“Big Mistakes” star Dan Levy on creating something ‘radically different’ from “Schitt’s Creek”

Key Points

• Dan Levy explains why he wanted to write a crime-comedy for his Schitt’s Creek follow up.

• Levy plays a gay pastor in Big Mistakes, where he gets caught up with a crime family.

• Levy talks about what he’s learned from Laurie Metcalf playing his mom.

After six seasons starring on and showrunning his “gentle, warm, sweet,” as he describes it, Emmy-winning comedy Schitt’s Creek, Dan Levy was ready to go “in the completely opposite direction” for his next TV project.

He co-created it alongside Rachel Sennott in Big Mistakes, where he plays Nicky, a gay pastor who gets caught up with a crime family after his sister, Morgan (Taylor Ortega), steals what she doesn’t realize is an expensive necklace owned by the mafia. Even after they return it (after digging up their just-buried grandma, who wore it to her grave), it’s too late — the mistake has been made, and they’re forever indebted to the mob.

“It’s been so fun writing crime. I give all the credit in the world to NCIS and Law & Order — writing crime every day is so much harder than anyone ever thought, certainly than I thought,” he says on Entertainment Weekly‘s The Awardist podcast. And then balancing that crime with comedy is this added element of challenge that has just been the greatest education.”

Levy wants the show to feel so real and grounded that they have a “crime expert” to authenticate “every crime-related incident, every response that we have to the crime, the plausibility of it, who would be in the room, who would be handling it, what are the tiers of the crime that we’re dealing with,” he explains. “And everything so far in the show has been actual criminal acts that have happened in real life. As insane as that sounds. He is an expert in the world of organized crime. He has an unlimited database of stories, information, knowledge on so many different worlds of organized crime, but predominantly mafia-related stuff. And it’s been fascinating.”

Having become famous for playing David Rose on Schitt’s Creek, Levy says he wasn’t trying to “discredit the work” he did on that show “by doing something totally, radically different,” but he did want to do something unexpected…and someone who wouldn’t know how to react when caught up in the world of crime.

“A pastor felt like almost the polar opposite of David Rose, to be honest. And it also really lent itself to the chaos of crime entering this person’s life,” he explains. “I often describe the early days of writing as making sure that when you’re developing character, you’re pulling the pendulum back as far as you possibly can in terms of stacking the odds against the character that’s about to meet this inciting incident or tension. What can you do to make sure that pendulum is pulled back far enough so that when you release it, it has enough momentum to keep going for seasons and seasons and seasons?”

In addition to a crime consultant, Levy & Co. also talked to a gay pastor to ensure that “the impulses and the decisions that my character makes felt right, that we never made fun of his religion, his relationship to religion, his faith,” Levy says. “That the comedy really came from the circumstance and not his belief in something greater, because that to me felt like a really great opportunity to show his sensitive side, to show a vulnerable side, to show a human side to this character in the face of all of this. A lot of care went into it. It wasn’t done on a whim.”

Like Schitt’s Creek, this story centers around a family dynamic; in addition to Nicky and Morgan, there’s their younger sister Natalie (Abby Quinn) and mom, Linda, played by Laurie Metcalf. The neurotic and loud Linda is running for mayor of their fictional New Jersey suburb, and Natalie works on her campaign. Levy says Metcalf, a four-time Emmy winner and recent Tony winner for her work in Death of a Salesman, takes a unique physical approach to the work that “squeezes comedy out of the most unexpected of places.”

Not to mention, her line delivery, he says, keeps everyone on their toes. “I think the reason why she’s so intriguing to watch is because she’ll take a sentence with a period at the end and spin it into something else,” he explains. “She’ll put a break or a pause or a breath in the middle of a sentence that would never normally require a beat like that, and carve out these whole new ways of delivering a line that, as a writer, you never even thought about. She’s incredibly gifted when it comes to her natural instinct to interpret dialogue.”

You could say he’s two-for-two in the great TV mom department, having worked with the late Catherine O’Hara as mom Moira Rose on Schitt’s Creek.

“I continue to pinch myself about the luck that I have had working both with Catherine and with Laurie, two titans of comedy and television and film, whose instincts are so singular and whose skill set is so irreplaceable,” he says. “It’s really been the great joy of my life to work opposite these women and to write for them and to write characters for them that are challenging, hopefully, and exciting and sexy and kind of against type, against what someone over 60 years old would normally see cross their desk. Continuing to challenge Catherine and Laurie [has] made me a better writer, and it’s definitely made me a better actor.”

Check out more from EW’s The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year’s best in TV, movies, and more.

Listen to Levy’s full interview on The Awardist, below, where he expands on comments about an idea he had for a potential Schitt’s Creek sequel, and looks back on previous jobs at an MTV VJ in Canada, and being an extra for Kelly Clarkson’s “Behind These Hazel Eyes” music video.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly