Schitt’s Creek star Catherine O’Hara’s passing in January this year was a huge loss for Hollywood, but particularly for those who got to work with the actress. One of them was Dan Levy, who played the role of David Rose, son of O’Hara’s Moira Rose across six seasons of the show. Reflecting on that loss, Levy is opening up on how she was an irreplaceable collaborator, someone whose influence on Schitt’s Creek went so deep into the show’s DNA that it’s impossible to separate the script from the performer.
Sitting down on Conan O’Brien’s podcast recently, Levy talked about how O’Hara rewrote a lot of the iconic scenes of her on the show. The night before shooting, an email would arrive at his inbox and it always started the same way: “Gentlemen, some thoughts about the scenes we’re shooting tomorrow.” Then came the complete rewrite, full of fresh brilliant ideas.
Talking about that Levy said,
“You know, because she had so much to offer, and she was so, the way that she thinks is so on another level that as a writer, you can’t get into her head. So all you can really do is set the table, wait for the email, ‘gentlemen, some thoughts,’ read the scene and say, ‘F**k yeah.’ You know, and like, just be prepared.”
Levy described watching clips of O’Hara on Schitt’s Creek online now and being unable to stop himself from watching them all the way through.
“And I, every time I see her — even though I wrote the thing — I stop and I watch, and I’m watching not for anything that I did, but I’m watching because she is impossible not to watch. And she’s impossible not to love and she’s, it’s impossible not to laugh with her in anything she does. And it’s, it is like an unimaginable loss. She was just an irreplaceable talent and an irreplaceable person.”
More details about Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek
Moira Rose is the dramatic matriarch of Schitt’s Creek, who is a formerly wealthy daytime soap opera star who still holds on to that fame. She presents herself as a woman of refined taste and considerable fame, though her career, as it seems, wasn’t as big as she deemed it to be.
Her character is defined by the way she speaks. She peppers her vocabulary with arcane words like “frippet” and “pettifogging.” These linguistic choices, combined with her designer wardrobe and rotating collection of wigs, are like an armor against the ordinariness of Schitt’s Creek, a small town she refuses to fully embrace despite living there for six seasons and being a part of the town council.
Schitt’s Creek is available to stream on Netflix.
Edited by Nibir Konwar