Matthew Rhys hails, on his mother’s side, from what he describes as “a long line of mariners,” natives of the Welsh town of Fishguard.
An actor best-known for his role as a sleeper spy on “The Americans” and currently starring on the Apple TV horror-comedy “Widow’s Bay,” Rhys used to spend his summers boating. And during pandemic lockdowns, he bought a 1939 wooden boat and painstakingly restored it. That boat, like many boats, is now for sale.
“I had these stupid notions that the family would love it,” said Rhys, who is married to his “Americans” co-star Keri Russell. “And they didn’t at all.”
But none of this had quite prepared him for the experience of kneeling at the stern of a bobbing eight-foot wood dinghy — a craft known as an optimist — and piloting it jerkily around the marina at Brooklyn Bridge Park, the rudder jammed into his back, the boom hitting him in the head.
It was the kind of humiliation that often besets his “Widow’s Bay” character, Tom Loftis, the mayor of an island community. While a dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms or an assault by a sea hag is perhaps more perilous than a tiller to the kidneys, Rhys found that brief sail as terrifying as anything on the show.
This was on a gorgeous June morning, about a week before the show’s Season 1 finale, which arrives on Wednesday. (Apple recently renewed “Widow’s Bay” for another season.) Rhys, goofy in the way of many a Brooklyn dad but also Old Hollywood suave, had come to the marina to cheer on participants in Brooklyn Boatworks, a program that helps students build and then sail optimists of their own.
He has been involved with the organization for several years while also serving on the board of the Billion Oyster Project and volunteering for the Kayak Foundation, other initiatives designed to improve New York waterways and make them more accessible.
“What I hadn’t realized I wanted since moving to New York is the feeling of expanse,” he said at the marina. “It’s magical. At the end of the piers, you just feel like you can breathe.”
Still, he acknowledged that navigating these waterways in a small craft is precarious. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” Rhys said. “But that is what I love about it.” He looked wistfully out at a trash barge on the water.
“Widow’s Bay,” which the New York Times critic James Poniewozik described recently as “the most delightful place I have visited this year,” is a deranged dyad of folk horror and cringe comedy. Rhys took the job because of that bonkers tone and because the fictional town of Widow’s Bay, an island community 42 miles off the coast of New England, reminded him of Fishguard, though with perhaps more cannibalism. Tom is a Widow’s Bay booster. He believes the place could be the next Bar Harbor or even Martha’s Vineyard.
But when Tom enters the water for a swim, he is attacked by a sea creature. And when he boards a boat in a different episode, he has to wrestle a zombie, which is above and beyond in terms of municipal dedication.
That episode, which was shot, like the rest of the series, in Rockport and Gloucester, Mass., is a bit of a sore spot for Rhys. While a stunt crew was out on the open ocean, he had to film his scenes on an ersatz boat on a sound stage, with members of the props department throwing the occasional bucket of water over him.
“I was kind of angry that we weren’t on the ocean,” he said. “But I was laughing a lot.” The zombie is admittedly pretty funny.
After a walk out to the park’s dock, Rhys put on a life jacket and the aqua socks that his wife refers to his “little bootees” and prepared to address dozens of school-age children. “Say some exciting words like you do every time,” Maggie McNicholas, the executive director of Brooklyn Boatworks, told him. Rhys, who likes to visit schools when the boats are mid-construction, jogged to a spot near the boathouse and took up a microphone.
He explained to the children that New York City is for the most part a series of islands, but that most New Yorkers have no relationship to the water. “Except you have built your own boats and will have a singular experience with that water!” he said, his zeal infectious. He ended with a dad joke, identifying the East River as not a river at all, but a strait. “So let’s get straight to the boats!” he said.
He handed out hats to the children, then made his way to the dock. The dad jokes kept coming: “Four decades since I was in an optimist, but I remain optimistic.” The boats were already there, their names painted on the hulls: Goat the Boat, Hip Hop Express, Poseidon’s Wrath, Super Guy Watercar. Rhys was helped into a boat called the Otterton by a Brooklyn Boatworks staff member who acknowledged the boat’s small size and pointed to the bailing bucket.
Rhys made a swerving circuit of the harbor, then returned to the dock to collect his passenger, a curly-haired child in a red life vest. “You look like a sailor!” Rhys told the boy. He gestured toward the bailing bucket. “You won’t need this.” The boy, entirely unimpressed, asked Rhys why he kept changing directions. Rhys muttered something about the wind.
After a few minutes they were back at the dock. “Good job!” Rhys said to the boy, who was unmoved. But Rhys remained enthusiastic.
“To talk to someone about the boat they’ve built while you sail them on the East River is as good as it gets,” he said.
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