K Callan, the actor, is having a moment, showered with praise for her turn as Ruth, the forgetful secretary to Matthew Rhys’ Mayor Tom Loftis, in Apple TV‘s hit horror quasi-comedy “Widow’s Bay.”
Through much of the 10-episode series, which earned 19 Emmy nominations on Wednesday, her part seems like incidental, if charming, comic relief — until the finale, when, in a long scene opposite Rhys, who has come to her house to kill her under the impression it will remove a curse from the town, she shares old photos, local and personal history and provides the information that changes everything. It’s a delicate, nuanced performance, homespun, funny, real and evocative of the way that there’s more to older people than we sometimes bother to see. Having lived long in an unusual place, Ruth provides a calm counterpoint to the frantic Tom. (Ruth is 84, but Callan, as viewers have remarked with admiration and surprise, is 90.)
“It’s been such a joy the love that Ruth has gotten from Reddit and various places on the internet,” Callan said last week over the phone, “and the stuff that’s been written. I spent the day [after the finale premiered] crying, really. There were so many nice things coming to me and people sending me things and saying, ‘Did you see this?’” (I should point out that I’m acquainted with Callan through her daughters Kristi and Kelly.)
It isn’t her first moment — she’s been acting most of her life. (“My first appearance was as the baby Jesus. I must have been almost a year old, so it was not a speaking part, but it was a lead.”) She played the wife of Peter Boyle’s hippie-hating factory worker in the much-discussed 1970 indie film “Joe.” In the Emmy-winning “Cousin Liz” episode of “All in the Family,” she played the lesbian partner of Edith’s late cousin. (It has its own Wikipedia page.) In the ‘90s, She was Martha Kent in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” which still earns her the occasional appearance at fan conventions. In Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out,” the first Benoit Blanc film, aged beyond recognition with prosthetics and swaddled in furs, she played Christopher Plummer’s mother — and, as in “Widow’s Bay,” was the unexpected key to a mystery.
In among these are many, many other screen credits, encompassing every sort of comedy and drama, including “Newhart,” “Poker Face,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “Coach,” “King of the Hill,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “The Onion Field,” “Forever Fernwood” and “Justified.” IMDb lists 154 of them, going back to a 1962 appearance opposite David Wayne as a Western Union operator in an episode of “Route 66,” which was shooting in her hometown of Dallas, and forward to the upcoming film “Bad Day,” alongside Cameron Diaz, Mark Duplass, Sam Richardson and Ben Schwartz.
“I always just knew I was going to be an actor,” Callan said. “Never told anybody because I thought they would just think I was crazy. And then years later, my brother said, ‘Oh, we always knew you were going to do that.’ In my era, you could be a teacher or a mother, mostly. My mom was kind of sick from the time I was born and died when I was 11, and I just kind of grew up on the movies — and Betty Grable specifically.”
Scenes in which Grable had visited an agent inspired Callan to pick up the Yellow Pages, where she found the Molly O’Day Agency.
“I got on the bus and I wore my Easter dress and my little gloves, and I went in and said, ‘Hi, I’m Kay Borman, and I’m a singer,’ because I’d sung onstage at [the University of] North Texas. And I figured, ‘Now she’ll throw me out.’ That’s what happened in the Betty Grable movies,” she recalled. “And she said, ‘Do you have any music?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I figured, ‘Now she’ll throw me out.’ She said, ‘Do you have an accompanist?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I figured, ‘Now she’ll throw me out.’ So she went down the hall and came back with an accordion player and I sang ‘You Made Me Love You’ and ‘I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.’”
Offered $100 a week to sing at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, Callan replied, “I don’t know know whether my daddy would let me do that.”
”I didn’t find out ‘til about 30 years later that she had called him when I was on my way home and he was fine,” she said. “He didn’t care if I went back to school. I was the first one in my family to go to college anyway. I must have been 18.”
