Dan Levy Just Wants to Entertain You
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Louis StaplesFri, April 10, 2026 at 2:22 PM UTC
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Dan Levy Just Wants to Entertain YouMary Ellen Matthews
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In 2019, when Dan Levy was filming the final season of Schitt’s Creek, he spent a lot of time wearing a neck brace. This wasn’t a result of a stunt gone wrong, or a storyline, but because his anxiety about perfectly closing out the show that made him a household name was so intense that he lost the ability to move properly. An acupuncturist and a chiropractor came to set every day so he could continue his work as an actor, writer, director, and showrunner.
This week, Levy returns with Big Mistakes, another project where he is once again doing it all. Co-created with the zeitgeist-hijacking Rachel Sennott (Bottoms, I Love LA), it’s his first self-created TV series since Schitt’s Creek. When we talk, it’s two days before the show drops on Netflix, so the most urgent question is: How’s the neck? “I am surprisingly great. I am way better than I thought I would be,” he says, pretty convincingly. “No neck braces were used in the making of this show!”
Big Mistakes is the meeting point between crime thriller and family comedy. Levy plays Nicky, a highly-strung gay reverend who, alongside his chaotic sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega), accidentally gets caught up in the world of organized crime. Laurie Metcalf co-stars as Linda, their power-hungry (and manic) mother who is running for local office. The show hurtles between the most relatable family dynamics and a string of outrageously stressful, life-threatening situations. Tonally, it’s completely different from Schitt’s Creek—a kooky comfort watch that feels like a warm hug. Yet there are similar components: a small town, a family with complicated sibling dynamics, and a powerhouse matriarch. Not un-coincidentally, both shows start at the moment where the characters might lose everything, which is a point of fascination for Levy. “I think we can be our funniest when we are our most unhinged,” he says. “That is the most human we get, because we don't have the time or the energy for artifice. Families in deep crisis, to me, is what I could write and write and write and write.”
When we speak, Levy comes across as precise and detail-conscious—traits that are essential to showrunning, which requires involvement in everything from writing to casting, costumes, and editing. He wears a knitted sweater and dark-framed glasses—a visual combo that became his signature when he first appeared on our screens as David Rose, the image-conscious son in a wealthy family who were suddenly declared bankrupt. Levy created Schitt’s Creek with his father, Eugene Levy, the Canadian actor who, for Millennials in particular, will forever be remembered as the awkward dad in the American Pie films.
It’s not just artistic genes (and those eyebrows) that run in the family. When they created Schitt’s Creek together, Eugene taught Dan the value of “laying a foundation” for each of the characters. Before writing the pilot, they spent weeks mapping out the precise personal history of the Rose family, right down to what happened to them at kindergarten. This was important, Levy explains, because “we are all a byproduct of a snowball that just keeps collecting volume over the years—rolling down a hill, or up, depending on how you see your life.” Details from these planning sessions, such as David’s socialite sister Alexis Rose (Annie Murphy) previously starring in her own reality show, provided new material well into the show’s later seasons.
If what happens to us in kindergarten stays with us, is there an emotion that comes to mind when Levy thinks back to that time? “As a young gay kid that wasn't comfortable enough to be his authentic self, I look back with a sense of confusion,” he tells me. “I was constantly trying to accommodate people’s expectations, while never revealing too much of myself. And that’s a really tough thing as a kid, because you miss out on a lot of formative years of examining who you are as a person. So yeah, I look back with a lot of fondness, but a lot of my childhood was trying to stay out of the spotlight.”
The desire to go unnoticed is fairly incompatible with being the son of an actor who was very famous in Canada. Growing up in Toronto, the city nicknamed “Hollywood North” because of how much TV and film is made there, the attention was on Levy whether he wanted it or not. “I just tried to keep my distance, and that was something I had to work out with my dad much later in life,” he explains. “I think he had seen it as, ‘Does my kid not want to spend time with me?’ And it wasn’t anything about that—I just didn’t feel comfortable being seen at the time.”
In Big Mistakes, Levy stars as Nicky, a pastor that gets accidentally dragged into the crime world.SPENCER PAZER
These dynamics were an education in the complex familial relationships that fuel much of Levy’s storytelling. In Schitt’s Creek, the Roses are bound together by their shared financial ruin. And in Big Mistakes, when siblings Nicky and Morgan are thrown into the world of organised crime, it exposes both the underlying tensions and the potential of their relationship. “There’s such a bittersweet quality to family,” Levy says, noting this duality. “Every family is uniquely dysfunctional in their own way. There’s a public facing family, and then there’s what happens behind the scenes. I’m always way more interested in the inner workings of a family when the doors are closed.”
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It’s tempting to look for similarities between Levy and the characters he writes for himself, because he’s pretty open about writing what he knows. He might not have experience of being a gay reverend, Big Mistakes is inspired by Levy’s greatest fear: Being forced into a life of crime. This presents a particular conflict for Nicky, who has chosen a life that is regimented, where there are very clear rules. “He knows exactly what he’s doing when he wakes up in the morning,” Levy says. “There is someone telling him how to be, how to live.” As he crosses various moral (and legal) lines, Nicky is stalked by a fear of failure—as a son, as a reverend, as a boyfriend. Is that something that follows Levy, too?
