Dan Levy opened up about how his father’s fame affected him in childhood.
Levy, who cast his dad, Eugene Levy, 79, in his Emmy-winning comedy they co-created, Schitt’s Creek, opened up about the experience on the Q with Tom Power podcast.
“I hated it. It caused some pain in my relationship with my dad,” Levy said. “When you are a closeted person who is repressing parts of yourself and is feeling incredibly insecure about who you are and the space you take up in the world, the last thing you want is for people to be staring.”
Levy revealed on a 2020 episode of Watch What Happens Live that he came out to his family at age 18. He was previously referred to as a “member of the LGBTQ community” in a 2015 interview with Flare.
The actor’s sexuality made having a famous father more difficult, he explained, because “the attention that we would get every time we left the house was incredibly uncomfortable for me.” He added, “I started to distance myself from being with him in public.”
“I just didn’t want to do things,” he went on. “Baseball games? Absolutely not. Way too many eyes. Restaurants, a lot of eyes. So I would opt out of that.” Ultimately, the gestures offended his father, who Levy said “understandably” took it “personally.”
“I think I was too young to even explain that it made me uncomfortable,” Levy said. “I saw it as a necessity to keep myself feeling comfortable in the world as someone who was not comfortable in the world,” he shared.
The pair was able to clear the air after the star vocalized what was happening for him. “We had that conversation, and it was important for us to have that clarity. I think it was really important for him to understand why I acted the way I did for so long,” Levy said.
The father-son duo’s show, Schitt’s Creek, which ran from 2015 to 2020, won nine Emmys in its final season—a record for a comedy series’ single season.
Levy debuted his follow-up to Schitt’s Creek, Big Mistakes, in New York over the weekend—and told People his father has been very supportive. “He came all the way from Canada to support,” he told the site, after his father and mother, Deborah Divine, came to the premiere. “They’re already quoting lines from it, and they’re very excited to watch it again. So, that’s all I could ask for.”
Big Mistakes is now streaming on Netflix.
