Dan Levy on representation in Schitt's Creek, celebrating queer love and Moira Rose's iconic outfits

i'd seen ross and rachel kiss a thousand times on tv i couldn't tell you a time outside of maybe queer as folk yeah or like a prison show and i don't think they were kissing on the mouth they weren't kissing on their mouth dan where two men kissed casually yes like where we expressed intimacy between a couple that was as nonchalant as many of the sitcoms and movies and tv shows we've seen straight couples engage [Music] please welcome handsome and talented dan levy in conversation with a handsome and talented jack guinness hello everybody it's four in the morning these people would be excited about anything yeah that's true so dan a so-called family a bunch of amoral broke disgusting fashionistas yeah i am of course talking about the british gq team thank you so much for having us yes thank you that's a great joke by the way thank you very much um you can steal that if you want um can we start at the end no yes of course so i just um watched the last episode we watched the last episode in my little piglet not a cabin gq piglet and it was it was so moving and i was thinking about the fact that shit's creek is such a global show and you were beaming into a global audience not just a queer audience you weren't singing preaching to the choir and it was so powerful it was like a kind of trojan horse how important was that moment to have that queer representation in the final episode well i mean listen it's very rare that you get an opportunity to tell a story about your community generally speaking in this industry and so to have gotten the opportunity that we that i was given it was a necessity to seize the moment and kind of tell a story that resonated with me and my friends and my community and um you know we called the last episode happy ending not just because my character gets one um but also because it was two men who were coming together and their love story ended in a wedding and not tragedy and so it was important to play on that kind of kind of duality of this is a happy ending that we need to see more of within the community and also obviously it's the end of our show and it was a very happy show and hopefully people took that it was a happy ending it was a happy ending in multiple levels you got backed off as well in it i did um thank you so much oh guys thank you thank you um yeah it's important i think you know when you're given opportunity seize the opportunity and do what you can with it and i just tried to tell as authentic a story as i possibly could and one that reflected my life what i love about your love story in that is it's so normal i love how you said it shocking how that is huh but well it is yes you're you're not normal you're crazy but um but it was it you represented like a real normal queer couple was that something that you you were really passionate about well how often do we get to see that not often it's either the butt of a joke or they die so i know it's hysterical um but yeah it was important to say okay well we we have certain freedoms on this show granted we were on very small networks um but we had freedoms to tell stories that that were normal normalizing an experience i'd seen ross and rachel kiss a thousand times on tv i couldn't tell you a time outside of maybe queer as folk yeah or like a prison show and i don't think they were kissing on the mouth they weren't kissing on their mouth dan where two men kissed casually yes like where we expressed intimacy between a couple that was as nonchalant as many of the sitcoms and movies and tv shows we've seen straight couples engage in so it was important in those moments to make sure that the intimacy existed and not that we were ever hitting people over the head with it but rather just telling a story as it is yes instead of rounding the corners or censoring it or reducing it to something to make people feel more comfortable because that's of very little interest to me or it being like a big kind of shock oh my god you know in this when you're watching a soap you're like there's going to be a gay kiss it's going to be a gay kiss it was just so part of the story and so the number of television shows i've watched over the past like 15 years where it's like in a shocking turn of event this thursday two men express love for each other and it's like and then it's like immediately a heart attack or someone dies one of them dies yeah so you know it was it was fun weirdly when i kiss people someone someone dies always wow that's how it works that's such a pity yeah never mind this isn't about me this is about yeah we can get into that later i guess so like on behalf of the queer community and i am the northern european representative of the queer community i want to thank you oh thank you they're laughing because it's true yeah i want to thank you for that representation hey thanks and i'm sure he won't mind but a friend of mine came up to you earlier i was telling you a story would you share that he i know i'm sure he'll be fine with it we won't mention names uh well i mean is that okay is that okay he said it was fun okay um you know i think the wonderful thing that you never expect when you tell stories that are not necessarily the central focus that exists within culture is that people's lives kind of get changed in unexpected ways and i think to hear someone tonight who was generous enough to tell me about their kid who came out to them and how watching the show and and the casual nature with with which my family treated me in the show helped to inform a level of comfort within their own family dynamic that made that experience easier and you must have had so many messages from people that have said it it's amazing though and you realize i mean all we did was try to tell stories and at the end of the day you realize how powerful a medium television really is and how often it's used for bad bad so if i can tell a story of two guys kissing in the end of our show and a happy ending and blah blah blah and that i receive letters of people who have if they've watched the show they had a happy ending they had a happy ending they it's like we were promoting sex work it's you know it's all those wonderful things but also that there is a connection with people at home who are seeing something and oftentimes a lot of the people that wrote in hadn't seen gay people in their community i mean they exist they're just not in for like saying it publicly so it was great to realize that the stories we were telling were resonating and that's something that i think when you make something you