Dan Levy on overcoming rejection and harnessing grief

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0:36Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, author and broadcaster Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast where we flip the traditional interview format on its head, celebrating failure rather than success. Because what we learn from the former is often far more important than anything that comes from the latter. It's how we respond to failure that defines our character and helps us grow. Every episode, I ask a very special guest to discuss three failures and how they emerged on the other side to be the person we see today. Just before we jump into our interview, I wanted to share some exciting news.

1:15starting next week I will be releasing not one but two weekly episodes we'll of course have our regular how to fail episode but I'll also be releasing a brand new failing with friends series for subscribers I am so thrilled about these episodes because this is where you get to be involved every week on failing with friends I'll be going through your failures or questions and it gives us a chance to look at failure together. If you'd like to get in touch, follow the link in this episode's description. Keep an eye out next week for our first ever Failing With Friends episode.

1:54When Dan Levy was 15 and on his way home from a bar mitzvah, his parents kicked him out of the car in front of a Gap Kids and told him not to come home until he'd gotten a job application. It was an early lesson in the value of hard work, and it served him well. On Schitt's Creek, the sitcom he co-created and co-starred in along with his father, Eugene, he was also the writer, director, and unofficial wardrobe consultant. Some weeks, he later recalled, he barely slept eight hours over seven days. Levy's efforts paid off. Not only is Schitt's Creek now one of the most beloved TV programmes of all time, but Levy became the first person to win an Emmy in all four major comedy categories in a single year for producing, writing, directing and acting.

2:43The show came to an end in 2020 after its sixth season. Since then, the Canadian Levy has launched his own production company, scored a deal with Netflix and directed and starred in his feature film debut, Good Grief, which tells the story of Mark, whose husband Oliver dies unexpectedly and whose friends help him through the devastating aftermath. It's funnier than I've just made it sound. A classic romantic comedy delivered with Levy's impeccable taste and generous heart. I think there's beauty in loss, he says. It can inspire. Dan Levy, welcome to How to Fail. Oh gosh, what an intro. Thank you so much.

3:23I'm thrilled to be here. You are such an incredible creative presence on this earth. And then I watched Good Grief and then I read your statement that came with the screener and it felt so aligned to so many of my values, not least the power of friendship and how important your friends are in your life. And really, Good Grief does have at its center this love story between Mark and Oliver, but really it's about a love of friends, isn't it? Yeah, it was sort of inverting the idea that friendship is always on the peripheral of the films that we watch. I think if you look at kind of romantic comedies, it's always sort of the through line is the two people getting together and the friends act as sort of funny foil.

4:09As much as I love the genre, it felt important for me to tell the story of friendship being the central focus and the lifeline and the true romance in this particular story and celebrating that. Because as a chronically single person, my friends are my family and my community and a support system. And it just felt like a really important, for me at least, an important story to tell of the love, the romance of friendship and how in adulthood the complexity of friendship changes and what we expect of people changes. And somehow the closest people in our lives, the closest friends we have could be in a way the people that we excuse the most.

5:00that if someone were to walk in off the street and examine our friendships as close, as familial as they are, they might say, well, you might need to just, some of you might need to have a chat. And that's what the movie does, essentially, is use death as a catalyst for these friends to re-examine themselves, but also who they are in relation to one another and the hope that that makes their friendship stronger. And also, actually, without giving anything away, for Mark to re-examine what love is, what romantic love is, what he thought it was. And one of the things that I know so many millions of people around the globe value you so highly for is the way that you convey and portray queer love in all of its nuance and joy.

5:50You do that so well on screen. And yet you describe yourself as chronically single. So how do the two things mesh? Because you clearly understand what romantic love is. Why are you chronically single? I think I haven't made the space for it, if I'm being honest. It requires a kind of active quest. I find myself really wrapped up in what I'm doing. I mean, for Schitt's Creek, for example, if I had a partner going into that experience, I certainly would not have had that partner coming out of that experience because it is so full on, requires so much time. And I care so much about what I'm doing that when I'm in those situations, it's hard to prioritize someone or something outside of it.

6:34And so I just don't think I've given myself that time to look and to be available. I mean, you go on dates and things and that's fine. And then you get separated by work or separated by, you know, living in different cities and they come and they go. But the act of looking for love is not something I've ever really done. And I'm in the very early stages of it right now, now that the movie is done. You recently turned 40, didn't you? And I wonder if that has that focused the mind? Yeah, yeah. That has a tendency to really like snap you into figuring out what the priorities you need in the next 40 years.

