Matthew Rhys did something Tuesday night that no man has managed before him. He won two lead acting Emmys in two different categories, for two different shows, in the same ceremony.

Rhys took Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for Widow's Bay and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series for The Beast in Me. Add his 2018 Emmy for The Americans, in the drama category, and he's now the first male actor to have won across all three lead acting buckets. Eight nominations across his career, and this is how it finally broke.

The comedy field wasn't thin. Rhys beat Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for Wonder Man, Steve Carell for Rooster, Jason Segel for Shrinking and Martin Short for the latest run of Only Murders in the Building. In limited series, he saw off Riz Ahmed (Bait), Jason Bateman (Black Rabbit), Charlie Hunnam (Monster: The Ed Gein Story) and Oscar Isaac (Beef).

Widow's Bay walked in with 19 nominations, the kind of number that tells you the Television Academy noticed early. Created, written and showrun by Katie Dippold, it's a horror-comedy set on a cursed New England island, and Rhys plays Tom Loftis, the town's anxious mayor trying to sell tourists on a place everyone local knows is wrong. It premiered in April and has already been renewed for a second season, so this isn't a one-and-done trophy chase.

The Beast in Me is a different animal entirely. Netflix's eight-part crime thriller casts Rhys as Nile Jarvis, a real estate scion with money, charm and a first wife who died under circumstances that leave him a suspect. No court has said otherwise, and the show trades on exactly that ambiguity.

Onstage, Rhys kept it loose. "My apologies to the women who have to stand again," he said, before turning the spotlight on Dippold. "Stephen Root was right," he told the room. "This is purely because of the depraved and twisted mind of Katie Dippold. And her genius really does live in the recesses of her disturbed brain."

It's a strange kind of full circle for an actor who spent the 2010s known mostly for playing a very controlled Soviet spy. Comedy and a murder-suspect real estate heir weren't the obvious next steps after The Americans, and yet here he is, holding two statuettes that say otherwise.

Widow's Bay's second season is already locked. Whether Rhys turns up at next year's Emmys chasing a fourth nomination, in whichever category the show or his next project lands him in, is the only part of this story still unwritten.