“I think he was right”: the only scene Catherine O’Hara wasn’t allowed to shoot
When Catherine O’Hara died earlier this year, it came as a great shock to many of us, not least because she was only 71 years old. But it’s hard to imagine someone who was always so profoundly full of life and warmth no longer roaming the earth, especially with her effortless humour and wit.
Seth Rogen put it well when he accepted her posthumous Actor Award on her behalf, saying, “She really showed that you can be a genius and be kind, and one of those things does not have to come at the expense of the other in any way, shape or form.”
Whether she was fretting over her son in Home Alone or refusing to accept her new life in Schitt’s Creek, O’Hara was always a joy to watch, because you can tell how invested she was in every role, and in fact, she was never short of ideas, often suggesting adjustments to scenes and bringing her improvisational skills. Sometimes, though, her ideas went just that little bit too far.
O’Hara collaborated with mockumentary filmmaker Christopher Guest various times, improvising many of her lines in the comedy Best in Show, in which she starred alongside Eugene Levy as her husband, the pair owning a dog called Winky. While she was always bringing ideas to set, there was a moment when she pushed it to the extreme, and for the first time, Guest had to say no.
“I did have Chris say no to one thing in Best in Show. It was based on something I had heard about in real life. So I told Eugene this idea, and I said, ‘I’m thinking of doing this… idea, backstage with the dog.’ You never have to run anything by Chris. We all know what’s supposed to be achieved in the scenes, and we do our best. We’re also free to offer anything. But I must have known this was risky enough that I ran it by Eugene,” she told the New Yorker.
Straight away, Levy was hesitant. Perhaps this really was too far after all. “Eugene said, ‘You might want to run that by Chris before we shoot.’ I go, ‘Well, he can say no afterwards, he can not use it…” And Eugene said, ‘No, I think you might want to…’ Never in any shooting of those movies did Chris ever say no, except in that moment.”
So what was O’Hara suggesting? “I’ll just say it involved… ‘relaxing’ a dog,” she said. “I kept saying, ;But I know somebody who does it! ’Cause the dogs are nervous before the show.’ It’s not a surprise that Guest said no to wanking off a dog – animal rights activists would’ve gone absolutely nuts.
Still, Best in Show was a success, and O’Hara gave a tremendously funny performance that didn’t require any animal masturbation – that’s something you’d be more likely to see in a John Waters film, and while it might not have grossed a huge amount ($20.8million against its $10m budget, to be precise), it was highly acclaimed for its ridiculous array of characters and improvisational comedy.
With O’Hara and Levy pairing up, what more could you want?