7:14It's funny you mentioned that story about Gap Kids and my mom in particular has always done such an amazing job of contextualizing money in relation to me. and the fact that what my parents have is not what I have. That growing up, it was important to know the distinction between spending their money and spending my money. And the joy that comes with earning your money and spending it. And I think in a way, it's kind of spiraled out of control because now I just am a workaholic and my mom is now saying, like, you have to stop. A quest for independence has always been really important for me from a young age, especially I think growing up with a parent who is so recognizable.

7:56I think it's almost inherent in my identity, this idea to be perceived as something uniquely my own and not in relation to. How aware are you when you're writing something like Schitt's Creek or Good Grief of the quiet revolutionary that you are behind your words? Because showing relationships like that between David and Patrick and Schitt's Creek, between Mark and Oliver and Good Grief, and showing them so that they're not trapped by what a straight society might perceive of as their own inherent tragedy, but showing them with nuance and warmth. It's just so refreshing and it is life-changing for so many people who watch it.

8:36Are you or were you aware of doing that? When you spend a lot of your life looking at versions of yourself that are constantly in pain, there is a desire to create a better outcome. And that was really important for me, especially in Schitt's Creek when we started tackling the conversation of sexual identity and how it was discussed and making this active choice that it was never going to be in question, that the town was going to be unbelievably supportive and that the family would be the foursome that had the most to reckon with in terms of their own beliefs and their own sense of self. And it was in that little shift making sure that this town that we landed in was a safe haven for them, even though they didn't see it at first.

9:27Or maybe, I mean, in Moira's case, I don't know if she would ever fully recognize that it was a safe haven for her, but the kindness and the warmth of that town and that little domino effect of saying, okay, we're not going to make the small town the butt of the joke as it always tends to be. but rather this progressive place where it is nothing but acceptance. That created this domino effect of, well, what if nothing was questioned? And we just wrote to that. And that was the only kind of active choice that was made. The idea of David and Patrick and the conversations that they had about their relationship and their sense of identity and who they were to each other just felt like me trying to write from as truthful a place as I could about my own experience.

10:15So much of David's ups and downs came from my failures, which we might discuss a bit later. I don't know. I pushed back on this idea that I had to sensationalize them and anything that involved who they were and what they meant. In a way, it was kind of boring to me. I'd seen it. And I've also seen people do it in really beautiful ways. So if we are going to make a lesson out of it, let those people do that. And I'll just tell the story as is. And in a way, I think that made an impact in spite of my not expecting it to or wanting it to. I don't know. You have to just write what's truthful. Yes.

10:58You have to write life. Well, talking about writing life and writing truth, I'm going to do that annoying interviewer thing where I conflate your character with who you actually are. Fabulous. So in Good Grief, one of the laugh out loud moments for me was when Emma Corrin is playing a performance artist, just like knitting herself into red wool. She asks your character, are you scared? And you reply all the time. Are you scared, Dan? Always. In spite of your success? Yeah. I don't know whether that has anything to do with being gay. I can only imagine that it has something to do with the fact that for a large chapter of my life, I was presenting as someone who was very different from who I actually am.

11:43I think when you're closeted for those formative years in your life, there will always be a level of questioning. Like, am I good enough? Do I deserve to be in this room? Am I equal? It's a very bizarre sort of series of questions to ask yourself. And yet when you have been made to feel less than for those formative years of your life throughout school, et cetera, you know, summer camp, it stays with you. And you can have all the success in the world, but it's really hard to shake those kind of foundational layers. And I've learned to work with them and not against them. They certainly drive me.

12:29Proving those people wrong is certainly in the back of my mind. And I also wonder whether it has something to do with being Canadian. I feel like being British and Canadian, there is this, you can't ever think too highly of yourself. It's an unbecoming quality to have like a ton of confidence. And yet navigating where a belief in yourself and overconfidence, where that clashes to me is always that dance. That idea of proving bullies wrong. I honestly, I'm so grateful for it now because I have insane drive. I will never be able to prove it wrong in my head. I know. Well done us. Before we get onto your failures, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the language of quote unquote coming out.

