Matthew Rhys walked out of the Peacock Theater on Monday night with two Emmys and a piece of history nobody had managed before him. He won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for Widow's Bay, then turned around and took Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series for The Beast in Me. Add his 2018 drama win for The Americans and Rhys becomes the first actor to have won the top lead-acting Emmy in all three major categories.

He's also the first man to pick up two lead-acting trophies on the same night. That's not a small thing at a ceremony that's been running since 1949.

The comedy win was never really in doubt. Widow's Bay went into the night with 19 nominations and walked out with 14 wins, a record for a comedy series in a single year, according to a tally reported by The Free Press Journal. Rhys played Tom Loftis, the mayor of a haunted New England tourist town who'd rather it wasn't haunted, and the show turned into the kind of word-of-mouth hit that builds through a season instead of arriving with one.

Rhys beat a genuinely stacked field to get there: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for Wonder Man, Steve Carell for Rooster, Jason Segel for Shrinking and Martin Short for Only Murders in the Building.

In his speech, Rhys credited showrunner Katie Dippold's "depraved and twisted mind," echoing what supporting actor winner Stephen Root had already said about her earlier in the evening. He also thanked director Hiro Murai, calling him his hero, and closed by shouting out "the great and good people of Wales," which got the kind of laugh a room full of industry people gives when they mean it.

What's interesting is how Rhys has described the show itself. He told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year that his first reaction to the script was blunt confusion. Murai, he said, told him on their first call that they weren't making comedy or horror, just a real world with real backstories, played straight. That approach paid off in a finale Rhys has called some of the heaviest material of his career, heavier even than his limited series turn in The Beast in Me, which had already put him through the wringer once this year.

The limited series win came against Riz Ahmed for Bait, Jason Bateman for Black Rabbit, Charlie Hunnam for the Ed Gein series and Oscar Isaac for Beef, all of them former nominees in their own right.

Widow's Bay has already been renewed for a second season, and Rhys is also up tonight as an executive producer in the Best Comedy Series race, a fourth credit on a night that's already given him more hardware than most actors collect in a career.