Inside the ‘Widow’s Bay’ Flashback to 1702: How Betty Gilpin and Hamish Linklater Reveal the Town’s Evil Origins

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Our History” and “Seasickness,” the sixth and seventh episodes of “Widow’s Bay,” now streaming on Apple TV.

Betty Gilpin felt like she was haunting the cast of “Widow’s Bay.”

Apple TV’s horror-comedy from creator Katie Dippold had already shot its first season when Gilpin arrived on set to film a surprise flashback episode, which aired as the sixth installment of its freshman run. The episode, released this week along with Episode 7, takes viewers back to 1702 when Widow’s Bay’s original sin was taking root.

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Gilpin plays Sarah Warren, a woman brought to the island as part of an arranged marriage to its founder Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater), only to learn he made a deal with the devil to spare his starving town. The episode is a vast departure from the already surreal series, stylistically presented on gritty film and helmed by famed horror director Ti West. The series’ main cast had also already been sent home by this point, so it was a change of pace — and people and place — for everyone.

“It really felt like we were ghosts in somebody else’s house,” Gilpin tells Variety. “You could tell every department, from hair and makeup, to the camera crew, to Katie were doing their opus-level work here, and they were really excited about the thing they had just made. It was a lot to ask a crew to make a 1702 indie at the end of a months-long shoot.”

Gilpin isn’t kidding about the haunting. Some of the episode’s interiors were built alongside the regular Widow’s Bay sets, so breaks for her –– while costumed in 18th century clothing –– were spent taking a breather on a city hall desk or lounging on a couch that would certainly be out of place in 1702. “Our cast chairs and crafty table were set up on all their contemporary sets,” she says. “I watched some of the first episodes and was like, ‘I napped on that couch’ and ‘I think I accidently left my protein bar wrapper on that desk.’”

To ensure Gilpin and the rest of the cast didn’t get too comfortable in present day Widow’s Bay, a portion of the episode was shot on location at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts, the home of a woman accused of, executed for and later exonerated of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1693. 

“I’m dressed in garb of that time, wandering around this real woman’s home and its grounds,” she says. “There was a day when I peed in the woods, holding up all my skirts, and I was like, ‘I bet Rebecca Nurse did this very thing in this very spot.’ Then I wandered around the corner of the house on a lunch break one day, and I scared one of the grips. He was like, ‘You can’t just float around the corner dressed like that. You scared the shit out of me.’”

Unlike the on-edge crew member, the episode is bound to delight fans of the increasingly popular series simply because it deepens the already wild mythology of this island, revealing key details like what’s down the well and just how long that creepy chair has been sitting in front of that creepier door. Sealed by consuming a mushroom that sprung from the snowy, barren land (as seen in last week’s episode), Richard’s devilish pact cursed Widow’s Bay for the foreseeable future, binding all those born on it to its grounds — those who try to leave face immediate death beyond its watery borders.

The town’s history has been warped through time, though. Creator Dippold says she wanted to interrogate the town’s collective opinion of their founding father as a brave savior, exalting him to the point that Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) feels inadequate in comparison. But Dippold says the episode, which was cooked up about halfway through the writers’ room as a “dry colonial horror period piece,” almost didn’t happen. In the series premiere of “Widow’s Bay,” when Tom is giving Arthur (Bashir Salahuddin), a New York Times journalist, a tour of the historical society, the original script called for him to note that Richard Warren lost his face in the 1700s, among the town’s many atrocities.

“I remember at the last minute, before shooting the pilot, I knew then we were going to see this flashback episode, and I was like, ‘This man is going to have to have a face for us to do this, and we need to change that joke,’” she says.

Dippold says they also needed an outsider’s POV into the Widow’s Bay origin story. Sarah was perfect, because she is hopeful when she arrives in the opening scene. The tainting of that optimism is its own kind of American horror story.

“The soul of the show is that there are horrors big and small,” Dippold says. “Sarah is going to this haunted island where there’s a plague going on, and her husband turns out to be this monster. But there’s also the emotional horror of how she’s about to marry someone she’s never met before, and she’s desperate for it because she doesn’t want to be a spinster, as they would have said back then.”

