Six years after Schitt’s Creek wrapped its Emmy-sweeping run, Dan Levy is back on television – and this time, he’s brought organised crime with him. The Canadian actor is returning as creator and star of the Netflix comedy, Big Mistakes.
Levy plays Nicky, one half of an inept brother-and-sister duo who stumble into the mob world after stealing for their dying grandmother, and he proudly tells WHO that this is a show requiring nerves of steel.
“Someone told me they needed a Xanax after watching,” Levy tells us with a grin. “And I thought: that’s about right!”
Dan Levy explains how Big Mistakes differs from Schitt’s Creek
For fans expecting the warm, small-town comforts of Schitt’s Creek, this surprising pivot may confuse them. But for the 42-year-old Levy, it was exactly where he wanted to go next.
“I had six seasons of a warm, fuzzy, cuddly show, and my natural curiosity was to go in a completely different direction,” he explains. “I wanted to keep what I loved – the family dynamics and the flawed and funny characters – but explore something completely different.”
That “something” required Levy to also ask himself an unusual question; how would he fare as a criminal?
The answer came quickly: “Horrible,” he confesses. Right off the bat!”
The show’s documentary-style look – handheld, loose, almost uncomfortably real – was a conscious decision to keep the crime tension credible. “We threw a lot of the conventional elements of TV-making out the window and the effect is exactly what I wanted,” he says. “The show constantly feels real and alive.”
Who is in the cast of Big Mistakes?
Scene-stealing comedian Taylor Ortega plays Nicky’s sister, Morgan, but Levy says he only ever had one person on his wish list to play Linda, the duo’s formidable grandmother, and that person was Laurie Metcalf. “I wrote her a letter, sent a script, said a little prayer, and hoped for the best,” he says, adding that it was Metcalf’s earlier work on Roseanne that always inspired him. “When you send something to someone you revere so deeply, you really just have to let it go.”
The positive response came within 48 hours. “I screamed,” he tells us. “Out loud.”
It’s a show brimming with big swings, he adds, but it all feels “genuinely satisfying and never cheap.” It’s also a welcome distraction for Levy, who is still grieving after the January death of his beloved Schitt’s Creek co-star, Catherine O’Hara, at age 71.
Dan Levy on possible Schitt’s Creek reboot
O’Hara and Dan’s father (and Schitt’s Creek co-creator), Eugene Levy, started their careers together in the Canadian sketch comedy series Second City Television and co-starred in four Christopher Guest films, including Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman, before starring as John and Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek. On Instagram, Dan Levy paid tribute in characteristically eloquent terms: “What a gift to have gotten to dance in the warm glow of Catherine O’Hara’s brilliance for all those years. Having spent over fifty years collaborating with my dad, Catherine was extended family before she ever played my family. It’s hard to imagine a world without her in it.”’Not
When questioned recently on CBS Sunday Morning about the potential for a Schitt’s Creek sequel, Levy simply said that while he had thought about it, he couldn’t move forward with it without O’Hara.
“No, not now,” he said in the interview. “You can’t.”
For now, Levy is keeping busy with Big Mistakes, a show he equates with a theme park ride. “You get on the rollercoaster, buckle up and just let gravity do its thing,” he declares.
Xanax is optional.
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