SPOILER ALERT: This story reveals details of the Season 2 plot of Apple TV‘s Widow’s Bay.

One of the biggest surprises in Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay arrives through Evan Loftis, the seemingly ordinary teenager at the center of the show’s increasingly unsettling mystery. Played by Kingston Rumi Southwick, Evan spends much of the season pushing against the suffocating boundaries set by his father Tom Loftis, portrayed by Matthew Rhys, only for a shocking revelation to fundamentally reshape their relationship by the finale. As the series peels back the secrets surrounding the coastal town, Southwick’s performance evolves from rebellious teenager to a young man forced to confront painful truths about his family and his place in a much larger story.

Below, Southwick talks to Deadline about discovering Evan’s secret connection to the show’s mythology, working opposite Rhys and why he’s hoping his character gets into more scares in Season 2.

DEADLINE: How did this role come to you? 

SOUTHWICK: My agent at the time, months and months and months before I even got an audition or anything, before Matthew [Rhys] was cast, before anybody knew that Hiro [Murai] was going to direct this. There was a role for me, and he was like, “Dude, this is perfect. You’ve got to do this when we get the audition.” So, I got the audition and sent in a self-tape. Then I got a call back with Allison Jones, the casting director. I was really nervous going into the callback in Silver Lake because she was a big casting director, and I’d never really done comedy before. I kept telling myself that I needed to really lock in and do this.

We got into the room, and it was Allison and one of her associates. Then we do the audition. In one of the scenes, I’m staring dumbly at the reader, and in the middle of the scene she starts laughing. I don’t know if it was because of me just staring at her for the scene, but she starts laughing. So, we had to redo the scene multiple times. Then I did a Zoom camera test with Matthew, and that went really good. Then I booked the role.

DEADLINE: How much did you know about your character arc and the show itself when you got the role? 

SOUTHWICK: I had no idea. None. I booked the role, and we went in to do the table read. We only read, I think, the first two episodes. The episodes were being written and distributed while we were shooting, so we didn’t know what was going to happen. The funny thing is that I didn’t know signing on. Then at our dinner after the table read, before we started shooting, a producer’s assistant came up to me and talked about the ending of what was going to happen in Evan’s arc and how he was going to be the descendant, but she didn’t want to tell anybody, they wanted to keep that a secret. But this assistant came up to me and was like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve just read the final thing, and it’s about you, and you’re the…” And I’m like, “What? I had no idea.” I was like, “Oh my God, tell me more.” So, we started talking about it. Then I didn’t see her for the rest of shooting. I thought maybe she got fired or something. I was like, “Oh no.”

DEADLINE: She was a ghost from the future. 

SOUTHWICK: Exactly. [Laughs]. But because I didn’t see them again, I didn’t know if it was real or not and I thought maybe that ending had changed. Then we started getting the final scripts, and I was like, wow, he’s a way bigger part of the story, especially for Season 2. It was exciting. 

DEADLINE: How did that affect the way you approached playing Evan? 

SOUTHWICK: You can tell that Tom is very passionate and very aware of his son and really wants him to be safe. That’s brought up a lot in the show. We really didn’t want it to be an obvious thing of, “Oh, something bad is going to happen to Evan,” but it’s not what you expect at all until the very end. You think, “Oh, is he going to be in trouble? Is he going to get hurt or something?” But you don’t expect it to be that. We wanted it to feel like, OK, something’s going to happen, and we’re going to make you think it’s this bad thing, but it’s actually way different and maybe worse than what you would think. It definitely changed my approach. Especially near the end, we wanted there to be a little bit more of a relationship with Tom. Like, “Hey, it’s going to be OK. Everything that we’ve done is out of a place of love.”

Evan retaliates because he does love his dad, but he doesn’t understand why he’s being treated [harshly] by not being able to experience certain things like going out. We really wanted to show that in little scenes. For example, when the town is going to the shelter and Tom and Evan [put their plans to go to a baseball game aside], they put each other’s safety first and say, “It’s OK, we’ll do it another time.” That was important. Most of that really changes at the very end and going into Season 2. That’s where you’re going to see a big difference in Evan.

Also, you’ve seen other shows where there’s the bad teenage kid who’s smoking pot and is just an asshole. It’s an annoying character. You’re like, “Oh, geez.” I really didn’t want to do that. I really didn’t want to be that kid.

DEADLINE: Yeah, Evan isn’t really douchey, like his friend PJ. 

SOUTHWICK: Yeah, that’s Beck Nolan. He was the best on set. A lot of things that he did that were in the show, he improvised, and it was so funny. We actually did a lot of improvising in the show. Me jump-scaring them in the car, we improvised that, and some more I can’t remember at the moment, but we had such a fun time. But yeah, I didn’t want him to be a douchey kid where you’re like, “Ugh, get him off my screen.” [Laughs]. So, he’s smart within his retaliation. I’m glad people are taking it in a way where it’s not like, “Ugh.” You know what I mean?

