It’s all in the family for Eugene Levy and CBC’s ‘Schitt’s Creek’

CBC’s Schitt’s Creek will return to TV in January 12.
(Photo courtesy of the official Twitter account of Schitt’s Creek)

TORONTO—Expect to see more of the Levy clan on the CBC comedy “Schitt’s Creek,” says patriarch Eugene Levy.

The proud papa says more screen time is in store for daughter Sarah Levy, whose role as a small-town waitress was largely confined to the diner in the first season.

Her role as Twyla expands to include more interaction with other townsfolk, while son Dan Levy digs deeper into the neuroses of his spoiled character, David Rose.

Eugene, of course, returns as Johnny Rose, the head of a wealthy family who lose their fortune and are forced to move to a tiny community devoid of the luxuries they’re used to.

The comic veteran can’t help but gush about working with his children during a recent interview.

“It’s a kick for me doing scenes with both my kids. It’s hard to explain how strange it is to be working professionally with your own kids, saying, ‘Wait a minute. These are my kids!”’ the “SCTV” alum said during a recent round of interviews next to co-star Catherine O’Hara.

“Thank God they’re talented. That could have been sad,” jokes O’Hara, who plays Johnny’s wife Moira.

“Are you kidding? Yes, it could have been,” Levy groans.

O’Hara says she was glad to see her character—a former soap star who spent much of the first season in denial—break out of her bubble in the second season.

“And for me that was really fun,” she says. “I got to work with the cool women, all the actresses who play all the women in the town, including Sarah Levy.”

If the first season was all about the Rose family’s desperate bid to escape newfound poverty, the second is all about them being forced to accept a new reality, says Dan Levy, the show’s co-creator.

“We sort of broke the characters down individually and said, ‘OK, now that we know they are staying in this town for longer than they had thought they were going to, how would each of these people react?’ Moira is not going to react the same way that Alexis would and we really took a long time thinking about, psychologically, how each of the family members would respond to this,” he says in a separate interview.

“It also made room for an emotional undercurrent to the season that wasn’t as present in the first. I think we really sort of dig in deeper with all the characters and all the stories…. We can really play with peeling back the layers a little more and exposing some of the vulnerable side of the situation and the characters.”

The second season of “Schitt’s Creek” begins Tuesday on CBC-TV with back-to-back episodes.