Actor Awards 2026: Seth Rogen pays poignant tribute to Catherine O’Hara
Seth Rogen paid a poignant tribute to Catherine O’Hara at the Actor Awards 2026, saying “she wanted to destroy” in every performance.
The ceremony took place on March 1st in Los Angeles, where the top echelons of the film and TV industry came together to celebrate their achievements over the past year, with a selection of the top awards going to major Oscars contenders such as Michael B Jordan and Jessie Buckley.
However, it was the ‘Female Actor in a Comedy Series’ category that sparked the most emotion, as O’Hara took home the prize for her role as Patty Leigh in The Studio, weeks after her death, aged 71.
In her place, Rogen, the show’s writer and leading actor, posthumously accepted the award on her behalf, paying tribute to the star before a standing ovation of rapturous applause.
“She would have been honoured to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much,” Rogen began in his speech, before adding, “Something I’ve been marvelling at over the past few weeks was her ability to be generous and kind and gracious, while never, ever minimising her own talents.”
The actor went on to note that O’Hara “knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day she was on set.”
Rogen also told an anecdote of how O’Hara would send emails to him and The Studio’s co-creator, Evan Goldberg, where she would offer complete rewrites of the scenes she was in. “Literally 100 per cent of the time, it made not just her character better, but the scene better, and the entire show better as a whole,” he added.
Before signing off the speech, Rogen urged the audience to share O’Hara’s breadth of work with those who may be unfamiliar, saying: “Tell the people as they are laughing that that’s Catherine O’Hara, and that we were lucky to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us.”
O’Hara passed away on January 30th at her home in Los Angeles following a brief illness, with her cause of death later being revealed as a pulmonary embolism with underlying rectal cancer.
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