Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy Illustration by Tom Bachtell

On a recent Monday afternoon, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara were in town, taping an episode of the “Tonight Show” at NBC. Before talking about “Schitt’s Creek,” the Canadian sitcom on which they co-star, now in its second season, they played Pictionary with Jimmy Fallon and Shailene Woodley. Fallon drew a cat and a tongue. Levy said, “Cat, tongue. Cat, tongue.” His thick black eyebrows flew up. “Hold your tongue!” he said. A buzzer sounded, and Fallon hurled a pillow from the couch. “Another ten minutes and I would’ve had it,” Levy said.

The night before, in Toronto, “Schitt’s Creek,” which Levy and his son, Daniel, co-created, had won nine Canadian Screen Awards. (In the U.S., it airs on the Pop network.) The show is about the Rose family—a wealthy couple (Levy and O’Hara) and their feckless adult children (Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy)—who lose their money and move to Schitt’s Creek, a shabby town they once bought as a joke. (The town is so shabby that its mayor is Chris Elliott, scuzzily haggard, with a mullet.) Daniel Levy’s sister, Sarah, plays a local waitress.

Levy and O’Hara, both long married, have known each other for forty-four years, and have played a couple several times. Offscreen, they are familiar and fond. Backstage, O’Hara, looking elegantly fun—dark eye makeup, multidirectional hairdo, gray dress, beige fishnets, pink pumps—fretted quietly to Levy. Levy, in a subtly patterned suit that a tycoon might wear, extended his arms. “It was fine, Catherine. Oh, come on, it was great.” He kissed her on the cheek.

Outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, they headed to an S.U.V. Photographers called their names, flashbulbs popping. The next stop was a “Schitt’s Creek” panel at the 92nd Street Y. In the car, they talked about their roles and the old days. Levy’s character, Johnny, is not the sort of legendary bumbler the actor has played in the past. (Imagine Levy in the movies, and he’s pursuing a mermaid and falling down a flight of stairs, or singing “My Bubbe Made a Kishke,” or walking in on his son with a pie.) He said, “The intention was for me to be the straight man. Like Jack Benny: funny people around him, and he just moves the story. ‘Well, we should be going.’ ”

O’Hara’s character, Moira, is a former soap-opera actress with a vast collection of wigs. In one scene, she ransacks the couple’s motel room looking for a pair of earrings, screaming every time she doesn’t find them.

“I think there has to be an anchor,” Levy said.

“I think I’m that,” O’Hara said. “I hold the family together.”

“You do . . .” Levy sounded equivocal. “You’re grounded at times, but you have your moments.”

Levy and O’Hara went on a few dates in the seventies. “Everyone at Second City tried dating each other,” O’Hara said. “Eugene took me out to breakfast.” She looked at him. “You wanted bacon and eggs, and you wanted me to come along.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Levy said. Driving her home after another date, Levy said, he took a turn too fast, hit a guardrail, and messed up a car wheel.

Early on at Second City, Levy said, “I had one piece in the show. My act was Ricardo and His Trained Amoeba. It was a guy with a whip. He’s making an amoeba do tricks. After every trick, he takes out his microscope, opens it, checks to see if the amoeba is there, and goes, ‘Ta-da!’ ”

O’Hara said, “The first scene I did with the cast, I was understudying Gilda”—Radner. “It was something about mosquitoes. All I did was slap people. Mainly John Candy. Slap, slap. I slapped his arms, I slapped his face. I thought, I’m just going to kill mosquitoes on this guy! We came backstage afterward, and he said, ‘Have you ever heard of fuckin’ mime?’ But he was sweet about it.”

Levy said, “The first thing I did, they said, ‘Well, we’re doing a murder scene, and you be the corpse.’ ” Later, he said, he did some scenes with Andrea Martin.

“Did you ever date her?” O’Hara asked.

“Yes, yes,” Levy said. “We had done ‘Cannibal Girls’ together, an improvised movie about women that eat men. The cut line on the poster was ‘These Girls Eat Men.’ I had a big Afro, a big mustache, big muttonchop sideburns. I had no clue that what we were doing in front of the camera would one day be on a giant screen, and people were going to be looking at it. I didn’t really put that together.”

In the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, O’Hara said, “Did we come here with ‘SCTV,’ Eugene, or am I dreaming?”

“I was here ten years ago,” Levy said. “A panel called ‘Why Are Canadians So Funny?’ ”

Onstage, with Daniel Levy seated nearby, he told the crowd, “There’s not a day I take for granted that my kids are in a scene with Catherine O’Hara.”

O’Hara smiled. She said, “The first time I looked at the two sets of eyebrows . . . ” She trailed off. The audience laughed. Daniel Levy raised his thick black eyebrows above the frames of his glasses, and the audience laughed some more. ♦