Bleecker Street Kate O’Flynn has been a working actor for 20 years and, on this blinding August morning, is adjusting to the beginnings of her first-ever trip to Los Angeles. Over the years, she’s starred opposite the likes of Toni Collette and Olivia Colman on high-profile series for Netflix and HBO, respectively; she’s an Olivier-nominated stage regular who drew raves for her brittle take on The Glass Menagerie’s Laura on the West End. But it is the funky Apple TV horror comedy Widow’s Bay that did the trick: O’Flynn is now a first time Emmy nominee while her character, the indefatigable mayor’s assistant Patricia Moyer, has become an unlikely internet sensation. And so it goes — welcome to Hollywood.
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“I feel like I’ve launched out of a rocket,” O’Flynn says, as we wait for a table at a busy West Hollywood café. Wearing a purple tee and dark denim shorts, she’s as warmly approachable as you’ll find in this part of town, even with the dizzying schedule of campaign events: “It’s taking me awhile to acclimatize.”
While in some ways this trip represents the end of a chapter, with Widow’s Bay’s remarkable freshman run set to culminate at the Emmy Awards next month, O’Flynn is here to speak for the first time at length about her next major project: Mike Leigh’s final film, Tender Loving Care, which hits theaters December 4 after festival stops in Toronto, New York and more. The moment feels very full-circle for the English native, who plays one of four leads in the rich ensemble drama. Two decades ago, Leigh cast O’Flynn in her first-ever movie, as Sally Hawkins’ hard-partying sister in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky, and now, for his last, he has handed her the most significant role of her big-screen career. It couldn’t be better-timed.
“I’ve had 20 years’ worth of life experience in working with Mike,” O’Flynn says. “There’s something about those markers that is emotional. Not that that would ever be discussed with him, but I felt it — time, and life being lived.”
O’Flynn was on vacation in Sweden, having just concluded filming on Widow’s Bay, when Leigh called her up. “I believe you’re in something called Windows Bay?” the director asked, in O’Flynn’s amused recollection. “I’m just checking if you’re available. Here’s the deal: We’re doing a film. We start in six weeks. There’s no money. But you know the deal. You’re going to have a bigger part than the last thing.” (They’d last collaborated on 2018’s Peterloo, in which O’Flynn played a bit role; she also appeared in Leigh’s Mr. Turner.)
O’Flynn replied, “Yeah, I’m in, great.” That was that. “He said it was the quickest conversation he’s had with an actor, which surprised me,” she says now. “You don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s just fun to roll the dice.”
It’s a good thing she did. O’Flynn gives a poignant, deeply lived-in, subtly shattering performance in Tender Loving Care as Amy, a dogged social worker struggling to rebuild her life after ending things with her boyfriend. She moves in with her best friend (played by breakout Alice Bailey Johnson) while navigating simmering tensions with her parents (Paul Jesson and Marion Bailey), who imagined a different life for their daughter. These strands emotionally converge as Amy’s father’s health begins declining, and the family must come together for him and for one another.
It’s a completely different part from Widow’s Bay’s Patricia. The combination of the two would make for a striking dual showcase for any actor — let alone one whose big break happened just a few months ago, following decades of putting in the work. “I know how rare this is. I worked really hard to get here, to get the opportunity,” O’Flynn says. “But it does also feel like I rubbed a lamp and said to a genie, ‘Can you get me two great roles one after another that are going to come out at the same time? Can you just serve them up to me?’ It doesn’t happen like that.”
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Mike Leigh’s legendary method precedes itself: He casts actors without a script and allows them to build the characters, brick by brick, and then the story. When O’Flynn was 21 years old, Leigh invited her into the process for Happy-Go-Lucky. She was instructed to think of someone in her life, describe them, walk around as them, become them — then pull from other real-life situations, then let the magic of fiction take over. O’Flynn was still a student at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and had no idea how atypical this approach was for film acting.
“I was very naive and I just kind of went with it and enjoyed it, but couldn’t properly place how unusual a process it was,” she says between bites of her veggie omelet. For one day’s work, before cameras started rolling on Happy-Go-Lucky, O’Flynn arrived at the flat of Hawkins’ Poppy — in character. The cast improvised for 11 hours: They hung out in the apartment in character, they drove to Southend in character, they attended a barbeque in character. Leigh was always watching in a corner. The script would form out of the immersive exercise. At 11:00 p.m., he said, “Come out of character.”
