Kate O’Flynn found out she was an Emmy nominee and immediately went underground. It was nuts in the best possible way.” The realization didn’t land until the next day, when she scrolled through a phone full of messages from people she had worked with across two decades. These names wouldn’t mean anything to anyone outside British regional theater.
O’Flynn is being covered as a breakout, and she doesn’t dispute the term. I’ve worked hard to cultivate a life outside it that also supports this moment. There’s a bit more faith in myself.” Her years onstage shaped how she approaches a set.
Most of her theater work was on new plays with living writers, which taught her to treat the script as a governing document. Unlike nearly everyone else, O’Flynn was never skeptical it would work. Asked whether she believed a horror-comedy that plays like Stephen King directing “Parks and Recreation” could land, she didn’t hedge.
I knew that I would want to watch it.” The script, director Hiro Murai’s sensibility and a first read-through alongside Dale Dickey, Stephen Root, Kevin Carroll and Matthew Rhys settled it. Even the tonal tightrope critics keep marveling at was, to her, a nonissue. Her read on Patricia, a social outcast and eccentric assistant, turned out to be nothing like what Dippold and Murai had imagined.
She heads to Toronto with Mike Leigh’s “Tender Loving Care,” made by the director who gave her a first job on “Happy-Go-Lucky” at 21 and who has signaled the new film will likely be his last. It’s terrifying and liberating.” Dickey, her co-star and fellow nominee, told Variety she is rooting hardest for O’Flynn to take supporting comedy actress, and has vowed to carry her train up the steps. We’re just going to be two queens rocking the red carpet together.”
Extract — continue reading at the source.
