News
March 23, 2016
Father-son team Eugene and Dan Levy go with the very funny flow on their second season of 'Creek'
March 16, 2016 - LAtimes
Eugene Levy, of "SCTV," "American Pie" and the films of Christopher Guest, was waiting at the old Culver Hotel in Culver City for his son and collaborator, Dan, to arrive.
"It's the fashionably late thing they [young people] really take to heart," Levy said.
The Levys, 69 and 32 respectively, are the co-creators and costars of "Schitt's Creek," an exceedingly funny situation comedy of Canadian origin that plays in the United States on the Pop channel. Its second season begins Wednesday; a third has been ordered.
Dan arrived. "You look sharp," he told his father, who was wearing a suit the son had picked out for him. Dan also looked sharp, in a more casual way, and more genuinely stylish than his fashion-defined "Schitt's Creek" character, whose tastes are more cutting-edge than classic.
The series
focuses on the Rose family, defrauded of their fortune and forced, by their own
inability to frame a better option, to live in two connecting motel rooms in a
monetarily worthless town they happen to own. (Eugene's Johnny Rose, the
father, had bought it for his son, Dan's David, as a kind of gag gift; they
were that kind of rich.) It's a familiar idea on paper, but in execution it has
a life all its own.
It was not long before the Levys were competing against each other in the best actor in a television comedy category at the Canadian Screen Awards.
The series and its cast would go on to sweep the TV comedy categories, with father besting son. There were awards too for Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy's frequent castmate and fellow comedy icon who plays Johnny's wife, Moira; for Chris Elliott as Mayor Roland Schitt; for Emily Hampshire, who plays David's dark, deadpan, antagonistic soul mate, Stevie; and for the show itself.
Annie Murphy, who plays Dan's sister, Alexis, and Jennifer Robertson, who plays Roland's wife, Jocelyn, were also nominated. (Dan's actual sister, Sarah Levy, is also on the show, as the town waitress, Twyla.)
Is
there anything in their own relationship they've transferred to their
characters?
"Our
relationship?" Eugene asked. "There's not much of a relationship, I'm
afraid to say."
"Yeah,
it's a shame," Dan said, laughing. "Obviously you're at an advantage
when you're writing a family dynamic and you've experienced the dynamic. I know
where we can take the character of Johnny — a lot of the time it's just how far
can we take the character of Johnny before I get an email from my dad reading
the notes at the end of the night saying, 'you know, I have a problem with how
far you've taken Johnny.'"
The younger
Levys were not discouraged from following their father into show business.
"I've
read about actors trying to prevent their kids from getting into it," Dan
said, "and I think that's from what they themselves experienced in the
industry. And I feel like you didn't have those kind of traumatic
experiences."
"No,
I didn't," Eugene said. "I was lucky. Horrible experiences meaning
you're sleeping on the floor blowing dust balls away from the crumpled-up shirt
you're using as a pillow …"
"I
think that's just college," Dan cut in.
"…
that was actually fun."
Dan
had appeared as an MTV Canada host for some years before he worked with his
father in an improvised spoof of a "Super Sweet 16" episode that
"I did for my actual 26th birthday — the first time I had ever
acknowledged who my dad was."
"It
was fun," Eugene said, "because he was doing very well, not trying to
be funny, just playing the premise of the scene — which is what a good
improvisation is."
"But
you were tentative about this," said Dan, meaning the series.
"I
can't say I was tentative about it," Eugene said. "I was excited
about the prospect of working with Dan, but this is a different animal. This
isn't like sketch work, this is creating a character you want the audience to
be emotionally involved with — it's a character-driven show, but you've got to
have the audience with you. Otherwise when you hit your first bad joke, you
lose them and that's it. What I didn't know was, as an actor, could he create a
character that has that kind of depth to it?
"Making
the pilot, I would go up to him and say, 'I think you have to speak up.' 'Why?'
'Well, because it's hard to hear, and they're probably having a tough time
miking you.' We'd do another take, and it was kind of the same."
Then came
the first episode, and "he just popped right out of the gate," said
Eugene, very much the proud papa. "It was like, pow! It happened."