Dan Levy Remembering Catherine O’Hara Is Making Me Cry, Too

Six years after Schitt’s Creek took its triumphant final bow, Dan Levy is celebrating his new series Big Mistakes — a press run that’s been dotted with poignant reflections on the late Catherine O’Hara.

The legendary comedic force, who died in January, was more than Levy’s on-screen mom. As he noted in his touching tribute to O’Hara, her five decades of collaboration with Eugene Levy made her a lifelong member of the family, even before the younger Levy was born. It’s a closeness you can feel in his latest interviews, like with CBS Sunday Morning.

For the first time since filming wrapped on Schitt’s Creek, Levy and CBS journalist Anthony Mason visited Goodwood, Ontario, which served as the stand-in town for the show’s titular community. After sharing that he’d been “thinking about” a Schitt’s Creek revival before O’Hara’s passing, Levy began to cry. “It’s tough ... I didn’t think that I’d have quite an emotional reaction,” he shared, noting that being back was prompting recollections of his beloved, on-screen mom. “It’s what you have to hold on to, is the memories of it all.”

“And an incredible clip reel,” Mason offered, to which Levy agreed: “Listen, for someone who was not on the internet, she knew how to meme.”

And during an April 8 appearance on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast, Levy further honored O’Hara’s comedic gifts, remembering the time she made him break while filming the very first episode of Schitt’s Creek. As her character, Moira Rose, looked for a missing tennis bracelet, O’Hara found a stray light bulb in the drawer she was searching through. “It wasn’t a planted prop, it was just something she found. And she pulled out this light bulb and started screaming at the light bulb.”

Levy said that if you rewatch the episode (which I obviously am right now), you can see him “Stefon-ing” through that entire scene — a reference to Bill Hader’s Saturday Night Live character, who would cover his mouth with his hands to signal his excitement and hide his real laughter. As it turns out, Levy used the same trick to make it through O’Hara’s heights of hilarity.

“I think it’s funny that characters find other characters on TV funny, so I started just leaning in to the fact that if I find this funny, then maybe David found this funny,” Levy said. “And maybe the audience gets to have a bit of a, Is it the actor, or is it the character?”