Dan Levy: ‘Sometimes all you have is laughter,’ says the Schitt’s Creek actor and writer

There is no getting away from it – for the first few minutes, I feel as if I am talking to David Rose. It could hardly be otherwise. Handsome and square-jawed at 40, Dan Levy, son of the legendary Eugene, had been working in the business for close to a decade when he created that role for Schitt’s Creek, in 2015. Up to that point he was not well known outside his native Canada.

Indeed, it took another five years for Schitt’s Creek to move from cult favourite to mainstream smash. By that stage fans had enjoyed hours and hours of Levy’s performance as the mildly dim, hugely self-absorbed, ultimately decent Rose. The character is an icon of the pandemic age.

“It’s a hotel room where they’ve pulled out the bed,” Levy says, looking around. “It’s just an empty room.”

A talented polymath who served as showrunner on Schitt’s Creek, he soon puts distance between himself and his most famous creation. One doesn’t wish to forward even positive stereotypes of Canadians but Levy exhibits that warm chumminess proverbially associated with the most northerly Americans. And he is clearly whip-smart.

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We are here to discuss his debut as feature director. Good Grief, a Netflix production, stars Levy as a suave expat in London who, after the sudden death of his husband, travels with pals to a tastefully lit Paris. Our own Ruth Negga co-stars in a film that is nearly a comedy.

“Isn’t she great? When Ruth was first brought to my attention for the movie it was an incredibly flattering thing,” says Levy. “She’s an extraordinary talent. But I had never really seen her do anything like this before. It wasn’t that I didn’t have faith in her skills. I just didn’t know if she would want to do it.”

What prompted him to base an entertainment around grief?

“I was going through it at the time,” he responds. “I hadn’t lost a lot of people, so it was kind of a new feeling. And it was a feeling that was being swallowed up by the pandemic – which was a moment of collective grief. It was about pulIing the thread of a single experience. I found myself confused I wasn’t feeling more of the grief I was personally going through. It was my grandmother, and I loved her dearly.”

Good Grief nags at that concern throughout. It has to do with how we feel guilty about not feeling sufficiently bereft after a loss. It is about accommodating ourselves to the future without the loved one. It does all that within the structure of a contemporary comedy. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone has a quip for every situation.

“It was like that with Schitt’s Creek,” says Levy. “It was predominantly a comedy. Then there were these glimmers of sentimentality and drama. But we treated Schitt’s Creek as a drama in the writers’ room; we always treated it foremost as a drama. What would these characters do in real life if they were going through this tragedy? This movie is the reverse. It’s a drama with moments of lightness. That’s life. I have that from my experience in my family. Sometimes all you have is laughter when you have nothing else.”

I am interested to hear him say that. I have met his father and, as is often the case with comic actors, he is the most sober and thoughtful of conversationalists. Known for gutbusting turns in Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and the American Pie films, Eugene Levy could now claim the status of Canadian national treasure (though I’m sure he wouldn’t).

“Well, you’ve spoken to my dad. He can be very serious,” says Levy. “I think he just cares a lot. I think he’s an incredibly sincere person. A lot of people expect comedians to be ‘on’ all the time. He’s the reverse. He has to turn it on.”

But that is not to say Levy snr “didn’t use his skills to make us laugh as kids”.

In a recent interview Levy suggested that his father, then busy in US film and television, decided to raise the family in Toronto as a way of maintaining normality, away from the madness of Hollywood.

“Yeah, I think he didn’t love the idea of my sister and I growing up in LA,” he says. “I think he wanted to keep us separate from what he did. It wasn’t until I got into this industry that I understood how much of a sacrifice it was, particularly at that time in his career, to not be in Los Angeles, to not be in the room for those auditions. But I think he’d argue it wasn’t even a sacrifice; it was a necessity.”

This meant that Levy got to grow up as a Canadian. That’s not nothing.

“Oh, yeah. Los Angeles and Toronto are two very different cities. That is not to dismiss an LA upbringing, but I am very glad I grew up in Toronto,” he says.

Levy seems to have been a decent student. He studied film production at York University and Ryerson University in his home city before going on to become a host on the Canadian version of MTV. After five years at the network – producing his own specials and doing red-carpet work – he embarked on an apparently busy career as an actor. In 2015 he formed a production company with his dad and they knocked together the prototype of Schitt’s Creek.

Everyone now knows what that is. Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara play parents to a wealthy family who relocate to a remote, unsophisticated town after their business manager defrauds them. Dan Levy and Annie Murphy are the pampered adult offspring. The show could hardly have had a lower-key start.

“I don’t know where to start,” Levy says, laughing. “Listen, every network in America passed on the show. We went to Canada. We built the show on our own. We got the funding ourselves. We found a network in Canada that loved the show and wanted to make it. Once it was funded we found a network in America that also wanted to show it. God love them, it had very low ratings.”

The lack of eyes on them allowed a sort of liberation. When few people care what you are doing you can do pretty much what you like.

“You make the show you want to make when there is no interference,” he agrees. “We didn’t have to answer to ratings. We didn’t have to answer to anyone but ourselves. And so we had fun with it. We were collaborative and we could experiment.”

Here’s a question. If the show had ended up first at, say, NBC would they have been able to keep the title? I somehow can’t imagine prime-time network TV going with “Schitt’s Creek”. Americans can be awfully prudish about language.

“Funnily enough, we almost got sold to a network but they passed solely because of the name,” he says. “But even if we changed the name, I have zero faith the show would have succeeded in the same way.”

It took a while but they got there. In 2020, at the “pandemic” Emmy Awards, Schitt’s Creek became the first show ever to grab all seven of the main comedy awards. Dan Levy won for outstanding comedy series, writing and directing for a comedy series. The reviews (initially snitty) were now largely ecstatic. Everyone loved the beautifully timed performances. Everyone (well, everyone sensible) appreciated how the show addressed David Rose’s pansexuality. That was some reward for an enormous amount of work. Who taught him to do all that stuff?

“There was no sleep involved,” he says. “I think I taught myself. I was incredibly porous during the experience, especially in the first few years. I tried not to have an ego about what I didn’t know. It was really one of those situations – and it sounds kind of corny – but sometimes you stumble into the job you’re meant to do.”

He can now regard himself as a player. Netflix just allowed him to make a feature film. The cards have fallen well.

“It wasn’t until I stepped into the showrunner role I thought, this is exciting – I think I’m good at this.”

The evidence backs him up.

Good Grief streams on Netflix from Friday, January 5th