Kingston Rumi Southwick was sitting at a cast dinner after a table read for Widow’s Bay when a producer’s assistant pulled him aside with a warning he barely believed. “You know the end, it’s all on you,” she told him. He had four scripts. He had no idea what she meant. He never saw her again on set.
The 18-year-old actor, who plays Evan Loftis in Apple TV+’s horror-comedy series, describes that encounter now with the amusement of someone who has since watched the season finale air and seen the show emerge as one of streaming’s most talked-about series of the year.
The first season, which premiered in April and concluded this week, revealed that Evan is the last living descendant of the island’s founder — the man whose blood pact with a dark entity brought the curse to Widow’s Bay in the first place. The revelation reframes nearly every scene Southwick played without knowing it was coming.
Created by Parks & Recreation writer Katie Dippold and directed in part by Hiro Murai, the show stars Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, Widow’s Bay’s hapless mayor and Evan’s father, who spends the season trying to hold together a tourism-dependent coastal community while something — several somethings — systematically kills anyone who tries to leave.
The series shoots on location across small Massachusetts sea towns outside Boston, a choice Southwick says fundamentally shaped his performance. “These owners would have their own Widow’s Bay–esque stories,” he said. “It really put you into the mindset of being in a sea town that’s haunted.”
Working opposite Rhys, whom Southwick calls “Matty,” proved a sustained master class. The Americans veteran, he said, kept redirecting his attention from internal instinct to external impact. “Because maybe something feels the best for us right now in this scene, but how is the audience going to take it?” Southwick recalls Rhys asking. The lesson proved especially useful on a show that balances sharp workplace comedy against genuine supernatural dread within the same episode — sometimes the same scene.
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Apple has already renewed Widow’s Bay for a second season, and the finale positions Evan, not Tom, as the character with the most consequential story left to tell. Southwick, for his part, sounds ready. “It’s way different and maybe worse than what you would think.”
