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A few years back, Dale Dickey walked into a department store looking for a dress. She was wearing what she usually wears — T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops, no makeup — and a salesperson gave her the once-over and redirected
her.
“I sort of was treated like Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman,’” Dickey tells Variety. “It’s like, you’re on the wrong floor, dear. You want to go downstairs. I’m like, no, actually, I’m looking for a dress. Got a credit card and everything.”
She tells the story with her signature rasp and infectious smile, encased in a talented aura. However, it is also, in miniature, like her more than four-decade-long career: being told which floor she belongs on, but still going where she wants to go anyway. This summer, roughly 75 films in and after countless television roles, Dickey received the first Emmy nomination of her career for Apple TV’s horror comedy “Widow’s Bay.”
But, once again, her reaction was not vindication. It was merely a logistics problem.
“I’ve got to start the anxiety of trying to find a dress and get the hair and the makeup,” she says, “which for me, being a little white-trash character actress, is a little anxiety-ridden.”
Dickey isn’t performative. This is just her.
“The awards thing is never really first on my mind,” she shares. “I’m a team player, and I’ve been a supporting actor off and on for so long. It’s just not something that I thought was ever sort of in my realm.”
She is also clear that the timing of this recognition is the gift.
“It’s sweeter coming at this point in my career. Had it come when I was younger, I would have run away. It would have been too much. Now I’m older, more settled, and it’s like, OK, this will be fun. I can go to the party and enjoy myself.”
She takes real pleasure in looking around the nominee list and finding company — the veterans, lifers and fellow journeyman actors like Jeff Kober, guest drama actor nominee for “The Pitt,” who has been visible for decades without ever being counted for awards. The pathway was not easy, but it never is.
On Zoom from her apartment in Los Angeles, Dickey talks about spending about 11 years in New York before relocating West, freelancing and, in her phrase, “pounding the pavement.”
She struggled with representation upon arrival.
“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she explains. “I fell between the cracks. I was not pretty enough this way. I wasn’t quirky enough that way.”
It was six-time Emmy-winning veteran actress Tyne Daly, one of the first people she ever worked with, who gave her the Hollywood forecast that turned out to be right.
“She said, you know, Dale, you work more as you get older, so hang in there,” Dickey recalls. “Your face isn’t going to hit right away.”
And sure enough, the work increased when she reached her 40s.
Los Angeles didn’t solve it either. She arrived 30 years ago with a rule — she wouldn’t move without an agent — and landed at a small boutique agency that liked theater actors. Then came a succession of retirements and deaths, and by around 2007, during the writers strike, she was once again without representation.
“I thought, oh great, I’m a character actress in my 40s,” she says. “They’re letting people like me go.”
People tried to get her in rooms, but she still couldn’t get in. An introduction eventually brought her to BRS/Gage Talent, the agency she’s with now.
She is dismissive of the industry’s favorite question: “People would say, ‘Well, what’s the time limit? How long are you going to give it?’ And I’m like, what? Is there a time limit? I keep going. There is no end.”
The advice she gives young actors is not softened either. She recalls giving it recently to an unnamed actress at a festival: “Honey, if there’s anything else you can do, do it. Do it now, because this is not for the faint of heart. It’s not about fame and fortune. It’s about the craft and working your craft.”
If you look at Dickey’s IMDb page — encompassing more than 145 credits — she’s been in something every year going back decades. You won’t find a gap year until 2002.
“It’s interesting about that year. It was a bad time in my life,” Dickey shares. “I had some family tragedy and was working through a lot of things.”
She lost her SAG insurance. When work finally came — a small role on “Frasier” — she was so broke she hadn’t paid her union dues and couldn’t step on set until she did. “Here I am on the most expensive set in history. It’s like, ‘Who can I borrow money from to pay my dues?’”
A friend covered it, and she paid him back with the check.
She refuses to call these recent years anything but luck, particularly after COVID and the Hollywood strikes. She still says yes to young filmmakers with no money, as long as it doesn’t cost her a paying job: “That’s part of giving back.”
Plenty of it never surfaced.
“My IMDb page was filled with so many things that have never seen the light of day,” she says with a chuckle, “where the catering was maybe a peanut butter sandwich, and you stayed in a roach-infested Holiday Inn. But hey, I’m a camping girl. I need a bed and a toilet. I don’t need anything fancy.”
But back to “Widow’s Bay.”
Her hilarious standout character, Rosemary, was supposed to be a supporting on the show — a townsperson, in and out, a few quips. Then, weeks before the shoot, creator Katie Dippold approached her with a heads-up about “a little bit of dialogue.”
That dialogue comes in the penultimate episode of the season, “Emergency Shelter,” where Rosemary traces the Warren lineage on an overhead projector, like the ones teachers used when many millennials were in school.
It was 10 or 12 pages long.
“I read it, and I was like, what the fuck,” Dickey recalls.
The staging made it worse. She had to match the monologue to roughly 10 slides on an overhead projector, talking and marking the slides on a machine that was mounted upside down. Everyone offered a teleprompter. She turned it down — she’d never used one and thought it would throw her. She was 63 at the time.
“I was like, well, this is going to be a real test of my memorization and my brain skills,” she says.
The response from the ensemble is the part she keeps returning to.
Supporting comedy actor nominee Stephen Root, who plays Gerrie Doyle and shares the scene with her, along with actress Nancy Lenehan, came to where she was staying days earlier and ran the scene with her countless times until it was solid.
“I was in a loving, supportive room. It was really scary, but it was fun, and I knew they all had my back,” she says.
Scene partners and Emmy nominees Matthew Rhys, Kate O’Flynn and Root sat patiently and lovingly, waiting through every technical mistake she says she made.
What’s adorable is she had a reference point, too — a seventh-grade teacher and that same machine.
“The light projected on her, she looked like a little vampire,” Dickey remembers. “I had a great line in a play I did with Leslie Jordan, where I said, ‘Distance and darkness, honey, it’s a girl’s best friend.’”
She laughs.
“It only added to the horror of the scene.”
When Dickey got up on Emmy nominations morning to watch, she wasn’t doing it for herself but because fellow cast member Jeff Hiller was announcing, and she wanted to see all her friends’ names called. One of those names was her fellow nominee O’Flynn, who Dickey says she’s rooting for on Emmy night. “I will gladly carry Kate O’Flynn’s dress train up the steps when she wins her award,” she says with conviction.
Dickey is one of those actors who won’t stay in the trailer.
“I’ll go to set. I’ll go to watch. I’ll sit in the video village, walk around, talk to everybody. I try to watch the other actors and soak in what they’re doing,” she says.
Even though Season 2 won’t shoot until spring 2027, she has a wish list of other roles she’d like to play but is rarely allowed to: a period piece, corsets and bustles, late 1800s. But as our conversation comes to an end, I share one wish-list role I have for her — she and recent Oscar winner Amy Madigan playing sisters in a comedy — any comedy.
“Oh, my God! Yes!” Dickey bursts out. “Why didn’t I ever think of that?”
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