Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for Widow’s Bay episodes 6 and 7, “Our History” and “Seasickness,” now streaming on Apple TV.
Betty Gilpin felt obsessed with the cast of “Widow’s Bay.”
The Apple TV horror comedy from creator Katie Dippold was already filming its first season when Gilpin arrived on set to film a surprise flashback episode, which aired as the sixth installment of the freshman series. The episode, released this week along with Episode 7, takes viewers back to 1702, when Original Sin in Widow’s Bay began to take root.
Gilpin plays Sarah Warren, a woman brought to the island as part of an arranged marriage to founder Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater), only to learn that he has made a deal with the devil to save her starving town. This episode is a big departure from the already surreal series, stylishly presented in a stylish film directed by famous horror director Ti West. The main cast of the series had already gone home at this point, so it was a change of pace and change of people and place for everyone.
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“It felt like we were ghosts in someone else’s house,” Gilpin told Variety. “I could see that every department, from the hair and makeup to the camera crew to Katy, was doing a production-level job here, and they were really excited about what they had just created. It was tough asking the crew to make 1702 Indie at the end of months of shooting.”
Gilpin isn’t kidding about this ghost. Some of the episode’s interiors were created along with the regular Widow’s Bay set, so her breaks in 18th-century costume were spent resting at her desk in the town hall or lounging on a couch that would have been out of place in 1702. “Our cast chairs and clever tables were installed in all contemporary sets,” she says. “When I watched the first few episodes, I was like, ‘I took a nap on that couch,’ or ‘I think I accidentally left my protein bar wrapper on my desk.'”
To ensure that Gilpin and the rest of the cast didn’t get too comfortable in present-day Widow’s Bay, parts of the episode were filmed on location at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts, the home of a woman who was accused of witchcraft during the 1693 Salem Witch Trials, executed, and later acquitted.
“I wear period costume and walk around this real woman’s house and its grounds,” she says. “One day I peed in the woods with my skirt all up and I thought, ‘Rebecca Nurse must have done something like this in this very spot.'” Then one day, as I was wandering around the corner of my house during my lunch break, I spooked one of the grips. He said, “You can’t just be hanging around corners like that.” You scared me so much. ”
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Unlike Nervous Crew, this episode is sure to please fans of the increasingly popular series, if only because it deepens the island’s already wild mythology and reveals important details like what’s at the bottom of the well and how long the creepy chair has been sitting in front of the creepy door. Sealed by eating mushrooms that grew from the snow-covered barren land (as seen in last week’s episode), Richard’s demonic pact cursed Widow’s Bay for the foreseeable future, binding all those born there to its grounds, and those who attempted to leave beyond its watery borders faced immediate death.
However, the history of this town has become distorted over time. Creator Dippold says he wanted to question the opinion of the entire town, praising the Founding Father as a heroic savior and admiring him to the point that Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) feels incomparably inadequate. But according to Dippold, the episode was developed by about half of the writers’ room as a “dry colonial horror period piece” and almost never came to fruition. In the series premiere of Widow’s Bay, when Tom shows New York Times reporter Arthur (Bashir Salahuddin) around the Historical Society, the original script called for him to mention Richard Warren’s loss of face in the 1700s, as one of the many atrocities that occurred in the town.
“I remember knowing at the last minute before we shot the pilot that we were going to see this flashback episode, and thinking, ‘This guy needs a face to do this. We’ve got to change that joke,'” she says.
Dippold said he also needed an outsider’s perspective on Widow’s Bay’s origin story. Sarah was perfect. Because in the opening scene she is full of hope. Tarnishing that optimism is a uniquely American horror story.
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“The whole point of this show is that there are horrors big and small,” Dippold says. “Sarah is going to this haunted island where there’s a plague, and her husband turns out to be this monster. But there’s also the psychological horror of being married to someone she’s never met before. And Sarah wants that because she doesn’t want to be a spinster, as they were saying at the time.”
