Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Widow’s Bay finale.
The comedy-horror series Widow’s Bay has been taking critics and audiences alike by storm — no pun intended — this spring television season. Since he pulled triple duty on the show, Widow’s Bay actor, writer, and supervising producer Neil Casey is a big part of why.
Best known for performances in the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, as well as series like Silicon Valley, Black Monday, Clone High, and Big Mouth, Casey portrays the titular island’s fearful innkeeper Kurt. He also penned the third episode, “The Inaugural Swim,” as well as the lyrics to the earworm-y sea shanty “The Last Man.”
A two-time Primetime Emmy nominee, Casey is certainly no stranger to comedy — or to collaborating with Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold. (Dippold co-wrote Ghostbusters and both were a part of Upright Citizens Brigade and the subsequent series UCB Comedy Originals.) But as a comedy-horror hybrid, Widow’s Bay is also a vast departure from the sketch shows Inside Amy Schumer and Saturday Night Live for which Casey received his previous nods.
“The tone of it is special, but it really is all Katie,” Casey tells Gold Derby. “She has such an appreciation for horror as a genre. She’s really an encyclopedia.”
“The tone of the comedy, it’s very real,” he continues. “The characters aren’t very self-aware. I joke that it’s like these characters have never seen a horror movie; we’re not living in that world where the characters are above it or are aware of the fact that they’re in something that resembles fiction or anything like that. … The humor comes naturally out of the scenes and because of the fact that the characters really believe that what’s happening is really happening.”
As Season 1 winds down, we spoke with Casey about the finale’s endgame and how “The Last Man” came to be.
Gold Derby: “The Inaugural Swim” has a moment where it’s made clear that something supernatural is happening on Widow’s Bay. Can you walk us through leaning into the paranoia versus the undeniable visual and whether one is more interesting than the other to you?
Neil Casey: Some of this is hindsight… but we wanted it to be a satisfying story arc over the course of the entire season. At a certain point I think we’ll get bored if we stay in denial for too long and we keep the audience in denial. So, having Episode 1 where we see him on that tightrope and then Episode 2 where we watch him really want to accept this like black mold explanation…
The repetition of the mold felt so intentional, especially bookending the show with a mention of it in the MREs in the finale.
Well, fungus is pretty evil! Between the mushrooms and the black mold and the mold in the book, it seems like it’s one. If the medieval idea was that sulfur is the smell of the devil, whatever’s happening on this island, one of the telltale signs of its presence or influence is the appearance of the mushroom, right? And then yeah, the mold, there could be something to that; it’s certainly around a lot. It’s like when its influence is peaking, you see a lot of this black mold around in the book and all that. It’s a production design decision, but it works for me. It’s a little telltale sign of the evil within.
And it felt like it grounded things more in the way that people do evil and people react to this environment, especially when looking at Richard Warren and the Offerings and how Tom was willing to kill someone.
Yes, obviously we were concerned about our real characters’ journey, and putting Tom in these impossible situations is the core of the show. I don’t think that it would be particularly satisfying if there were just like a parade of haunts, as Wyck says in [Episode 1]. Both the comedy and the drama come from the characters. You look in the abyss, it looks into you. Tom is dealing with supernatural horrors, and then by the end, he’s putting himself in a really morally compromising situation. We expect that to resonate with people more than just the idea of, “There could be another creature or something out there that’s going to get us.”
When Patricia walks out of the hospital room, you see in the waiting room…all sorts of stuff going on on the island that we have not had time to focus on in any given episode – the tourist mom with the broken arm and all that stuff. Against the backdrop of all this supernatural craziness happening, we want to tell a real human story about characters we care about and definitely the evil that people are capable of.
Matthew Rhys in Widow’s BayWith that in mind, what were the discussions around who needed to survive the season? Was there ever a question about Ruth or even Kurt?
I was very jealous of Chris Fleming getting pulled up in the water spout cyclone. I would have loved to do that stunt even if Kurt was dead!
Over the course of the writing, the body count went down. In Episode 8 with the Boogeyman, there was going to be a higher body count at one point. You want to feel the threat of the supernatural, you want to feel that it’s real, but at the same time, if it turns into a bloodbath on the island, it stops being believable that people would not be running for the hills. And then there’s also just the idea of the outside world encroaching. We want to stay in our world, and at a certain point, if we’re going to play it realistically and really deal with what would happen in real life, if you have too much death, it’d be hard to imagine being able to reset and tell a new story the next week. You’d still be dealing with a mass atrocity of one kind or another.