“I think we both want to prove something to ourselves, so it’s not necessarily driven by a fear of failure, but rather a desire to impress ourselves and to deliver on a promise,” he explains. “I have always been a bit of an overachiever. I like to put my best foot forward. I want to impress people. I think that comes from being in a slightly powerless position for a lot of my life and hiding so much of myself away.” He takes a pause. “I haven’t really talked about this before, but I think that we both share that, and I think that is ultimately a fear of failure.”
Before Schitt’s Creek, Levy had made a name for himself in his twenties as a host on MTV Canada. (A job he “hated,” especially the awkward red carpet interviews with celebrities.) But the seismic success of Schitt’s Creek transformed him into an A-List star. The sitcom wasn’t just a hit, it was a cultural phenomenon—a show that people still look to for comfort, laughter, and an endless library of reaction GIFs. Initially, it was a slow burner, but its popularity took off exponentially when the show was added to Netflix half-way through its six-season run. By the time it reached its conclusion, Schitt’s Creek had fans across the world watching in anticipation for the perfect ending.
That’s when art imitated life. In 2020, Levy became the first person to win four Emmy Awards in the main categories—acting, directing, writing, producing—in one year for the show’s final season. Does he feel pressure to follow that up? “There’s obviously greater expectation for this show [Big Mistakes], because we had more resources to make it, so that’s really the only pressure,” he says, given that Schitt’s Creek was made on a comparatively tiny budget with costumes that were purchased on eBay. “But you can’t compare what you do to what you’ve done. I just think that is doing yourself the greatest disservice.”
Laurie Metcalf is Linda, Levy’s new TV mom.SPENCER PAZER
Levy’s creative partnership with Netflix, which spawned the 2023 film Good Grief, is another full-circle moment. Originally, Schitt’s Creek was rejected by US networks and streamers before eventually finding a home at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was filmed in Goodwood, a small community north of Toronto. “Sometimes, you can only make things in Canada, because it’s a less fear-based economy there,” Levy says. “You can play around with things in ways that I just don’t think you can do in American network television.” We’ve seen a similar dynamic recently in the viral success of the homoerotic hockey drama Heated Rivalry, which was made by the Canadian streamer, Crave. Levy is “thrilled” that there is another show that is putting Canadian TV on the map. “I love how horny the world is,” he says. “Clearly, this came at the right time.”
In his own shows, Levy has always centered queer stories. There is something very queer about how, in both Schitt’s Creek and Big Mistakes, his characters have created protective barriers around themselves in order to navigate the world, including a sharp tongue that is used most on their respective sisters. David finds comfort in materialistic notions of status, while Nicky enjoys the sense of moral standing that comes from being a reverend. The catch here is that, while Nicky is an out gay man, his church expects him to be “non-practicing.” They have no idea that he’s in a secret relationship with Tareq (Jacob Gutierrez), a handsome local contractor and queer activist. As this intoxicating new love forces Nicky to make moral compromises, the show portrays the truth that, as a gay person, life can contain many closets. And even if you have accepting parents, or live in a liberal place, sometimes it’s still difficult to step out of them.
Being the face of queer stories in mainstream culture is not uncomplicated. I’ve noticed that gay men can be particularly tough on our own celebrities, to the point where stars such as Benito Skinner, Andy Cohen and Jordan Firstman have said that gay men are very often their harshest critics. When I mention this, Levy remembers listening to a podcast soon after he swept the Emmys, where the gay host complained that he didn’t deserve them. He thinks these attitudes are driven by scarcity, where minorities are “indoctrinated” into believing that there is only space for a select few at the top. “It makes sense, in a way, that we would be jealous of people and that we would feel scared when someone succeeds, because that means: ‘Oh my gosh, is that one less opportunity for me?!’ And frankly, it's true. Even as a successful gay actor, you still don’t get the roles.”
Jacob Gutierrez plays Tareq, Nicky’s secret boyfriend.Courtesy of Netflix
Levy’s work usually centers a strong maternal figure, too. In Big Mistakes, he is joined by Metcalf, who practically fizzes with energy in every scene. And in Schitt’s Creek, the legendary Catherine O’Hara, a longtime collaborator of Levy’s father, played the eccentric actress Moira Rose. (O’Hara passed away suddenly in January.) People often ask Levy about his famous father, but given the prominence of mothers in his work, I wonder what he’s learned from his mom, Deborah Divine? “My mom offers a lot of humility. She is not in the industry and she doesn't care for the industry,” he says. “No one is allowed to get away with any ego-related stuff! She makes sure that the glamor of the job never affects who we are as people, and that our priorities are always in the right place.”
There seems to be a recent shift in Levy’s priorities. He tells me that, in the past, he has been “100 percent” motivated by proving his naysayers wrong. But lately, he’s realized that letting go of those voices is “even more powerful.” And when I suggest that Big Mistakes might split opinion, he responds that he’d “rather polarization than indifference”—a sign that he’s no longer chasing universal approval. In fact, on the set of Big Mistakes, Levy felt the same “thrill versus fear” that made him so certain Schitt’s Creek would work. Except this time, that energy is driving him toward his end goal. “I want to make things that mean something to people,” he says, simply. “I just want to entertain people.”
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
