Betty Gilpin, the evil origin of Hamish Linklater Town

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 wrapped its first season when Gilpin arrived on set to film a surprise flashback episode, which aired as the sixth installment of its freshman series. The episode, released this week alongside Episode 7, takes viewers back to 1702, when the original sin of Widow’s Bay took root.

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 discover that he has made a deal with the devil to spare his starving town. The episode is a huge departure from the already surreal series, presented stylistically on gritty film and directed by famed horror director Ti West. The main cast of the series had also been sent home at that point, so it was a change of pace – and of people and place – for everyone.

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

Gilpin isn’t kidding about the spooky. Some of the episode’s interiors were built alongside the regular Widow’s Bay sets, so the breaks for her – while dressed in 18th-century clothing – were spent taking a breather on a desk in City Hall or lounging on a couch that would certainly be out of place in 1702. “Our molded chairs and crafty table featured on all their contemporary decors,” she says. “I watched some of the first episodes and thought, ‘I took a nap on that couch’ and ‘I think I accidentally left my protein bar wrapper on that desk.'”

To keep Gilpin and the rest of the cast from feeling too uncomfortable in present-day Widow’s Bay, part of the episode was shot on location at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts, the home of a woman who was accused of, executed for, and later acquitted of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1693.

“I’m dressed in period clothing and wandering around this real woman’s house and its grounds,” she says. “There was a day I peed in the woods, holding up all my skirts, and I thought, ‘I bet Rebecca Nurse did exactly this in this very spot.’ Then one day on a lunch break I was walking around the corner of the house and I spooked one of the handles. He said: ‘You can’t just float around the corner dressed. You scared me terribly. ”

Unlike the on-edge crew member, the episode is sure to delight fans of the increasingly popular series simply because it deepens the already wild mythology of this island and reveals important details like what’s in the well and how long that creepy chair has been sitting in front of that creepy door. Sealed by eating a mushroom that emerged from the snowy, barren land (as seen in last week’s episode), Richard’s devilish pact cursed Widow’s Bay for the foreseeable future and bound everyone born on it to its turf – those who attempt to leave face instant death outside its watery confines.

However, the city’s history has been distorted over time. Creator Dippold says she wanted to interrogate the city’s collective view of their founder as a brave savior, glorifying him so much that Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) feels inadequate by comparison. But Dippold says the episode, which was conceived 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 New York Times journalist Tom Arthur (Bashir Salahuddin) gives a tour of the historical society, the original script calls for him to note that Richard Warren lost face in the 18th century, amid the city’s many atrocities.

“I remember at the last minute, before I shot the pilot, I knew we were going to see this flashback episode, and I thought, ‘This guy is going to have to have a face to do this, and we have to change that joke,’” she says.

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

“The soul of the show is that there are horrors big and small,” says Dippold. “Sarah goes to a haunted island where there’s a plague, and her husband turns out to be a 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 that because she doesn’t want to be a spinster, as they would have said at the time.”

Sarah comes with a smile and a joke. Neither is well received, which Dippold says is its own chilling nightmare. “There are the 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 greater horrors of life. And you can imagine how easily this episode and a moment like that could fall apart with someone who wasn’t Betty Gilpin. I think she’s iconic. She just sells the horror in her eyes and her acting.”

While she gives her best final girl energy, Gilpin also has to sell the comedic tone that weaves through the series, which she says was still in development when they were filming. “Sometimes it felt like we were making ‘The Crucible,’ sometimes it felt like we were making a slasher movie, and sometimes it was total clown school,” Gilpin says. “Seeing the version now, I think they really chose a beautiful blend of it. And honestly, it was so satisfying to finally see it, because Katie in particular really carved out a piece of her soul to make this.”

The other part in this story is the man who ties episodes 6 and 7 together despite them being 300 years apart. Linklater’s Richard Warren had to be menacing enough in 1702 to inspire his congregation to bury him alive to curb his evil, and to have Sarah flee the island with his children at night, not knowing that taking them from the island would turn them to dust. But when Tom, Wyck (Stephen Root) and Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) dig up the undead man these days, he must also be able to sell some comedy. One of Dippold’s favorite moments in the entire first season is his notepad exchange with Tom, which becomes increasingly slapstick.

Linklater previously played in this particular sandbox of spooky islands with Mike Flanagan’s ‘Midnight Mass’, something he happily drew from for ‘Widow’s Bay’. “I come from a background on remote islands with dangerous conditions, so I was very happy to run back to my island holiday,” he says.

He is largely hidden in the shadows in the flashback episode, taking away Sarah’s optimism about their future as a couple as he beats a man to death and then foils her plan to poison him. It isn’t until episode 7 that the audience really gets a look at the old, desiccated Richard who Tom and Wyck offer to sail beyond the reach of the island to die. This Richard Warren’s even gravelly voice and wooden movements, recorded before episode 6, are all Linklater, no VFX.

“No expense was spared on those beautiful costumes they built,” he says. “Awfully gross teeth, great wig. We shot the prosthetic, reincarnated version first, so we got to establish the sound and movement of the character after he was dead, and that was quite fun. Then when you walk around in those colonial high heels, with beautiful flowing locks, it calls for 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 keeps several cans of Viennese sausages. It was played for laughs, but it was torture for Linklater. “Jesus Christ, that was disgusting,” he says. “That was the best acting of my career, pretending that what I was eating was actually luscious.”

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 lock him back in his coffin in a struggle. Filming that scene coincided with Linklater’s 49th birthday, and the irony of him being locked 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 will definitely drop your register,” he says. “This is what the universe does to you. It holds up a mirror 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 in 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,” says Dippold. “Even at the end of Episode 6, when Betty gives him the potion and tries to seduce him, I think it’s so heartbreaking. I think he’s kind of hopeful that she won’t think he’s a monster.”

Dippold, Gilpin, and Linklater all took something other than this unorthodox detour back in time. Dippold recalls the rather strange ending to filming the series, as shooting the 1702 episode for the last time meant thanking the season 1 crew for their hard work in a completely new location, with a cast of mostly new faces.

“It was a really funny way to end this season when you’re giving a speech in a colonial setting with all new actors, because you’re outside 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 acting over-the-top with 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 to be buried alive on the property of one of the accused Salem witches is a totally unexpected bucket list moment.”