The trajectory of O’Hara’s life changed forever when she was a teenager and her older brother started bringing his girlfriend, Gilda Radner, to dinner with the family. When Radner came over, says O’Hara, “my mom would definitely break out the good plates.” Inspired by Radner’s acceptance into the original Toronto cast of the musical Godspell, O’Hara auditioned as well. She got a callback but not, ultimately, a place in the show. “That’s okay, it’s fine, still bitter!” she jokes.
Toronto’s Second City troupe went on to do six seasons of the Canadian sketch comedy show SCTV. They’ve all stayed friends forever, and Martin Scorsese staged a reunion in 2018 to start shooting footage for an upcoming Netflix special. Lately they’ve been gathering around O’Hara’s island, working on new material and telling stories about beloved friends long gone, like Radner, John Candy, and Harold Ramis. Candy, who starred with O’Hara in Home Alone, died in 1994—on O’Hara’s birthday, as it happens. “Oh, it was terrible,” she says. “I got some mixed phone calls that day. ‘Happy birthday and oh my God.’ Yeah. I’ll always remember the day he died.”
The third and final entry in O’Hara’s tales of terror is the most adorable—and possibly the most revealing. She auditioned to play the wife in a Robert De Niro movie. The casting people asked her to read a scene set in bed, so O’Hara slid down in the chair trying to seem like she was lying down. She re-creates it for me on her kitchen chair, her chin tucked unflatteringly into her chest and her legs stretched out akimbo. “Really attractive, right?” Yes, it may have been a poor choice, but as Candy said: She didn’t actually want to play the wife.
We could have used a lot more of O’Hara over the years, but with Schitt’s Creek she gave us everything. The actor spent enough time at SCTV and in Christopher Guest’s improvised movies to make collaborating with Eugene and Dan Levy feel like a homecoming. “She was so sure of the boundaries of what the character would and wouldn’t do,” says Dan Levy. O’Hara came up with Moira’s vague, European-parlor accent, as well as her obsession with wigs. She also elevated the character’s grande-dame vocabulary into the stratosphere of absurdity with words like unasinous. “Unasinous is fun,” the actor says with a laugh. “It means ‘equally stupid.’ As in: A number of unasinous ideas have been put forward today.”
Most of all, O’Hara insisted that Moira and her husband, Johnny, played with such elegance by Eugene Levy, remain in love throughout the crisis that finds them owning, operating, and living in a shabby, forgotten motel in a town they once bought as a joke because of the name. Theirs is a deeply romantic story of a man thoroughly enchanted by his mercurial wife. Rewatching Schitt’s Creek now—as many have been doing for comfort and escape—Moira suddenly seems like all of us forced to live a terrifying new life that resembles nothing of our past one. Moira is unapologetic about hating every second of her new normal, even as she grows closer to her family and her better self. It’s hard to conceive of any other actor managing to make Moira as dear as she is outrageous.
When I ask O’Hara if she kept anything from Moira’s closet, she disappears into her bedroom for a minute and returns with a divine pair of black lace-up Givenchy platform booties in one hand and an armful of luxury draped over her other arm: the Michael Kors sequin shift that Moira wore to her son’s boyfriend’s coming-out party in season five, a Celine tuxedo, and a McQ Alexander McQueen coat. “And look at this dress!” she says fondly, holding a slinky above-the-knee item out in front of her. “Apparently, I love Givenchy. It’s really tight but in a good way. How many older women get to wear short dresses or skirts? I did, as Moira.”
In the days leading up to our visit, O’Hara admits that she felt a little adrift. “At one point last week I was feeling grouchy or something,” she says. “A little disturbed. Every once in a while it hits me.” This is the time of year she’d be leaving for Toronto to start anew on Schitt’s Creek. And now it’s done.
“I don’t see trying to top this,” says O’Hara. “How greedy can one person be? When I was growing up, my mom would say, ‘Every day, just be thankful for your health. Get up and be grateful that you’re awake. You’re here for another day.’ ”
It’s against O’Hara’s practical nature to fantasize about goals, but she admires the hell out of Melissa McCarthy (“She’s so funny and fearless and such a great actor”) and is riveted by Succession (“The actors and the writing are all so good. Everyone’s despicable but you love them one moment and the next they’re awful again”). Her plan for now is to write for herself. She won an Emmy for writing for SCTV, and if she’s going to work she wants to feel devoted. “When I do take a job, I work really, really hard,” she says. “I forget that I’m a wife, that I have a husband and kids. I’m completely there. I think talents are God-given and it’s your job to take care of them and share them with the right people and….” She stops and gives herself a magnificent eye roll. “Blah, blah, blah.”