“I remember going to the hotel that night, looking in the mirror and going, ‘Who am I?’” O’Flynn says. “Then we shot the scene, which was three, maybe five minutes long. After 11 hours of improvisation!” O’Flynn had returned to the process over the years, in between landing juicier TV parts in series like Landscapers and My Lady Jane, and the nerves always buzzed her anew. “I’ve usually got the safety net of a script, so having to constantly think small and go in step by step — like, am I actually going to be exposed to having no imagination? That’s my fear going in,” she says. “A lot is demanded of you.”
Tender Loving Care presented an even more intensive challenge. When O’Flynn arrived to begin character development, she was introduced to the story’s parents, played by two actors with a lifetime’s worth of Leigh films under their belt. “They had this shorthand, this lack of fear, that I was moved to watch,” O’Flynn says. “Up for equality. Balls to the wall. Let’s go. It was inspiring.” As they got deeper into it, the project unveiled itself, layer upon layer. O’Flynn just said aloud one day, “I think maybe social work,” and Amy’s job was decided — not to mention so much more.
“There is that hook of being on the front lines, trying to do something in a system that’s not working — and there’s a reason she makes that choice to do an all-consuming career,” O’Flynn says. “It means she doesn’t have to think about what she wants, about her desires or her life. She doesn’t look after herself. She doesn’t eat properly. And you can’t ever ask her a question and her answer straight or give you.”
O’Flynn communicates such detailed, intricate knowledge of Amy’s psychology and background it’d sound obsessive in any other context; for a Mike Leigh movie, it’s a prerequisite. Especially when you’re one of the movie’s main actors — a new experience for the star. She got a TikTok with a social-work algorithm to learn how those in the field speak and move. She interviewed all kinds of professionals for research. A specialist was on set to ensure the dialogue that came out of any improv was accurate.
O’Flynn also sat in on casting sessions for the children that Amy works with. “I felt really trusted to be there with Mike,” she says before bursting into a laugh. “And I was just like, ‘Oh, you did the same to me when I auditioned.’ He’s got his spiel!”
‘Widow’s Bay’ Apple TV **
As O’Flynn saw it, Leigh decided along the way of making Tender Loving Care that it would be his last film. “It was a process for him — his method is just particularly tiring as a director because he’s creating everything from scratch and everything goes late in the day,” she says. “But he’s razor-sharp. There’s a childlike excitement that he has in making films. He loves it.”
At this, O’Flynn breaks down in tears mid-interview. We sit in silence for a few moments. “It’s a vocation,” she says finally. “You see it so clearly. It’s something he has to do.” Still crying, she then starts laughing to herself: “Being like this now, I can feel Mike being like, ‘No, Kate, no.’ I can feel him.”
If Leigh’s screen career, which includes seven Oscar nominations without a win, indeed concludes with Tender Loving Care, it’ll make for a fitting closing note. The movie is wondrously attuned to the mundane, to the absurd humor and gentle devastation that lives in the everyday — and in so much of his work. It’s a kind of call to action through filmmaking, an unflinching look at the way overloaded systems are failing countless people and an expression of the vitality of showing up for those in need. O’Flynn sees it in tandem with Leigh’s last work, Hard Truths.
“Hard Truths is kind of painful, and with this, he wanted a slightly lighter, more loving thing,” O’Flynn says. “When I watched Hard Truths, I was like, ‘This guy’s still got it.’ There’s a fearlessness in it. It’s amazing that he still fucking wants to do it. So many people, as they get older, get scared and their worlds become smaller. They don’t live. What I love about Mike is there is that determination to live and be plugged in and be interested.”
Tender Loving Care’s final shot alone holds so much of Leigh’s 55 years of making movies — and the director came up with it well in advance, telling O’Flynn about it on set. As the significance of the whole project to Leigh became clear, O’Flynn found that grief infusing the work. “I don’t think Mike would agree with this, but there was something meta about it,” she says. “You’ve got a filmmaker who’s making his last film, and then the film is about that stage of life and things ending. God, I think I’m getting myself in a rabbit hole. But it’s about all the ways we try and care, and the complexities that come with that. It was all in the air.”
She calls this moment — what’s about to come for Leigh — his “victory lap.” O’Flynn, meanwhile, realizes she’s at the beginning of something thrillingly, terrifyingly new. “I’m being asked, ‘What do you want to do, if you could play a part?’” she says. “I have never had that conversation at all before. It’s having to properly think about, if I could do anything, what would it be — and actually, why am I doing this? But I do feel quite confident in the answer because I was tested with that when I was not making any money and no one was interested.”
Now, the people are very interested. “It’s also like, ‘Now you’ve got the opportunity to just get on with it instead of tying yourself in knots,’” she says. “You’ve just got to hang on to the rocket ship.”
Stay tuned for more exclusive features on this fall’s biggest festival-bound films.
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