don't expect but it's such a rewarding takeaway from that experience but that's a lovely point as well because it didn't feel like it was a mission it felt like you were just telling a story and then this is a lovely byproduct of it and i think everyone in this room we are all the culture makers here and i think it's really important to give that message out that put these stories in your work make representation and inclusivity and diversity central to your work and not make it a teachable moment yeah yeah yeah i feel like we don't like being taught humans i feel like there's a retaliation to being taught we get defense we get defensive because it makes us feel like we don't know something but if you have a conversation about something it's a far more inviting space to change people's minds and to talk about things that live outside of our comfort zones yeah and i'm thinking like when i was a kid the only queer representation was something like queer as folk and i'd have to up really late with i'm so old that we didn't have remote control and i was ready to like turn the volume down and change the channel yeah and like but there was nothing in just normal tv that my whole family would have sat down and watched together and that's what you gave people it's a gift well i appreciate that yeah it was fun it was nice to be able to do it and i supposed to do with my family yeah right i mean you literally did it with your family i employed two-thirds of my family oh you're such a saint or three-quarters of my family what was it like working with your family it was amazing i mean listen my dad is the greatest human being on the planet he's so sweet thank you yeah yeah yeah um and my sister is in the show i mean it was it was a wonderful thing and i think my dad is someone who has led me down the path through the entertainment industry in a way that is so he doesn't give a about anybody for him it's about golf and eating right so anything that facilitates golf or eating is a wonderful thing for him that's lovely in his case it's movie making and television that facilitates the bagels and the golf got it and so to grow up with somebody who really didn't care about the glamour of hollywood or the expectations of hollywood or these things that tend to kind of float around you the more successful you get that sway you from a creative path because it affects your ego in a strange way it was a wonderful experience to get to watch him work and to take his lead in that because he really is about the art of making something and celebrating creativity and the joy that comes from um building something from the ground up and he really sincerely does not care about maybe the fact that restaurants when american pie came out gave him free pie i think that was the best that was the most exciting food again going back to food yeah i was able to watch him on set and watch the way that he and the great katherine o'hara led our team i mean she deserves more than that but um it's fine it's fine you listen guys it's kevin's mom from home alone come on when you lead by example and they had no ego when they walked into the room and i think you know as an actor you can walk onto sets and be like okay i'm gonna get yelled at today by an actor who's upset about the fact that his donut didn't have powder on it um to lead by that kind of example and to set a precedent for people that was basically like show up do your job do it well open the conversation to people leave room for collaboration and that's what we're trying to do we're trying to squeeze every moment for the creative juices that we possibly could and to extract did you learn that from so waiting for government is probably my favorite film of all time it's incredible so i was a kid and i went to new york and brought it you could only buy on american dvds so i bought it on an american dvd and then came back and bought an all regions dvd player to watch it and in that it's all about the ensemble and then in a mighty wind all those films that your dad did that are not about the ego they're about the ensemble i feel that that energy is in shit's creek there's no one star it's about the team is that something you learnt from watching him work well i think that's why i came to him with the idea so many years ago because what he did in writing those movies i mean i guess outlining those movies with christopher guest was bring a kind of sincerity and a heart and a reality to an absurd situation yes and what i learned is that you can really push characters way beyond their comfort zones and make them incredibly sort of colorful and vibrant if you root the world in a real place you just have to have that foundation that's real in order to ground people into believing the characters and when he came and also i think everything my dad has has sort of done has been rooted in something that has a very throbbing heartbeat and a warmth and he's not someone that's that likes to be mean he doesn't find mean comedy to be um funny he finds it to be mean so to bring him on and to work with him in this show i think really in those early days created the warmth and emotionality of the show and rooted everybody in a place that was so stable i remember you know we were going through characters in the early days and it was like weeks at a time for each character and i remember thinking he's a very slow man he moves very slow he eats very slow he thinks very slow but there's a method to the madness and i just kept thinking like i want to write and he was like we can't write when we don't know what we're writing and so you have to sit and you have to live with these people and you have to figure out whether they were happy or sad kids and you have to know what they were like when they got their first job and at the time i was like this feels very detailed and i have very little interest in it and it was what informed the entire dna of our show it's what made writing the show easy because we had that bedrock to pull from uh you know a little bit of lexus the song that came into our show was something that we had done in those early days yeah i had it on a piece of like paper from like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah was your dad alexis or were you me that was a trick question yeah um and so yeah i learned so much from him and i was so proud to have collaborated with him on this show and for this show to have changed our whole lives to go through that with a family member and then to watch my sister also achieve success through the show it's been an unbelievably emotional experience because none of us saw it coming we were on pop