Widow’s Bay has prevailed because the sleeper hit of 2026, and Kingston Rumi Southwick can’t look forward to season two.
“It’s so much fun,” the 18-year-old tells The Hollywood Reporter on a latest Zoom. “I’m glad people are connecting to it.”
The actor performs Evan, son to Matthew Rhys’ Tom, within the Apple TV horror comedy sequence. Created by Katie Dippold, Widow’s Bay is ready in a fictional — and really a lot cursed — New England island city and facilities round Tom, the city’s mayor.
Because the present’s April premiere, it’s continued to select up momentum each critically and in viewing. “I remember reading it for the first time and being like, I love this,” Southwick says.
The tone of Widow’s Bay is hard to land, and it very a lot does, however Southwick was interested by how it will end up when filming the present. “I was watching it and thought that is exactly what I was thinking, if not better than what I imagined,” he says.
The spooky New England vibe was straightforward to get into for Southwick, largely because of the present filming throughout Massachusetts. “We would shoot in these smaller sea towns outside of Boston, in people’s houses. I would talk to the owners, and they would have their own Widow’s Bay-esque stories,” he says. “It really put you into the mindset of being in a sea town that’s haunted, so I’m glad that we shot in Massachusetts because I had never been, and the place is a very big part of the story.”
The present moved between soundstages and placement shoots to actually get that atmosphere proper. “You see the town and Richard Warren with his head cut off, that’s really what it looks like. You could be there today, and it’ll look basically the exact same,” says Southwick.
Dippold spent years discovering the suitable tone of the present that might translate to audiences. It was one thing that stood out to Southwick when he learn the script. He factors to the state of horror in the mean time, with franchises that proceed to place out sequels and new entry factors, like Obsession and Backrooms, which can be additionally doing properly.
“What Widow’s Bay did really well was it took those horror tropes and made [them] its own. It’s a very original idea,” the actor says. He additionally factors out simply how humorous the present is and the way onerous that may be.
For Southwick, whose previous credit embrace Presumed Harmless and 56 Days, enjoying Evan has been a dream. “He’s a really smart kid,” he says of Evan. “There’s so much more that Evan can be saying and would be saying and stuff, but he doesn’t let off all of his stuff he wants to say or feels like he can.”
The daddy-son relationship between Evan and Tom is an enormous driving pressure for Evan’s story. “There’s so many unspoken things, and I think that’s also partially because I haven’t had a mom,” Southwick says of his character. “Being able to have an emotional intelligence or awareness of being able to talk about how you feel or things like that [is important]. Evan didn’t grow up with that. He grew up with a dad who kind of wants everything to be idyllic and to be the perfect thing.”
Wanting forward, Southwick’s excited to see how Evan can develop and what may be in retailer for the not too long ago introduced second season. “I’m really excited for not only the mischief he gets into, but the levels that he can get to,” he says.
Southwick says he and group would speak on set about how he may evolve within the subsequent season if he performed him a technique or one other. The actor has additionally wished to enterprise extra into comedic work, having largely labored on dramas. “This is a good way for me personally as an actor to ease myself into it,” he says. “I think that for season two could there’s so many more opportunities for Evan to be in a very crazy, funny situation.”
