There’s so much to love about Widow’s Bay, but very close to the top is Kate O’Flynn’s performance as Patricia. The Emmy nominee won over viewers with her oddball character, the hardworking mayor’s assistant with just a touch of social awkwardness.
She fit right into the Widow’s Bay milieu of quirky small-town life on a cursed island, dealing with its supernatural crises (haunted cocktail parties, masked maniacs, 400-year-old living corpses, and sinister storms) with the same energy that she faced more petty concerns, including a mean girl who really did deserve to be tasered. O’Flynn made Patricia both incredibly unique and extremely relatable, but the process took some figuring out and discussions with Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold to get it right.
Talking to IndieWire, O’Flynn revealed a little bit about how Patricia reached her final form. Nailing that intersection of “bravery” and “vulnerability” was key.
“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,” O’Flynn said.
Some of Patricia’s funniest moments come when she’s interacting with Matthew Rhys’ Mayor Tom Loftis, as well as her now-legendary exchange with Dale Dickey’s Rosemary when the Sunset Cocktails soiree takes a turn for the satanic. (Hey, she had her qualms!) But considering how to portray Patricia’s alone time was also important in bringing the character to life.
One example: when she excitedly pours a glass of wine and unboxes her takeout order, only to realize the diner has given her not just the wrong meal but an incredibly unappetizing one.
“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,” O’Flynn said. “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.’”
One aspect of Patricia that didn’t make it into the show was a change in her hairstyle. “There was a period where I was like, ‘Maybe she wears her hair up at home.’ 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.’”
Dippold was willing to go with it, but O’Flynn ultimately decided against using her own idea. “‘I don’t know who Patricia is with the hair up,’” she recalled realizing. “So then I said to Katie, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve scrapped that,’ and she was like, ‘Thank God.’”
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