network in america and for those of you that don't know what pop network is neither do i um it was previously the tv guide network which again i'm speaking to an english crowd we know what tv guide is oh okay yeah it was where you go to see programs kind of scroll like if radio times had a channel exactly i don't know what radio times is tv guide okay so we weren't even in high definition for the first four seasons of our show this was not destined to be a success and yet somehow it happened so to get to do that with with family was really wonderful so it was a slow burn which i loved to say the least right sure we were on radio times network and then to achieve the success you have you've won four emmys so come yeah i mean no one else has won four emmys you guys didn't even get your duke of edinburgh reward private i'll tell you later so count me down one emmy for writing no i'm not doing that but i just want to work out the categories writing writing oh now you're counting down directing producing producing acting whoa listen it was people no no people were in a vulnerable time yeah and we were a very warm presence we were comfortable they needed a happy story this is a happy ending it was like partially the fact that i liked the show and the show was good but partially the fact that we were all just desperate for someone to hug us and are you were you aware of that of the comfort because apparently golden girls got insane amounts of views yes because people want something warm and familiar to to feel like they were in a soft comfortable space and were you aware of of that effect that people were watching it in covid because it was so comforting well i didn't know that at the time but i when we first started to create the visuals and the aesthetic language of the show i went to i love lucy yeah which was a show because i'm 97 years old i'm 97 but i watched it as a kid and felt so much comfort knowing that every night yeah it would show an episode of i love lucy dating myself um but you could escape into these wonderful little apartments and these people who really loved their lives and there was something so wonderful about the concept of sitcom that you go either day after date now it's like minute after you could just stream an entire season but at the time you would tune in week after week and you would feel a closeness to people because there was a familiarity and there was a consistency and so when we were building our sets it was always like well this needs to be a place that people it can't be too cold or it can't be too gross it can't be too unappealing because this needs to be a place that people want to come to and that they feel warmth when they watch it and comfort and so yeah the intention i think was always to be a safe kind of space and i think to choose to make the town of shits creek a place where homophobia and intolerance and bigotry and you know all of the negative things in our culture simply didn't exist cracked open a world of storytelling that i think led to this place where in hard hard times when we're feeling really bad to look at a world that is much kinder than the one we currently live in is a nice escape i think well i always say like you you can't be what you can't see and you created a possible world a kinder world that we all like to enter very smart sounding i i mean that was a great quote that's the first time anyone here has heard me sound yeah felt very enlightened well you know i meant it namaste so um you were talking about the visual design of it we're with a fashion crowd right now we've got to talk about moira i mean it's just insane and then her pope outfit in the last episode how did that come about were you thinking we we have to outmoir a moira for the last episode of course the pressure was very high i mean we had a budget of about two cents in a shell per episode and i knew from the very beginning that i wanted the clothes to tell a story we're telling a story of a very wealthy family i didn't want it to look like that's a zara dress with some cheap pearls and i'm supposed to buy that she's rich like no it needed to come through the clothes because people who have that kind of money and much like what we're experiencing with succession yes you have to authenticate that world in order to buy into that world and so it was very important for me that fashion play a huge part in the in in creating a consistent dialogue that i didn't have to write so if we watched the character of moira rose show up every day to this town dripping in like feathers valenciaga and jill and rick you buy in yes and if you don't know who those designers are then so be it if you do it's that one extra detail that makes it more that authenticates it and so i bought the clothes myself because we couldn't afford to buy them in the stores and also because they lost money years prior we had to post date all of the clothes to the time that they lost their money and previous oh my god so we didn't have money to buy expensive clothes so i ended up developing a huge shopping addiction and purchasing the clothes from apps and from early days of real real when they didn't know what pricing was and um and so we i would accumulate all of these clothes pack them into suitcases take them to set unpack them with our costume designer and then collectively we would style catherine in all the looks and so it became this challenge of like how do you find these clothes that we can't afford you just have to look really hard and so now i'm really good at consignment shopping and have a terrible shopping addiction because the show is stopped but i've continued are you still buying clothes for more information yeah wow i know well there's certain things that i think like if we ever do something in the future maybe my eye goes out yeah but the the pope thing was catherine's i said what do you think we should do for the wedding she said i think something pope related and she sketched in the book there's an actual sketch that she did of herself it's a cartoon of herself with a pope's hat and she was very insistent that there'd be a band of hair around the base of this hat i don't know what that if you saw the sketch you'd realize it's a very big accomplishment on the hair and costume department that they actually interpreted that into what got onto our show but it was a wonderful i always thought that catherine's look in that last episode was such an incredible celebration of the style of our show but also such a celebration of the team because not only did you have to we had to source the mcqueen dress that she wore in the tom ford boots and that hat was custom