DEADLINE: Talking more about your portrayal as Evan, there’s that scene where he’s reading the scary and almost unintelligible letters from his mom out loud. Talk about how you approached that. 

SOUTHWICK: We did that scene so many times. That episode was directed by Andrew DeYoung, who I love as a director. Him and Hiro, I got really close to and we talked a lot about those scenes. I had to think about how Evan grew up without his mom, and that he carries the weight of having died when she gave birth to him, so he thinks. He never knew her. Then, he learns that she was actually alive for a certain amount of time after, and his dad kept that away from him. All those years, Evan thought that she didn’t know him or wasn’t able to experience him. So, I thought about it as, that’s not parenting. Now, Evan has to parent him about something. And I thought of it as their roles switching. Evan reading those letters was like, “You kept this away from me. You’re going to sit here while I tell you what you did wrong.” You know what I mean? It’s that idea of, you have to understand that is not okay, and you can’t do that again. You have to explain why. So, we did those takes, me reading the letters, in a lot of different ways.

I did versions where I was crying while reading them. Then we did scenes where Andy and I really wanted it to be that I haven’t been able to express myself the way I want to. When Evan is really upset at his dad, and that he was going to mask his true feelings and then just make his dad feel bad. We landed on being sarcastic in the way that I say things, like, I can’t believe you did that to me, that’s effed up. But in a way that’s more like, I’m so shocked that you did that.

DEADLINE: It’s very dry, biting sarcasm in a way that’s humorless. 

SOUTHWICK: Exactly, that was the thing: What’s a way to dig at him as much as possible? Because Evan is masking his own feelings. It hurts to read these, but that’s his dad. And Matthew is such a good actor, he did so good in those scenes. 

DEADLINE: Then he has this total 180, and his relationship with his dad changes tremendously. What were the conversations with Katie and Hiro about this? 

SOUTHWICK: We had conversations about how we really wanted people to see him and his dad as equals. Like, you did something wrong, but I’ve been doing something wrong too. I think it all comes down to how we are as father and son and that relationship that’s being built. Obviously, there’s so much unspoken love and respect for each other that just isn’t being said. They’re both scared to say it, and they don’t really know how. Growing up without a mother figure and understanding how to have that emotional intelligence without a mother in your life is hard for Evan. When he’s given the opportunity to be like, “OK, I have to do this now. I have to parent him for a second. I have to grow up. I can’t be doing this dumb shit.” But then Evan goes back to being a little bit dick-ish when we go down to the shelter. You know what I mean? [Laughs]. But leading into Season 2, because there’s more horror, I hope Evan will be putting himself into [more mature situations]. 

DEADLINE: What was it like working with Matthew to build that father-son duo? 

SOUTHWICK: He’s amazing. I got to know him before we even got to set, which was nice. I found out that my godmother has been really good friends with him for years, and I had no idea. She gave me his phone number, and we started texting before we were shooting or before I had even met him in person. So, we became friends through that. Then while we were shooting, we became really close. As a scene partner, he really lets you do your thing. We’ll be doing a scene, and it’ll be his coverage, and then it’s my coverage and he’ll be like OK, let’s try this… He’s going to give his best possible version of himself to help you do the best possible thing that you can do. That’s really nice because when it’s not your coverage, a lot of actors will just read the lines because they’re not on camera. He’s really good because he gives you everything that you need. He likes to share. He’s not like, “I want this for myself,” or “I want this scene for myself.” It’s more like, let’s make it about the scene.

He really thinks about the audience, which is important. A lot of the time, as an actor, you have to believe everything that you’re doing. You have to really be in it. But I think the bottom line is, if the audience believes it, then you’re good. So, he really opened my eyes to thinking about the audience. It’s a directorial mindset, too, I think. I really appreciated that insight from him because I would also love to be a director someday. He also helped me think beyond just being on set and being aware of where the camera is. It’s also about asking, “How are people going to take this?” That’s a really big thing that I learned on this project, especially from him.

DEADLINE: So, now we all know that Evan is the descendant. What do you hope is next for Season 2 in general? 

SOUTHWICK: I’m really excited. As I said, I love the horror part of it, and I don’t think Evan got to do as many horror scenes or have as many things happen to him. So, I’m really manifesting that in Season 2 there are different scary situations and that Evan gets put into some pretty crazy and pretty scary circumstances. I would go to set on days when I wasn’t working because I wanted to watch. I went on set for the Boogeyman scenes, and I have videos of him jumping out the window, and I would go to the night shoots. It was just fun to watch all of that. I really want to do more horror, and I’m excited to see what Katie and Hiro have in mind.