She worked with Margo Jones, a pioneer in regional theater who had premiered works by Tennessee Williams and William Inge, found employment in commercials and, “you know, working at the fair, standing by the new automobiles at the automobile show and doing all those things you do in Dallas trying to be an actor.” She wrote letters to her “MGM idols” asking for career advice and got back handwritten responses telling her to stay in Dallas “and, you know, sing for the Lions Club, do whatever. And once you’ve exhausted everything there, then go to New York and study.”
Her long-term plan had been to “go to New York, become a New York actor and ultimately come to Los Angeles,” though each step took longer than expected. She wound up teaching at her old high school, Our Lady of Counsel Academy, where, on Jones’ model, she built a theater in the round in the lunchroom and expanded the P.E. program, attracting new students. “It was the first time I ever put stuff out and got stuff back — I’d kind of been invisible before,” she recalled. “So I made the decision to stay, because I thought if I go to New York, that’ll just be for me, but look at all the good I’ve been doing here. Ultimately I ended up teaching, ended up getting married, ended up having three kids. We moved to Oklahoma, and then the marriage broke up, and then I went to New York.”
She landed in 1968, and “everybody my age had been there for 10 years, ripening and learning. I had a voice lesson once a week, and I went to dance class twice a week, and then I was in [legendary teacher] Herbert Berghof’s class once a week. It was really hard the first three years; then things begin to loosen up. I got ‘Joe,’ which ended up being on 10-best lists. It made a star of Peter, but it put me in the system.”
After eight years in Manhattan, acting in commercials and onstage, she finally moved west with her daughters and the proper start of her screen career, beginning with a three-episode run on “One Day at a Time,” charting a path through every sort of comedy and drama all the way to “Widow’s Bay.”
“I got the audition last year, about April,” Callan recalled, “just to recur. And I said, ‘This is silly, they’re not going to cast a Los Angeles actor to go recur in Massachusetts. That doesn’t make any sense. But, you know, hope springs eternal for all actors. And ultimately it did happen. All I knew about Ruth was the pilot. I had no idea what her journey was going to be. I had a lot of thoughts and fears about the part because it wasn’t very much, but I really wanted to work with [writer] Katie Dippold and [director] Hiro Murai.
“When I was there for my first fitting, I was talking to the wardrobe people. I said I kind of felt like furniture. And they said, ‘That’s because you haven’t read the 10th episode.’ But I didn’t get the 10th episode forever; I didn’t know what it was. I worked one day on Episode 1, then I worked the second day on Episode 8, having not read 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. And finally, I wrote Katie and I said, ‘I would really love to know what’s going to happen.‘”
But when she finally read Episode 9, in which Rhys’ Tom resolves to kill Ruth, “… I just about had a heart attack. I was so shocked. It was so exciting.”
“What was it like working with Rhys in that final scene?” I asked.
“First of all, he’s been very generous talking in the press about how great I was and how I could just do it forever and so on and so forth,” Callan said. “But he is the one who had the heavy lifting in that scene. I was dropping all these bombs on him and he was jumping from one emotion to the next; he really had the hard work to do. But what great words they gave me; it was really hard to learn. They had asked me if I wanted a monitor [a teleprompter], but I’ve always learned the copy.”
“You’ve had — are having — an exceptionally varied career,” I say.
“It ebbs and flows. You fall in and out of age ranges. When I first started doing commercials, I was [cast as] a young mother and young wife. I could do that for many years. But then, you don’t really look like the mother of teenagers yet, but you don’t really look like the mother of little kids [anymore], and you have to sit out until you age into the next group. You have to have a marketable look, and you have to also have persistence. It never occurred to me when I went to New York that it wouldn’t work out. but mainly I’m really good at denial. I think it gets a bad name, denial.
“I’ve really been lucky,” she concluded. “Any artist’s life is hard, if you’re gonna have a freelance life. It’s a lifestyle choice. People don’t always know that. Like marriage is a lifestyle choice. When I was on ‘Lois and Clark,’ I knew I was employed for, like, three years, and that was fabulous. But I like not knowing, I like that just anything can happen.”
The post At 90, K Callan is loving her moment in the limelight with ‘Widow’s Bay’: ‘I’ve been really lucky’ appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