and we had to it was we had to spray paint costume i mean all the jewelry was a whole other conversation um because cheap jewelry actually looks cheap on camera it turns out the whole process was so difficult and yet so rewarding because you when you see those scenes play out you realize it takes so much to make someone look a certain way it's not just the clothes or the accessories it's how the person feels when they wear the clothes it's the hair and makeup that go into creating whatever the mood is it was so important that we got that right and i remember seeing her on that day that we shot that and she walked out and i remember having a dream about she's wearing a very long wig like a blonde and i had a dream about the fact that she should have these kind of like botticelli wow curls and i texted her hair person in the middle of the night and said i think it needs to be long and i think it needs to be blonde and we found this look and she she came out and the beautiful thing about catherine is she's such a chameleon so she really adapts to every wig every piece of clothing every different the structure of clothes changed the way that she carries herself and when she stepped out i like virtually burst into tears because it was so extraordinary to look at and she felt so beautiful and it was the last day that we were shooting on our sets and we were saying goodbye to a home that we had come to know for six years and the whole experience had a sense of melancholy that was really extraordinary and then to know that we had nailed the look at the last episode the relief of being like we had set such a high bar we'd put her in the craziest clothes and that and yet when it came to the moment that was the biggest and arguably the moment where the spotlight was the brightest on her we thought it most thoughtful that she in her way underplay her look and that's why she went white and she went light and it wasn't aggressive it was really soft so that my character could have the spotlight in your moment and so there was all this taken into consideration well it worked playing with the clothes was my favorite part of the show so your love of fashion yeah you've also designed a line of frames and sunglasses yeah that's very exciting you're wearing them right now i am indeed yeah so how did that come about i'd always enjoyed fashion and i'm not a designer i don't have any skills i can't draw i'm not good at that honey half of them come no touche but i knew that i had i knew that i wanted to say something in that space and ten this this started 10 years ago when i left my first job and thought i need to do something creative and i've worn glasses my whole life since i was second grade or whatever i know how they look i know how i want them to look i know how i want them to feel on people's faces and how every shape brings out a different angle and how important it is to that when you wear glasses it shouldn't just be putting them on for practical purposes it should be you should collect them especially if you ha if you can't see i'm completely blind without them so you have to have options yes and it it stemmed from that what's a bit like rose's wigs that each one's a different character yeah i feel i feel different with every pair right mm-hmm okay kid yeah well congratulations they are beautiful oh thank you so much so i have to ask you that so we all know eugene levy is jim's dad originally i knew him obviously before because i i love waiting for goffman but um was it weird seeing everyone calling your dad jim's dad it was weirder seeing him in the movie because it came out when i was in high school well so you were the age of the kids in the movie absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah god yeah it was very disturbing and traumatizing so weird mm-hmm so when he's having like the weird sex talks yeah that would have been when he was having weird sex talks with you well no he didn't have the weird sex talks with me because he did it in the movie so when he wanted to tell you about the birds and the bees he said i bought him a movie i just watched the movie wow yeah funny piece of trivia about that the original script had that part he said no to it a thousand times and i remember being like 12 and he my dad is again very slow and lovely and soft and warm but was like i wrote a script and uh a boy a pie in it and i don't know what they want me to be in it but i just don't know and i remember thinking oh what does a what to a like what are you talking about he said a boy a past yeah and then so i guess originally in the script his part the part of jim's dad was very aggressive and he was you know handing him his son porn and he was a very different harder character and my dad being the wonderfully gentle person that he is said okay i'll do it if i can rework the part and so he made that part the soft sort of trepid which is so much funnier because which is very much him uh it still didn't make it any less awkward or terrifying i remember him asking if i wanted to go to the premiere and then a friend called me and had seen an advanced sneak screening of the movie and said whatever you do do not go to the movie with your father it's gonna be hell um and then i watched the movie and it was hell yeah um so to finish tell me about the book because i feel like it's a lovely book end for the show you don't want to talk about it everyone has i've i've realized it's in everybody's room whether they like it or not oh i thought i i thought it was just in my room you all got one yeah i think so so they're gonna read it they can flip through it i don't need to sell anything today this chat was enough okay good yeah well that makes you very happy it's great so to finish i'd love you to sign my book okay what do you want me to write in there i would love you to just write dear jack i'm really sorry for ghosting you on real first of all [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i got off raya so i don't know if it's technically ghosting well it felt like ghosting down just write the words down and then sit down i'm actually writing that yeah please do that's legendary can we not get a sharpie what is this dear jack i'm sorry for ghosting you [Laughter] on raya love dan levy how about much love [Laughter] i'm not even putting my last name because signing a last name after acknowledging something like that feels very impersonal um xxx oh on that bombshell beautiful people the legends dan levy [Applause] you

Channel: British GQ

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Id: Fl7eKsayjZ0

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021