horror comedy series in New England, a region made spooky by Stephen King, what do you do between takes?

Go back to your trailer for a nap? Sit around and banter about the catering?

If you’re the cast of Widow’s Bay, you whip out the Ouija board. “Will the muse visit me today?” actor Kate O’Flynn recounted of their game, a definite note of cheek in her voice.

Matthew Rhys added, “We commune with actors gone by, passed over, how we should play certain seasons.”

In all seriousness, Rhys is a believer. Not in the supernatural fakery of a TV production – he said he annoys his kids when he interrupts family horror movie night to explain how an effect is done - but he once had a real-life encounter with something unexplainable.

“I spent a night in a very haunted castle in Wales once,” he recalled. “I went in as a slight sceptic and I came out a true believer.”

The owner of the castle had warned Rhys and his ex-girlfriend, who he had gone there with, to watch the property’s two enormous Irish wolfhounds because they were known to react to things that you couldn’t see.

The dogs did exactly that as Rhys recounted how they would turn their heads in sync, as if they were intensely following an imaginary fly. This happened a few times, and it put him on edge.

“We were asleep that one night, and then all of a sudden, I woke up and the room was freezing cold, and I didn’t open my eyes and I felt such a strong poke on my shoulder,” he said.

“I assumed it was my girlfriend, so I turned thinking I’d be looking at her, and I realised I was looking out of the bed, and someone there had poked me. There was no doubt, no question, I hadn’t dreamt it. It was real.”

Rhys, O’Flynn and Stephen Root are the leads of Widow’s Bay, a new Apple TV horror series set to debut this week. Created by comedy writer Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation, Ghostbusters), it playfully weaponises genre tropes to tell a story that is genuinely anxiety-inducing, sometimes gross, and revealing about what we really fear.

It’s not a King adaptation, but with its New England setting and general creepy vibes and threats, it’s definitely King-adjacent.

Root said that once King came along, he brought literary elements to the genre. In Widow’s Bay, that manifests in ways such as a father’s fear that he is failing his child, but with an added curse.

“(Dippold) writes beautifully about the human condition, that is one of her greatest strengths,” Rhys said.

“One of the great things (about horror) and this is true of good drama, is you can magnify very real human things on a slightly heightened or elevated platform. These are very real things we’re going through, but it’s on the coat hook of the supernatural.

Rhys plays Tom Loftis, the mayor of Widow’s Bay, who is desperate to drum up tourism business to ensure the survival of the island town. In the first episode, he has painstakingly arranged for a visit from a New York Times reporter, hoping to sell the joint as the next Martha’s Vineyard.

His vision is not shared by local fisherman Wyck (Root), who is shouting dire warnings of a restarted haunting, and that Tom’s plan is putting lives in jeopardy.

Widow’s Bay has a dark history of misadventure, plague and murder, including a killing spree when Patricia (O’Flynn) was a teenager, who barely escaped becoming a victim of a crazed maniac.

To reveal more would go against the cast’s wishes. “We hope that (the audience) don’t know a lot about it because we want them to experience it as they go,” Root said.

Widow’s Bay is a show that peels back its layers piece by piece. It takes you down some wild paths in relatively contained episodic stories while building an overall story that pierces the heart of what scares us – the physical dangers and the emotional ones.

It’s woven in such a way so that both have equal stakes. An O’Flynn-focused episode sees her character throwing a party and you feel her palpable insecurity about being mocked and disliked even more than the actual threat of that night.

Rhys said, “I remember (Dippold) saying social horrors are as frightening as anything else.”

“That’s what we’re talking about,” O’Flynn added. “The different layers of horror, because it’s so relatable, that fear of rejection from the mean girl, of people not liking you, are you being talked about.

“There’s such an opportunity because people come to (horror) wanting to be scared, and to be scared, you have to have your guard down.

“If you’ve got your guard down, there’s an opportunity to be hit with lots of different things. That’s what Widow’s Bay does brilliantly.”

Widow’s Bay is on Apple TV on April 29