Dan Levy, the Schitt’s Creek co-creator who followed a record Emmy sweep with grief and gangsters

Dan Levy

Photo: Patrick.suechan / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 9, 1983 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Actor, screenwriter, director and producer
Known for	Happiest Season, Haunted Mansion, Admission
Awards	4 Emmy · 2 Canadian Screen Award · Member of the Order of Canada

Most people who win everything in one night spend the rest of their careers trying to win it again. Dan Levy took the opposite route. After a sitcom he built with his father swept the biggest night in American television, he walked away from the formula that got him there, made a quiet film about a widower, fronted a cooking competition that lasted a single season, and then wrote himself into a crime comedy about a gay pastor blackmailed by the mob. The question hanging over his career has never been whether he can make people laugh. It is whether the man who created David Rose can convince an audience to follow him somewhere David Rose would never go.

His answer, so far, has been to keep moving. Big Mistakes, the Netflix series he co-created with Rachel Sennott and in which he plays the lead, has already earned a second season, and Levy talks about it as a story with an ending in mind. That is characteristic of him. He is a planner in a business that rewards improvisers, and the plan has always involved leaving before anyone asks him to.

Daniel Joseph Levy, the son of the comedian Eugene Levy and Deborah Divine, grew up in Toronto, where his birth on August 9, 1983 brought him into a household that celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah. His father is Jewish and his mother Protestant, and he had a bar mitzvah. Growing up next to one of Canada’s most recognizable comic actors was not, by his telling, a shortcut. He went to North Toronto Collegiate Institute and then studied film production at York University and at Ryerson University, the training of someone who wanted to understand how a show is built rather than simply how to appear in one.

Appearing in one came first anyway. Levy was one of the seven original co-hosts of MTV Live on MTV Canada, and he became a familiar face as co-host, alongside Jessi Cruickshank, of The After Show and its offshoots, including The Hills: The After Show and The City: Live After Show. Those programs were built on quick reactions to other people’s television, which turned out to be good training for a writer. He also wrote, produced and starred in his own MTV holiday special, Daniel Levy’s Holi-Do’s & Don’ts, co-hosted red-carpet coverage, worked on CTV’s coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and carried the Olympic torch for a leg of the relay. He left MTV Canada in 2011 after five years.

The acting credits of that period were small. He played a film producer in a four-episode arc of Degrassi: The Next Generation, appeared in the thriller Cyberstalker and had a supporting part in Admission, the comedy with Tina Fey and Paul Rudd. None of it suggested what came next.

What came next was a company. In 2015 Levy formed Not a Real Company Productions with his father and the producers Andrew Barnsley and Fred Levy, and its first project became Schitt’s Creek on CBC. The premise, a wealthy family stripped of everything and forced to live in a small town they once bought as a joke, sounded like a farce about comeuppance. Levy wrote it as something warmer. He co-created the series with Eugene Levy, played the prickly, image-obsessed son David Rose, and surrounded himself with his father, his sister Sarah Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Annie Murphy and Chris Elliott.

The show grew slowly, and then it grew all at once. Much of its reputation rests on a decision Levy made about the town itself: he wrote a place where homophobia simply does not exist. David is pansexual, his relationship with Patrick is treated with the same seriousness as any other romance on the show, and no character is punished for loving anyone. Levy has said that David’s sexual ambiguity was a big question mark in parts of America, and that issues like that were exactly what excited him. The choice read as naive to some viewers early on. By the final season it read as a thesis.

He also decided when it would end. In March 2019 Levy announced that the sixth season would be the last, calling the chance to finish on the team’s own terms a rare privilege. The final season earned 15 Primetime Emmy nominations, and in 2020 Schitt’s Creek became the first comedy to win all four major acting categories in a single year, and the first comedy or drama series to take all seven major awards. Levy won for comedy series, supporting actor, writing and directing, becoming the first person to win in all four of those disciplines in one year. The series had already brought him Canadian Screen Awards for best comedy series and for writing, and his work on it earned him four in total.

The public image of Levy that emerged from those years, the gracious son sharing a stage with his father, leaves out how pointed he could be. In 2017, when he began co-hosting The Great Canadian Baking Show with Julia Chan on CBC, a critic at The Globe and Mail reviewed the first episode and referred to Levy’s “feyness.” Levy called the word offensive, irresponsible and homophobic. The paper’s public editor answered that the critic had not known Levy was gay and meant preciousness, while conceding that words change meaning in the communities they touch. Levy stayed on for a second season and left in 2019, citing scheduling. The episode showed something that would matter later: he has no interest in being the pleasant host if the price is letting a slur pass as a description.

