For someone whose character threw one of the most hilariously disastrous parties in recent television, Kate O’Flynn sure knows how to work the crowd. I’ve seen her twice this past week — her first time in L.A. — both at our Women Shaping Television luncheon and at a Widow’s Bay event thrown by Apple. Each time, O’Flynn was the main attraction in the room — the breakout star of the breakout show who makes even famous people exclaim, “I just have to tell her how much I love her!”
When I spoke to O’Flynn for today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast a few weeks ago, she was still back home in England and taking in the enthusiasm around Widow’s Bay from a distance. “It’s been crazy — like, amazing — and I couldn’t predict it, really,” O’Flynn tells me on today’s bonus episode. “But I feel it’s quite heartwarming that so many people feel like Patricia. These inner Patricias that we all have that we’re sort of embarrassed by — you keep that side of yourself hidden because it’s like too much. That everyone got behind this character — it’s quite a lovely thing.”
In our podcast conversation, O’Flynn tells me a lot about the origins of Patricia, the shy but determined assistant to the mayor of Widow’s Bay (played by Matthew Rhys) who, over the course of the season, throws a party inspired by what turns out to be a cursed book and goes full horror-movie final girl as she escapes a resurrected baddie known as The Boogeyman. With her background in developing new plays as a London theater actress, O’Flynn — born in Greater Manchester, England, in 1986 — found it natural to follow creator Katie Dippold‘s vision for the show, which she’s compared to a haunted house that she visited as a child.
On new plays, “it’s for the writer to find their voice and you as an actor are serving that,” O’Flynn explains. “I wonder if just subconsciously that’s what I was thinking with Katie — she was following a feeling, and then I was following that feeling without talking about it.”
Stepping onto a set full of people with improv backgrounds, including Dippold and Emmy winner Jeff Hiller, “blew my head off,” O’Flynn admits. “The main challenge was not to break and laugh, which I failed most of the time with Jeff because he’s so good.”
O’Flynn’s contributions weren’t “funny one-liners,” she says, but physical actions that have become equally iconic parts of the show, like Patricia’s full-body dance moves at her Sunset Cocktails party. “It’s like you’ve got to find me in my natural habitat,” she says by way of explaining it. “I sort of don’t know I’m doing it when I’m doing it.”
Hear much more from O’Flynn in our conversation, including a brief look ahead at her upcoming film with Mike Leigh, Bleecker Street’s awards contender Tender Loving Care, and what it felt like to walk past the Sea Hag on set. (“I was just admiring the manicure,” she jokes). We’ll be back with another regularly scheduled episode on Tuesday!
