Dan Levy sat down with HollywoodLife for our podcast and discussed his hilarious Pop TV comedy Schitt’s Creek, which he co-created and co-stars in with his father, comedy legend Eugene Levy. The fourth season of their sitcom just started, and it’s even better than the last. Of course, you probably know Eugene as the father of Jason Biggs’ character Jim in the 1999 movie American Pie. Eugene’s actually the only member of the cast to star in all of the movies and the spinoffs — eight in total. Pretty impressive, right? Well, not if you happened to be poor, teenage Dan when the first movie came out.
Don’t get it wrong; Dan loves the American Pie films…just not his high school classmates wondering if Jim was based on him. Remember the film centers on the teenager having sex with an apple pie. Oof. “I was in high school [when American Pie came out] and you know, trying to make it just as a student in high school, and I was not very popular,” Dan told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “And then the movie came out and everyone asked me if it was like, some sort of biography of my life. I remember at the time, just saying to people like, “Do you think that my life here in Toronto at this high school is interesting enough to like, turn into a motion picture?’ The answer is no to that. And ‘no, I did not do that to a pie and no, no, no.'”
Poor dude. We can’t imagine what that would be like. Outside of school, Dan said he and his family had to deal with American Pie references from fans for “a good five years.” He said that “There was a good five years, I think, everywhere we went, there was, someone would come out with like a slice of apple pie and a wink and just be like, ‘it’s on us.’ Like, okay thank you so much.”
Dan’s costar, Annie Murphy, told us that she was in awe of getting to work with Eugene, the iconic Second City and SCTV comedian who’s starred in tons of your favorite movies. And very nervous. “My palms had never been sweatier,” she said. “Oh, it was absolutely terrifying, to the extent that the night before I shot my very first scene, I was racking my brain to think of some kind of excuse as to like, why I couldn’t go into work that following day. The only thing that I could think of was I had a doctor’s appointment, so my brain failed me. I had to go into work and do this. But as soon as we got the first scene out of the way, you know, we got the jitters out and then it kind of all started to fall into place.”
Dan was actually nervous, too. His father’s longtime comedy partner, Catherine O’Hara, also stars on Schitt’s Creek. She’s starred in countless Christopher Guest films alongside Eugene, including Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman. Dan’s known her for most of his life as a family friend, but working with her — that’s an entirely different experience. “I had never envisioned working with her as an actor and I think we both, sort of that first day, got hit really hard with the nerves when you’re realizing you’re working with two people who are just at the top of their game,” Dan said. “And we were very new to it all.”
Dan’s also got ties to another celebrity besides his dad: Drake! Like any loyal Canadian actor, Dan once appeared on Degrassi: The Next Generation. Remember that Drake starred as Jimmy Brooks on the teen drama from 2001-2009. Dan had a small arc on the show, and while he didn’t interact with Drake, they still knew each other.
He actually ran into Drake recently and had a bit of an awkward moment: “I was sitting across from him at brunch at this restaurant in Toronto, where everything is neutral and we can sit across from each other at a restaurant,” he told us. “And I was thinking to myself like, I know that we know each other in a Toronto way, but I’m not gonna go over to Drake at a table and be like, ‘Hey, how’s the eggs?’ Like, what are you gonna say? So I chose not to say anything and then I look up and he came over to me and was like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ And I was like, ‘oh see, now I look like a jerk.'”
Listen to the rest of Dan’s interview on the HL podcast HERE, and tune in to Schitt’s Creek on Wednesdays at 8:00pm on Pop!
HollywoodLifers, do you watch Schitt’s Creek? Let us know!