That same instinct shaped the way he used his reach once Schitt’s Creek became a streaming phenomenon. In the summer of 2020 he enrolled in Indigenous Canada, a free online course from the University of Alberta, promoted it to his followers, hosted twelve livestream conversations with its instructors and guests, and promised to match donations to the university’s Faculty of Native Studies up to 25,000 dollars. In 2023 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, with a citation that named both his advocacy for 2SLGBTQI+ communities and his work advancing Canadian television.

The years after the Emmys are where the critical picture gets more complicated, and more interesting. Levy signed an overall deal with Netflix in 2021 after an earlier three-year deal with ABC Signature, and he spent the first part of that period saying yes to other people’s projects. He was part of the ensemble of Paul Rudnick’s HBO film Coastal Elites, shot remotely during the pandemic. He hosted Saturday Night Live in February 2021, with Phoebe Bridgers as musical guest. He played John, the friend who talks sense into Kristen Stewart‘s character in Happiest Season, a tour guide in Disney’s Haunted Mansion, Andy Warhol in Jerry Seinfeld‘s Unfrosted, and Mr Molloy, the demanding writing teacher Maeve meets in the United States, in the final season of Sex Education.

His own projects had a harder landing. The Big Brunch, a cooking competition he created and hosted for HBO Max with the judges Sohla El-Waylly and Will Guidara, gave chefs a shot at 300,000 dollars and was cancelled after one eight-episode season. Good Grief, his first feature as writer and director, opened in a limited theatrical release at the end of 2023 before reaching Netflix. He plays Marc, a man mourning his husband, played by Luke Evans, and trying to hold together his friendships with the characters played by Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel during a trip to Paris. Critics were split. Variety’s Peter Debruge admired its sincerity, while Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com wrote that Levy was a natural on screen but still searching for his voice as a director, and The Hollywood Reporter found it more earnest than affecting. The film is flawed in the ways first films usually are, but it is also the clearest statement of what Levy wanted to do after the Rose family: take the tenderness of his comedy and see whether it held up without the jokes.

The same tension followed him onto the biggest stage in the industry. In September 2024 he and Eugene Levy hosted the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards together. Some reviewers praised the ease and warmth of the father and son; others, including Variety, found the evening humdrum and the hosts affable but forgettable. Levy had become the kind of performer television trusts with its most important night, and the reviews suggested that trust did not automatically translate into surprise.

Behind the camera he kept building. Through his production banner he produced Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, Ally Pankiw‘s documentary about the music festival founded by Sarah McLachlan, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025. He also voiced Joel in the animated Smurfs. Neither project was a statement, but both fit a pattern of loyalty to Canadian collaborators and to stories about communities that built something for themselves.

Big Mistakes is the project that finally tests the question that followed him out of Schitt’s Creek. Netflix picked up the series in 2025 as part of his deal. It was first conceived as a vehicle for Levy and Rachel Sennott as siblings, until Sennott’s HBO comedy I Love LA went to series and Taylor Ortega took over the role of his sister. Levy is the showrunner and plays Nicky, an openly gay pastor who, along with his directionless sister Morgan, is blackmailed into the world of organized crime. Laurie Metcalf plays their mother, with Abby Quinn, Boran Kuzum and Jack Innanen in the main cast. The show was shot in New Jersey and its eight episodes arrived on April 9, 2026. Reviews were warmer than they had been for Good Grief, and the series spent two weeks in Netflix’s global top ten for English-language television. In May 2026 Netflix announced a second season and a new first-look deal with Levy, who has described the series as a story with a five-season shape and a final image already in his head.

The year also brought loss. Catherine O’Hara, who played his mother Moira Rose for six seasons, died on January 30, 2026, at the age of 71. At the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards in September, Levy opened the In Memoriam segment with Annie Murphy and Macaulay Culkin, the three of them remembering the woman who had played their mother on screen. Levy said the lesson she taught him was to say yes to her instincts, because she was always miles ahead and everyone else would learn to catch up. It was a reminder of how much of the show’s magic he had shared with the people around him, and how carefully he still credits them.

Offscreen, Levy divides his time between Toronto and Los Angeles and has called London, where he lived in 2005, his favourite city. He has been out since he was 18 and has said plainly that he is gay; in 2019 Queerty named him among its Pride50 honorees. He keeps most of his personal life private, and his work carries the argument he wants to make in public.

What comes next is a second season of Big Mistakes, with Levy again in charge as writer, producer and star. It is the first sustained bet on a Dan Levy world that is not Schitt’s Creek, and the early numbers suggest audiences are willing to follow him into it. The man who once planned his own exit from a hit now has to do something harder: stay long enough to build another one.