With Ruth, though, it wouldn’t have been something supernatural, it would have been a very important character doing something that would arguably change him a lot for a second season.
Definitely. It’s Tom, Bechir, everybody. The way the chessboard is set up for the second season, people are not exactly the same they were as they were when they were in the shelter at the beginning of the [finale] episode, by any stretch.
Especially because of the bell. It rings again and there’s this look between Tom and his son, and then they get in the car and we don’t see where they go. Is that a scene where you all had to know where you wanted them to go in order to write it for the finale? Do you already know what the next step is?
I’m not sure that Tom knows what the next step is, and I’m not sure we do either. If the bell is ringing, then we know that the entity is active – that the island, if you want to call it that, is still awake [and] it’s communicating something. In terms of the story that everybody wanted to see, that was a moment where Tom and Evan are just finding each other and are present with each other at the end — an emotionally satisfying way to end the series. Does Tom have a line in the season that repeats more than, “Where’s my son?”
They’re physically together, but he’s not going to kill his son, who has been revealed as the true last descendent, so he’s dooming everybody in a way. Is that satisfying?
I hope it’s emotionally satisfying that they get together, but yes, certainly they both have a gigantic secret of something that’s awful and that they’re never going to tell each other. What happens in the chamber with Evan, he’s not directly responsible, but he’s an accessory, no question about it. They both have huge things that they’re never going to say to each other. They’re together, but they’re not the same.
When you’re acting in scenes as Kurt, is there room for you to lean on your background in improv comedy?
In Episode 5 where I’m yelling at Tom in the town hall meeting in the conference room, we did a lot of different takes there. I think I say, “We all know it’s a s–tty hotel” or something like that. When they had me doing the big, loud screaming thing, I think I went off the rails a couple times, just while we were all in that room together, and it was fun. But for the most part, the show’s pretty tightly scripted. We’re working with just a little over 30 minutes most of the time, so it’s a fun set, and people do find moments here and there, and things like that, but we’re staying pretty close to the words.
Was there anything in the shelter scene in the finale you added that didn’t make the final cut?
No, I don’t think so. My friend Anthony Atamanuik have the little two-hander where I knock his suitcase down the stairs. He had a line that was in the last locked cut that I saw: “What are we, waiting in line at the DMV or something?” and that was an improvised moment. But there were so many moving parts. All that shelter stuff was multiple days of shooting. With Episode 5, I remember I was in meetings for the next block, and then it’s like, “OK time to be an actor; let’s get a sweater on!”
In terms of playing Kurt, did the role speak to you in a specific way or was it more about wanting a role that was not in as many scenes because of all of the stuff you had to do behind the scenes?
Thankfully, as an actor, I just got to be an actor [and] not have to worry about those logistics, particularly. I did not know that I was going to be Kurt when Kelly Galuska wrote that episode. The great Allison Jones has been gracious enough to cast me in a few things over the years, so I imagine that between her and Hiro [Murai, executive producer and director] and Katie, they said, “Oh, yeah, that’d be a good fit for Neil.” I thought I might be the bartender or something, maybe, but there’s so many great people [including] local Boston and Massachusetts casting. We really lucked out so much with being able to get great people.
There’s so much history and clues baked into the inn; do you feel like that’s why Kurt is staying on as innkeeper even though he’s not excited about it?
I don’t think so. I think he really just wants to protect the honor bar. I think he really wants to protect his income stream. … Kurt is a small business owner, hoping to capitalize on whatever’s happening here. I think it’s very possible there could be more clues in the inn, because it is clearly that type of place that’s been around forever and there’s all the lore of all the terrible things that happened in the inn. I think we very well may circle back to that… but I really think Kurt just would love to be able to pay off his credit card!
And I have to ask about the process of working with Richard Reed Perry on the sea shanty “The Last Man.”
I knew it would be kind of a chant, like, “Who will be the last man?” A couple times we break away from it and do a little loop and then come back to it. I have an album of sea shanties from Nova Scotia. I went and listened to some colonial music. My son would listen to remixes of “The Wellerman.” I haven’t really written a lot of songs, but I wrote the lyrics as they were, and Richard came back with this incredible melody and arrangement and performance of it, which was just astronomically better than the best version of a bunch of guys singing it that I had in my head. It was just tremendous.