13:16because I'm always wary of using it because it feels like you're coming out of something or you have to appear from the disguise of being in the closet and that there's this shadowy place that you exist in. And I just wanted to ask how you felt about the vocabulary that people use around sexuality and whether it's ever bothered you. I don't know. I think it's something I've just accepted, whether that's a good or a bad thing. I think the act of coming out is such a bizarrely unnatural thing because essentially what you're asking a young person to do is proclaim who they're attracted to. And if you think about being young and trying to navigate the weird sensations of love and attraction and lust, they're so private.

14:06And for most people or for a lot of people, they'll never have to discuss that with their family or their friends, the idea of who they're attracted to. It's such an aggressive thing at such a vulnerable age. I'm speaking specifically to young people that come out. I was a lot older, but still I felt that vulnerability of it's exposing. And it should be a far more natural process. We should be able to kind of reveal who we're attracted to as opposed to proclaim it. And I hope that there can be a time in culture where we don't have to do that, where the assumption is it doesn't matter and it'll reveal itself over time.

14:52It's not going to require a proclamation. And it was your mother, wasn't it, who eventually said? Who asked. Who asked you? Mm-hmm. Was that a relief that she'd asked you? Yeah, it was. And it was also something that it came at the right time. It didn't feel inappropriate, but I genuinely didn't know if I was ever going to say it myself. And I wrote that actually into the Patrick's coming out story, his idea that like, he just got scared of the what if, because in the back of your mind, you've seen so many things. I mean, we're talking about film and television. How many times have we seen coming out stories where the parents kind of disown the kids?

15:30It happens. It's life. It happens all the time, every day. I actually found a great catharsis in writing that episode of television and flipping the idea of a coming out story on its head. Once we realized what that was, even writing a coming out story is so hard because it's been done really well. It's been done, in my opinion, not so great in some situations. The fear of the parents and their reaction, having their reaction be, we only wish we could have created a world where he could have told us sooner. That thing felt like a really interesting world that hadn't been explored. in the same way that Good Grief was this amazing catharsis and expression of how I feel.

16:14I'm either incredibly emotive or I'm not emotive at all. But writing has allowed me to feel things in a way that's not physically expressive, if that makes sense. Beautiful. Your first failure relates to a time in second grade, which for UK listeners is when you're about seven or eight years old? I would think so. It's like kindergarten for a couple of years and then first grade and second grade. So I don't know what that... Yeah. So what happened? I bring this up as a failure because sometimes, you know, there are these snags in our memory where we stick on these moments and they should have just come and gone.

16:50And yet they are as vivid as the day it happened. And the earliest huge failure for me was, it was my birthday, except my birthday's in August. So we, you know, you're very young and you want to celebrate with everybody because everybody who has a birthday during the school year gets to have cake and thing. So my mom made me a cake to bring in right as the school year started in September in Canada. So we did a celebration around my birthday because it's in August. And I was feeling a little embarrassed anyway because it wasn't really my birthday, but it was anyway. The cake is at the back of the classroom.

17:29My teacher says, we have a surprise for the class. I knew what the surprise was. And she said, Daniel, I'm going to go and get the cake. And I said, no, no, no, I can get the cake. I'll get the cake. Very excited, happy to share with the class. The cake is revealed. The class is excited. Just as I get to the front of the classroom, I trip and the cake falls out of my hand and onto my shoes and flips sort of cake first onto the ground. And the class obviously is hysterically laughing. And it is the deepest humiliation I'd felt in my young life. And I looked around and didn't know what to do. And it's that time where you're young and you don't know whether you should cry or laugh.

18:12And so my reaction was to sort of, I guess, go completely pale in the face and then reach down and start to eat the cake off my shoes. I don't know what that impulse was. I think it was kind of panic and deep embarrassment. And it was a moment that I've remembered because in a way, I've kind of intellectualized it as like the first exertion of hubris or something. Like I was like, no, no, no, I got the cake. You don't need to get the cake for me. I have it. And I didn't. I was too young. My hands were probably too small. The cake was too heavy. all of those things. And then it just, it was a symbolic thing, I have to say.

19:01It's so interesting to me how many people on this podcast do choose moments like that from their early childhood where they embarrass themselves. And I think it's that thing of when you're a child and you're trying to work out who you are in this confusing world, and you don't know whether someone is making fun of you or is on your side, it can feel quite terrifying. And I, a bit like you, I didn't have the happiest school experience for various reasons. And I wonder what you were like after that as a child at school. What was your school experience? I just, to me, I look back, I've never liked school.

