Dan levy confesses he almost beta-blocked his own podcast: inside his leap from emmy panic to netflix mob comedy
Dan Levy walked into Vogue’s podcast studio still vibrating from the memory of the 2020 Emmys, when a single beta-blocker saved him from imploding on live television. “I was seriously considering taking one before this interview,” he admitted to guest hosts Hannah Jackson and Margaux Anbouba on The Run-Through, the tremor in his voice half punch line, half confession. The stakes today were lower—no gold statues, no global audience—but the anxiety that fuels his writing was dialed up for a different reason: next Tuesday, Netflix drops Big Mistakes, the acid-tinted family-crime caper he co-concocted with Rachel Sennott after the two survived The Idol writers’ room.
From schitt’s creek to the canadian underworld
Levy insists the new show is not a pivot; it’s a dare. Where Schitt’s Creek wrapped its arms around a family learning kindness, Big Mistakes shoves siblings into laundering money for a Toronto cartel and dares them to claw their way out. “Committing to an idea you’re excited to tell in long form is intense,” he said, before dropping the kicker: “I have a very irrational fear of being blackmailed into organized crime.” The line drew a laugh, but Levy’s eyes stayed locked, suggesting the fear might be less irrational than he lets on.
Sennott and he wrote the pilot in a three-day fever, trading scenes over voice notes at 3 a.m., each trying to out-dark the other. Netflix bit within the week. Now, six hour-long episodes later, the show’s wardrobe alone—Marni platforms, vintage Helmut Lang, and a pivotal scene shot inside a Mississauga strip-mall nail salon—has already spawned TikTok mood boards. Levy, who once shopped exclusively at Toronto’s Club Monaco as a teen, calls the costumes “character exposition you can wear.”
While levy sweated the small stuff, vogue was staging its own heist
Across the Atlantic, Chioma Nnadi and British Vogue’s Laura Ingham used the same episode to unveil their latest coup: the Vogue Vintage Market, co-hosted by Alexa Chung and Lila Moss, raised six figures for Give Your Best, a charity that dresses refugee women for job interviews. Between sales of 1999 Gucci by Tom Ford and a Phoebe Philo-era Céline coat, Nnadi slipped in the real headline: Christopher Kane will replace Johnny Coca as creative director at Mulberry, ending months of speculation. The appointment, effective immediately, vaults the Scottish designer from independent darling to steward of a £163 million heritage house.
Levy, hearing the news through the studio glass, let out a low whistle. “Guess I’m not the only one making big mistakes on purpose,” he joked, smoothing the collar of his own JW Anderson cardigan—a gift from the designer, and a quiet reminder that in fashion, television, or crime, timing is the deadliest co-conspirator.