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Kate O’Flynn found out she was an Emmy nominee and immediately went underground.
“I felt like an ostrich,” she tells Variety over Zoom. “I got the news, and I was immediately overwhelmed and put my head in the sand,
and then quaffed champagne. 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. “That’s when I got emotional,” she says. “It just puts it all into context.”
That context is what the Emmy narrative keeps flattening. O’Flynn is being covered as a breakout, and she doesn’t dispute the term.
“This is undoubtedly a breakout for me, no question,” she says. “But I’m coming with more life experience. 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. “It’s about the writer’s voice,” she says. “As an actor, you’re trying to serve that vision.”
She calls acting a team sport and frames every scene as a question of orchestration. “What instrument are you playing in the orchestra in any set scene?” she explains. “Then you stick to that instrument, and you play your part.”
That instinct made her a natural fit for a project creator Katie Dippold had been carrying for 12 years. 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. “Honestly, yes. I knew it was my taste. 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. “That’s what’s great about collaboration,” she says. “You’ve got your root material, and then it’s filtered through different people’s brains.”
The character’s afterlife as a meme still bewilders her. “She is annoying, selfish and tough at times, but she’s brave and kind,” O’Flynn says. “She’s a flawed three-dimensional person, and to see the weirdness of her embraced, it’s like, oh, we all are that weird.”
The year of O’Flynn won’t stop on Emmy night. 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. “You’re treated as an artist by Mike,” she says. “There’s no scaffolding. 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. O’Flynn feels the love. “She’s Dame Dale Dickey to me,” she says with the biggest smile. “And I’ll be quite happy to carry hers. We’re just going to be two queens rocking the red carpet together.”