Sarah comes with a smile and a joke. Neither is well-received, which Dippold says is its own brand of spine-chilling nightmare. “There’s the tiny little social horrors, like when she gets there and she makes a joke that the guy doesn’t hear,” she says. “He makes her repeat it, and it falls flat. That, to me, is one of the bigger horrors of life. And you can imagine how easily this episode and a moment like that could fall apart with someone that wasn’t Betty Gilpin. I think she’s iconic. She just sells the horror in her eyes, and her acting.”

While giving her best final girl energy, Gilpin also has to sell the comedic tone that weaves through the series, which she says was still being formed when they were filming. “Sometimes it felt like we were making ‘The Crucible,’ sometimes it felt like we were making a slasher film, and then sometimes it was like a total clown school,” Gilpin says. “Seeing the cut now, I think they really chose a nice blend of them. And honestly, it was so satisfying to finally watch it, because Katie, in particular, just really carved out a chunk of her soul to make this.”

The other piece in this story is the man who binds Episodes 6 and 7 together –– despite them being separated by 300 years. Linklater’s Richard Warren had to be menacing enough in 1702 to inspire his congregation to bury him alive in order to contain his evil, and to send Sarah fleeing the island in the night with his children, unaware that taking them off the island will turn them to dust. But when Tom, Wyck (Stephen Root) and Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) dig up the undead man in the present day, he also has to be able to sell a bit of the comedy. One of Dippold’s favorite moments in the entire first season is the exchange of messages using a notepad with Tom, which gets increasingly slapstick.

Linklater has previously played in this particular sandbox of spooky islands with Mike Flanagan’s “Midnight Mass,” something he was happy to pull from for “Widow’s Bay.” “I have a background in secluded islands with perilous circumstances, so I was very happy to run back to my island getaway,” he says.

He is mostly hidden in shadows in the flashback episode, whittling away at Sarah’s optimism for their future as a couple as he beats one guy to death and then thwarts her plan to poison him. It’s only in Episode 7 that audiences really get a look at the ancient, dried-out Richard that Tom and Wyck offer to sail out past the island’s reach to die. Shot prior to Episode 6, this Richard Warren’s even more gravelly voice and wooden movements are all Linklater, no VFX. 

“Those wonderful costumes they built, no expense spared,” he says. “Terrifically gross teeth, terrific wig. We shot the prosthetic, reincarnated version first, so we got to establish the sound and the movement of the character after he was dead, and that was kind of fun. Then, when you’re walking around in those Colonial high heels, with gorgeous flowing locks, it demands a certain Brad Pitt in ‘Legends of the Fall’ savoir faire.”

The comedy is in full force on the boat out to sea, where a ravenously hungry Richard houses multiples cans of vienna sausages. It’s played for the laughs, but it was torture for Linklater. “Jesus Christ, that was disgusting,” he says. “That was the greatest acting of my career, pretending like what I was eating was actually sumptuous.”

At the end of Episode 7, when Richard recants his wish to die and instead tries to send Tom and Wyck to their watery graves, they have to seal him back into his coffin in a struggle. Filming that scene coincided with Linklater’s 49th birthday, and the irony of being sealed in a coffin to turn to dust as he closes out his own fifth decade was not lost on him –– but it did help him find Richard’s voice.

“I was screaming, ‘I want to live, I want to live,’ so that’ll drop your register, for sure,” he says. “This is what the universe does to you. It holds a mirror up to how you feel inside.”

Dippold was so impressed by Linklater’s nuanced turn as Richard, that  even she was convinced there might be something human inside of him.

“Hamish plays it so straight and so dry and so terrifying and so well that you can see the guilt and the burden and the weight of the world in his eyes,” Dippold says. “Even at the end of Episode 6, when Betty gives him the drink and starts trying to seduce him, I find it so heartbreaking. I think he’s a little hopeful she won’t think he is a monster.”

Dippold, Gilpin and Linklater all took something different from this unorthodox detour back in time. Dippold remembers the rather odd ending to filming the series, because shooting the 1702 episode last meant she thanked the Season 1 crew for their hard work in a completely new location, with a cast of mostly new faces.

“It was a very funny way to end this season when you give a speech in a colonial setting with all new actors, because you are out of the show’s own time,” she says. “It was good, though.”

For Gilpin, she’ll remember getting to play out her “Crucible” fantasies. “I love over-the-top acting in a bonnet,” she says. “I’m a sucker for it.”

Linklater, meanwhile, found the positive in what could have been a dark acting exercise. “Just being buried alive on the property of one of the accused Salem witches is a totally unexpected bucket-list moment.”