Catherine O'Hara Nearly Rejected Her Emmy-Winning Schitt's Creek Role

The legendary Catherine O'Hara has died at the age of 71, and it's hard to imagine a world without her. But it's even harder to imagine a world where she didn't play Moira Rose on "Schitt's Creek," the Canadian TV comedy about a wealthy American family who falls from grace. Yet, according to "Best Wishes, Warmest Regards: A Schitt's Creek Farewell" (which aired alongside the series finale in 2020), she nearly turned her role down.

"It's so stupid," O'Hara admitted (via The AV Club). "Really, it's lame to talk about not wanting to do it in the beginning. How stupid would I have been not to have done it?" As her co-star and longtime collaborator Eugene Levy put it, he didn't want anyone else. "She's always, like, a first choice," the elder Levy explained. "She was a first choice with the movies that [Christopher Guest] and I did. I mean, number one name. 'Let's get Catherine.'"

Eugene Levy apparently told O'Hara, per her recollection, that it would take "just 15 minutes" for him to pitch her the show. "'Then, even if it sells [without you], I won't bug you about doing the role,'" she recalled him adding. It did sell without her, though, and Eugene Levy and his son Dan Levy, who co-created the show while also playing David and Johnny Rose (Moira's son and husband, respectively), realized that they needed O'Hara to make it all work.

"I said, 'No, I don't think so. I'm kind of busy ... doing nothing,'" O'Hara recalled, but Dan Levy had a solution. "I said, call her back ... We'll go one year at a time," he explained in the documentary. "And if it's not gonna work, it's not gonna work. And he called her, and she said yes, and the rest is history."

Once Catherine O'Hara decided that she could manage working on the show after all, she made the series even better by suggesting some of Moira's unforgettable character quirks. After all, who would the character even be without her ridiculously fabulous wardrobe, her collection of wigs (all of which have names), and her absolutely confounding and otherwise beautiful ways of pronouncing words on "Schitt's Creek?" ("Bebé," the way Moira pronounces "baby," is frankly just the tip of the iceberg.)

In the "A Schitt's Creek Farewell" documentary, Dan Levy shared that a lot of these innovations were O'Hara's ideas. "She came to me with some references in terms of how the character would look, and she was thinking of having this sort of accent ... I remember finding it all quite dazzling," he noted, understandably.

That's when O'Hara chimed in. "The wigs weren't in it. And the vocabulary wasn't in it, you know. That's what I got to add," she revealed "I just asked if I could wear lots of wigs, depending on my mood. It works for fashion reasons, it works for hiding or revealing what I'm feeling, it works as a protective helmet. So, it's just too much fun."

It worked for fashion reasons, and it also made her character truly legendary ... but truthfully, O'Hara was such an incredible performer that she elevated every single project simply by showing up in the first place.

I'm pretty sure I've been a fan of Catherine O'Hara since I was born. Not only did my parents love "SCTV," the Second City sketch comedy show that launched O'Hara, Eugene Levy, and Martin Short (just to name a few folks) into superstardom, but I also grew up on her movies like "Home Alone" and "Beetlejuice" before getting older and appreciating her work in Christopher Guest's films. I could probably write 100,000 words about O'Hara's work with Guest alone. From her travel agent Sheila Albertson in "Waiting for Guffman" to her previously promiscuous Cookie Fleck in "Best in Show" to her aging actor Marilyn Hack in "For Your Consideration," O'Hara worked seamlessly with other Guest regulars — including Levy, Parker Posey, and Guest himself — on these largely improvised movies. (If you're unfamiliar or don't believe me, here's O'Hara playing a beautifully blitzed version of Sheila dining at a Chinese restaurant.)

Losing O'Hara at the age of 71 feels incredibly unfair, particularly because, thanks to "Schitt's Creek" and her more recent turns on Apple TV's "The Studio" and HBO's "The Last of Us," she was being introduced to brand new generations of viewers who got the chance to fall in love with her after decades of work. We'll always have Moira Rose, and we're all lucky that she decided to do "Schitt's Creek" when all was said and done. You can currently stream the series — and you should — on Hulu.