Updated

Updated · The New York Times · Jun 17

Matthew Rhys Pilots 8-Foot Dinghy at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Taking Blows From Boom and Rudder

Updated

Updated · The New York Times · Jun 17

Matthew Rhys Pilots 8-Foot Dinghy at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Taking Blows From Boom and Rudder

Q: How did an actor's struggle with a child's boat become a perfect metaphor for his new horror-comedy TV role?

Matthew Rhys’s failed attempt to sail an Optimist dinghy became a near-perfect real-life version of the character he plays in Apple TV+’s “Widow’s Bay”: a man trying to project competence while being physically battered, out of control and faintly ridiculous. The irony was central. Rhys comes from a Welsh seafaring background, spent summers boating and even restored a 1939 wooden boat during lockdowns. Yet at Brooklyn Bridge Park Marina he was undone by an eight-foot Optimist, a boat widely used to teach children basic sailing. He described kneeling awkwardly at the stern, the rudder digging into his back and the boom hitting his head, leaving him jerking around the water with little control. That humiliation mirrors Mayor Tom Loftis, Rhys’s role in “Widow’s Bay.” Loftis is a beleaguered island mayor who tries to keep order and deny supernatural danger, only to be repeatedly rattled by events beyond his control. Reviews of the horror-comedy have emphasized Rhys’s gift for playing a flustered, uncomfortable authority figure whose confidence keeps collapsing into anxiety and physical comedy. So the child’s boat became a metaphor because it stripped Rhys of the mastery he expected to have, just as “Widow’s Bay” constantly strips Loftis of authority. In both cases, the comedy comes from watching an apparently capable man get humbled in public while trying to hold himself together.

2 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jun 17

An 8-foot wooden dinghy left Matthew Rhys battered and rattled as he jerkily piloted it around the marina at Brooklyn Bridge Park, with the rudder digging into his back and the boom striking his head.
Rhys said years around boats had not prepared him for the sail, despite summers spent boating and a pandemic-era restoration of a 1939 wooden boat that he has since put up for sale.
The outing echoed the comic humiliation of his “Widow’s Bay” character, Tom Loftis, an island mayor, with Rhys saying the brief trip felt as terrifying as the show’s stranger perils.