At 90, K Callan is loving her moment in the limelight with 'Widow's Bay': 'I've been really lucky'

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Set us as preferred K Callan, the actor, is having a moment, showered with praise fo 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 l...