Sara smiles and jokes. Neither has a good reputation, and Dippold says it’s a chilling nightmare in itself. “There’s a bit of social phobia, like when she gets there and makes a joke so the guys don’t hear,” she says. “He makes her repeat it, and it fails. To me, that’s one of life’s greatest fears. And I can imagine how easily this episode or moments like it would fall apart with someone who isn’t Betty Gilpin. I think she’s iconic. She just sells the fear in her eyes and her acting.”
While giving the final girl a great energy, Gilpin also had to sell the comedic tone woven throughout the series, which she says was still forming during filming. “Sometimes it felt like we were making ‘The Crucible,’ sometimes it felt like we were making a slasher movie, and sometimes it felt like a full-on clown school,” Gilpin says. “When I look at the cut now, I think they really chose something that put them together well. And honestly, it was so satisfying to finally see it, especially because Katie just really chiseled out a piece of her soul to make this.”
Another piece of this story is the man who connects Episodes 6 and 7, despite the 300-year gap. Linklater director Richard Warren had to be intimidating enough to inspire his followers to bury him alive in 1702 to contain his evil, and to have Sarah flee the island at night with her children, not knowing that taking them off the island would turn them into trash. But when Tom, Wick (Stephen Root) and Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) unearth a modern-day undead man, he has to sell a bit of comedy as well. One of Dippold’s favorite moments throughout the first season is his exchange of notepad messages with Tom, which becomes increasingly slapstick.
Linklater had previously performed Mike Flanagan’s “Midnight Mass” in the sandboxes of the eerie islands, and he happily brought that song out on “Widow’s Bay.” “I have experience on remote islands in dangerous conditions, so it was great to be able to run back to the island resort,” he says.
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He remains mostly in the shadows in flashback episodes, chipping away at Sarah’s optimism for their future as a couple when he thwarts her plan to beat a man to death and then poison him. It’s only in episode 7 that viewers actually see the withered and ancient Richard, who offers to sail across the island for Tom and Wick to die. Filmed before Episode 6, Richard Warren’s even more gravelly voice and wooden movements are all Linklater, with no VFX.
“They are amazing costumes with no expense spared,” he says. “Terrible teeth, awful wig. We shot the reincarnated version of the dentures first, so we were able to establish the sounds and movements the character would make after death, which was a lot of fun. And walking around in Colonial heels with gorgeous flowing hair calls for Brad Pitt savoir-faire in Legends of the Fall.”
The comedy reaches its climax on a boat out to sea, where a hungry Richard is seen carrying cans of Vienna sausages. It’s played for laughs, but for Linklater it was torture. “Man, I hated that,” he says. “It was the best performance of my career to act like what I was eating was actually a luxury.”
At the end of episode 7, when Richard retracts his wish to die and attempts to send Tom and Wick to a watery grave instead, they have to struggle to seal him in a coffin. The filming of this scene coincided with Linklater’s 49th birthday, and the irony of being sealed in a coffin and reduced to dust at the end of his 50-year life was not lost on him, but it helped him find Richard’s voice.
“I was screaming, ‘I want to live, I want to live,’ so that’s definitely going to drop your registration,” he says. “This is what the universe does for you. The universe is a mirror of your inner self.”
Dippold was so impressed by Linklater’s subtle performance as Richard that he even believed there was something human about him.
“Hamish plays it so straight, so dry, so terrifyingly well that you can see the guilt and burden and the weight of the world in his eyes,” says Dippold. “Even at the end of episode six, when Betty starts giving him drinks and seducing him, I think it’s so heartbreaking. I think he’s a little hopeful that she doesn’t think he’s a monster.”
Dippold, Gilpin, and Linklater all took different paths back in time than this unconventional detour. Dippold remembers a rather strange ending to filming the series. The fact that episode 1702 was the last to be filmed was to thank the season 1 staff for their hard work in a completely new location with a mostly new cast.
“Having all these new actors doing speeches in a colonial setting was a really interesting way to end this season because it took us out of the show’s time,” she says. “That’s good though.”
For Gilpin, she will remember being able to act out her “melting pot” fantasies. “I love to perform under the hood,” she says. “I’m not good at that.”
Linklater, on the other hand, found positives in what could have been a dark acting exercise. “Being buried alive on the property of one of the accused Salem witches is a completely unexpected and once-in-a-lifetime event.”