19:38Me neither. Not a single day. And I think part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn't the truest expression of myself. And I think when you're playing a part of, it gets exhausting and you don't like yourself because you're hiding yourself. In my particular case, I just wanted to get through it because I think in my mind, I thought once school is done, people will have the maturity to accept me. I think it was toward the end of the last year of my high school experience that I told some friends. It wasn't a safe space. It's tough. It's tough. And I think also when you're the butt of the joke or you are bullied, it makes sense to me that you now write the jokes.

20:24Yeah, of course. You want to be in control of when people laugh. Yeah. I didn't think of it that way, but now that you bring it up, it makes sense. Yeah. And also, yeah, a control of—and also how the jokes are formed. And I think the one thing I learned from both my dad and Catherine O 'Hara during the creation of Schitt's Creek was you can tell very funny jokes about people in celebration of people, but not at their expense. And there's a very fine line between cruel comedy and observational comedy. And I will always lean towards observational comedy. The roast sort of world of it all is its own subculture, which is something I would kill for the self-confidence to endure.

21:12I also think that's why shit's worked. Because there was a warmth to the comedy and everyone was laughing at themselves as well as everyone else. There was a kind of democracy of comedy across the board. There was no butt of the joke. And that will always be something I'm trying to rewrite through my whole life, I think. Through anything I do is the kind of reversal of the first chapter of my own life, I guess.

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23:45Your second failure is dating in your 20s. That's a general, that's a big general decade-long failure, yeah. Tell us why you chose this. Because I think, in my mind, like, analyzing failures, to me they have to mean something. They have to shape you and hopefully shape you for the better. and I look back on my 20s as a decade where, again, when you're just coming into yourself, which I was at sort of 19 or 20, my relationship to Roman, I wasn't dating in high school. I mean, I was, but taking a poor young girl to center stage as a date was not - What is center stage? Center stage was a movie that came out, I want to say in the early 2000s, Okay.

24:33Based around the ballet community. Sounds amazing. In case she couldn't tell them. I had this very stunted, like, very underdeveloped sense of myself in relation to what I wanted romantically, sexually, in relationships. And it came from a very vulnerable place. And so I look at myself in my 20s and think, oh, my God. I had no self-respect. I would put up with anything. I was constantly chasing people who had one foot out the door. there was almost a comfort in knowing that it wasn't going to work out because it was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy of like well that can feed into the narrative that there's something wrong with me that I'm like fated to to live this kind of you know solitary life when it simply wasn't the case I was just going after people that I definitely should have not should have avoided and looking back on it.

25:30I mean, it's informed so much of what I do. I think going through that has, I've written about it in the TV show. In a way, I sort of wrote a little bit about it in the movie as well. Himesh Patel's character, Thomas, is someone who at one point feels very much like he, like nothing works out for him. I pulled a little bit from my own life from those very scary decade of my 20s where I thought the same thing until you realize you have to have the confidence in yourself to kind of override this habit of constantly putting yourself in submissive situations that don't serve you. And gosh, did I date some duds.

26:17Tell us some stories. Oh, God. I moved someone once across the country, got them a job, We had dated and then sort of separated and then kept conversation. And the conversation was very intense and intimate. And I went to visit his family at one point. And then I got him a job because we didn't live in the same city, but he was expressing interest in moving back to Toronto where I was based. got him a job landed had a had a met up for an evening and then the next day was like I just want I just want you to know that I have no interest in in being with you in a relationship and I said um are you sure you could have brought this up like months before yeah and you realize I had overextended myself in this desperate way, and yet in the back of my mind was never clear about it.

27:15Because I think I deep down knew that there was something not totally right. But I was too scared to actually say, what does this mean? And I think that's what your 30s does. I think when you turn 30, you have nothing to lose at that point. Not to say that 30 is old, but it shifts your perspective of what it is to date. I moved to London to get away from someone that I dated in my early 20s. London completely saved my life in my early 20s. It brought me out of my shell. It got me my first job because I had just tortured myself with someone who was never fully committed and then was and then wasn't and then was and then wasn't.

27:56And the connection was really strong, but then it wasn't. But then it was. That's on me for putting up with that. It's also on culture, I think, in a way, because I think we are indoctrinated into the belief that passion is uncertainty and will they, won't they? And I don't know. It's all a game. And now in my 40s, I'm like, no, true love is knowing where you stand. And it might feel less like fireworks at the beginning, but I would much rather have a slow building bonfire that sustains its heat. And so I think you do yourself a disservice when you say it was all you, because I think it's partly that.