One of the many well-deserved Emmy nominations for Widow’s Bay went to Dale Dickey, whose hilariously wry turn as town hall employee Rosemary quickly made the character a fan favorite. Though we loved her frequent sarcastic quips and her “qualms” about Patricia’s disastrous Sunset Cocktails, Rosemary’s biggest moment came in the penultimate episode, “Emergency Shelter,” when she broke down 400 years of island genealogy to reveal Richard Warren’s cursed gene pool.
In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, veteran character actor Dickey looked back on the epic scene, recalling its “11 pages of dialogue.”
Getting through the speech, she said, was “terrifying. I came from theater, so I’ve learned huge amounts of dialogue before, but on camera this was probably the biggest chunk I’d ever had. There were charts and slides and all these moving parts. They even offered me a teleprompter, but I’d never used one. So I just went back to my theater training. I repeated it over and over until it stuck. I knew everybody had my back, and when we finished, I was fricking relieved.”
At the recent San Diego Comic-Con, the Widow’s Bay gang participated in the first-ever Apple TV Hall H presentation, and Dickey again spoke about Rosemary’s big “dead baby, dead baby” moment, crediting its success to “the amazing, unending, massive support from my cast members and crew.”
Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold also gave Dickey her flowers.
“I’m so happy that the genealogy scene seemed to land with people because that was one of the hardest things [we did], and Dale Dickey here memorized that entire thing,” Dippold said. “I remember the projector screen was like upside down on the screen, so she couldn’t even really use it; she had to really go by her mind.”
It was such a heavy lift that Dippold remembered Matthew Rhys, who plays Mayor Tom Loftis, pulling her aside on set and jokingly asking, “Do you hate Dale Dickey?”
The scene may be full of humor, but 11 pages of dialogue is no joke, something Dippold is clearly aware of: “I’m really glad that that came together, because my god, what she had to do.”
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