SCHITT’S CREEK STAR
Meet the real Moira
Ever since Schitt’s Creek wrapped, Catherine O’Hara has been dying to reunite with the cast who made her weep with laughter every day. And now that the quirky TV comedy has rocketed in popularity worldwide – thanks to endless lockdowns and a clean sweep at last year’s Emmy Awards – the actress has let slip she has dreams for a big-screen revival.
“We should do a movie.
That would be nice. Fingers crossed!” laughs the 67-yearold, whose portrayal of vainglorious Moira Rose has also landed her two SAG awards and a Golden Globe.
She’s hardly been a household name, but Catherine has made a living in Hollywood since the ’80s, starring in films like Beetlejuice and Home
Alone – but it’s not surprising her forté is comedy.
Born in Toronto, the second youngest of seven siblings, her Irish Catholic parents passed on the funny bone to their entire brood. “Being funny was highly encouraged in our family,” she tells.
Her mother would “tell stories of people she met that day and imitate the people, and my dad would tell straight-out jokes that he heard from the office. It was two very different styles of comedy, but both I’ve been tapping ever since.
“They laughed, God bless them, to the very end of their lives. They’d laugh at things that would just break others. And also, when they were younger, it was the sexy thing about them, watching them make each other laugh.”
It wasn’t until one of her brothers brought home a new girlfriend, future comedy legend Gilda Radner, that Catherine realised she could make being funny into a career.
In her early 20s, she joined the cast of SCTV, a Canadian rival to Saturday Night Live, where she honed her skills with the likes of future comedy greats Eugene Levy, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Martin Short and Dan Aykroyd.
Acting roles followed, like wicked stepmother Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice, Macaulay Culkin’s mum in the Home Alone movies and a host of weird and wonderful characters in director Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, including Best in Show and A Mighty Wind.
Not that she didn’t put her hand up for more serious parts. She laughs as she recalls once having a meeting with a writerdirector who was considering her for the lead in a rom-com.
“He said to me, ‘You’re great! I’m looking for your kind of woman. You know, somebody who’s pretty enough, but anybody can have you.’”
What did she say to that? “Why, thank you so much!”
She didn’t get the part and instead of romantic leads, Catherine found herself typecast in mum roles.
“I was thinking the other day, I’ve been a mother to about 100 kids,” she muses. “Jack Black, Luke Wilson, Colin Hanks, Macaulay Culkin… Jared Leto!”
It was her longtime friendship with American Pie actor Eugene Levy that led to her breakout role as over-the-top mum Moira on Schitt’s Creek, about a rich family who falls on hard times and are forced to live in a one-horse town they’d bought as a joke.
While the show was created by Eugene, 74, who plays her Schitt’s Creek husband Johnny, and his son Daniel, 37, who plays David, Catherine made Moira her own invention, right down to her bizarre accent and penchant for wigs.
“I have these emails Eugene and I exchanged early on, in which I said, ‘I’d like to inject big words into Moira’s vocabulary,’ and he said, ‘Okay’, and then I said, ‘I want to wear these kinds of clothes,’ and he said, ‘Okay’, and then I said, ‘And I want her to wear a different wig every day,’ and he said, ‘Now hold on!’ In the emails, I can see me becoming Moira and him being Johnny. But they made it work for me.”
The actress confesses she and Eugene dated for a nanosecond back in the ’70s.
“I think everybody tried dating everybody back then,” she smiles. “We probably wouldn’t be working together if we’d gone longer on the dating. Really, it was like one or two dates. That’s it.”
Instead, she fell for production designer Bo Welch, whom she met on the set of Beetlejuice in 1987. The movie’s director Tim Burton set them up. “I’d say to Tim, ‘The production designer is talking to me all the time but never asks me out!’” she recalls. “He said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’”
The pair now have two sons, Matthew, 27, who works in set construction, and Luke, 24, who works as a set dresser.
“I moved to LA to be with him,” says Catherine. “I moved for love.” #