Dan Levy takes a spiritual turn in his new Netflix comedy

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Grief has been the catalyst for comedy in Dan Levy’s work since Schitt’s Creek ended.

First, the Canadian actor and screenwriter made the 2023 Netflix film Good Grief, in which he played a man who, having lost his husband, tries to find himself again in Paris with friends.

Now, in his crime comedy TV series Big Mistakes, Levy plays a Christian pastor whose sister, a primary-school teacher, makes a big mistake while the pair are grieving their grandmother.

That impulsive act leads the squeaky-clean siblings into the New Jersey underworld – to grave-robbing and gangsterism.

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As Levy is passing through Toronto on a quick promo tour, grief is not just a main theme in his new show, but top of mind in real life.

“When you lose somebody that is irreplaceable, there’s this feeling of ‘Oh gosh, well, how is anyone going to make me feel the way that she made me feel?’” Levy says, leaning in and speaking with a eager sincerity that also lends itself well to playing a spiritual leader.

Levy is speaking, of course, about Catherine O’Hara, the Canadian actress who played his mother, Moira Rose, on Schitt’s Creek.

The SCTV legend, who died suddenly in January, had been around Levy all his life thanks to a friendship and comic partnership with Eugene Levy, his likewise legendary father, that pre-dates Dan’s birth by a decade.

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In creating Schitt’s Creek for CBC, the Levys, father and son, gave O’Hara a later-career gift in Moira, an eccentric former soap-opera star – one that saw her win six Canadian Screen Awards in a row and a Primetime Emmy Award to cap it off.

But Dan Levy rejects that formulation – saying it was, in fact, O’Hara who handed a present to him and his father. “She had such a clear idea of who that character was and what she wanted it to be,” he says.

“I consider it one of the great honours of my life and of my career to be able to set the table for Catherine O’Hara so that she could just go to town.”

In Big Mistakes, Levy gets the good china and cutlery out for another one of North America’s true comic greats so she can chow down.

Laurie Metcalf, the 70-year-old stage veteran and four-time Emmy winner best known for playing Aunt Jackie on Roseanne and The Conners, plays Levy’s character’s mother, Linda Dardano, in the show he co-created with I Love L.A.’s Rachel Sennott.

But while the word “overbearing mother” will inevitably be applied to the part, Linda is more than that.

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While her adult children Nicky (Levy) and Morgan (Taylor Ortega) are getting pulled into the underworld of New Jersey, Linda is pushing herself out of her comfort zone on purpose – running for mayor of her small town and expanding her sex life into new dimensions along the way.

Metcalf was always top of Levy’s mind for Linda – citing her ability to be incredibly funny while at the same time inhabiting every character on stage or on screen in a deep and human way.

“One of my big goals with the show was to always keep it grounded, because when you’re playing with thrills and you’re playing with comedy, there is a tendency to lean either into too much thrills or satirical comedy, and somehow make the thing feel like a farce.”

With its pulpy elements and, eventually, elevated body count, Big Mistakes may seem to have little in common with Levy’s last TV comedy.

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But, like Schitt’s Creek, it sees Levy, now 42, playing a character defined by his role of big brother – “I will always have a preoccupation with family dynamics; they’re endlessly entertaining” – and writing rich female roles for an older legend and a relative newcomer to fill out his fictional family.

After catapulting Annie Murphy to television stardom as Alexis Rose, Levy has now cast relative unknown Ortega as Morgan.

The New Jersey native digs into the flailing character, a failed actress, back in her small town and re-engaged to her hapless high-school boyfriend (played by on-the-rise Canadian actor Jack Innanen).

“In finding Taylor, I found myself feeling very similarly to when I found Annie, which was knowing that I have met an actor who is finding the right project at the right time in their careers,” Levy says.

“Taylor, much like Annie, crushed it from day one.”

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As for Levy’s part, Pastor Nicky is an out gay man – but the Christian congregation he works for is one of those where homosexuals are embraced, but not homosexuality.

The comic potential of that contradiction is obvious – you can see the doors opening and slamming, as in a farce – but Big Mistakes leads more into the earnest complications of the situation as Nicky’s romantic relationship with a contractor deepens.

And the show is certainly not satirical about Christianity. “I never wanted religion to be the butt of the joke, much like we never wanted the small town in Schitt’s Creek to be the butt of the joke,” says Levy, who had a real-life gay pastor consult on the show.

While not a religious person, Levy does consider himself a spiritual person. He mother is Christian, his father Jewish, and he grew up in Toronto attending both Rosedale United Church and Beach Hebrew Institute; his parents would celebrate the holidays in both religions.

Big Mistakes may sound on paper like a comic Breaking Bad – but its central thematic preoccupation is with “goodness,” something that has animated all of Levy’s work and springs from his interfaith upbringing.

“When you bounce back and forth between the two, that’s all you really can take, because at times there can be opposing elements,” he says. “What my parents taught us was it’s the spirituality you should be taking from both these experiences; it’s the right and wrong.”

Big Mistakes premieres on Netflix on April 9.