Seth Rogen accepted the Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series for The Studio‘s late star Catherine O’Hara on Sunday. Calling it a “very sad honor,” the Apple TV series co-creator shared a moving speech dedication as the SAG-AFTRA crowd rose to its feet and applauded.
“I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who[m] I know she respected so much. She was such big fans of all of yours,” he began, as the camera panned to teary-eyed fellow co-star Kathryn Hahn.
“I, obviously, have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her and working with her, and something that I’ve just been marveling at over the last few weeks was really her ability to be generous and kind and gracious, while never, ever minimizing her own talents and her own ability to contribute to the work that we were doing. She knew she could destroy, and she wanted to destroy every day on set.”
Seth Rogen accepts the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series Award on behalf of the late Catherine O’Hara
(Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
The Netflix-streamed awards ceremony also panned to Jenna Ortega among the attendees, and the Wednesday star — who was nominated against O’Hara (with whom she co-starred in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) in the category — could be seen wiping tears away.
Rogen continued, “And I haven’t said this to the other actors, because I didn’t want them to get ideas, but pretty much every evening before she had a shooting day on our show, she would email me and [co-creator/EP] Evan [Goldberg] an email that always was pretty similar, and it said, ‘Hello, I hope you’ll consider the following.’ And then there would be a completely rewritten version of the scene she was in.”
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“And literally, 100% of the time, it made not just her character better, but it made the scene better and the entire show better as a whole. And 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,” Rogen added.
Concluding the tribute, Rogen said: “So I guess I’ll just leave you with this. If you have people in your lives that don’t know her work, if they’re kids in your lives, or just people who are out of touch or stupid or something, just show them O’Hara dancing to Harry Belafonte and Beetlejuice, show them O’Hara hurting her knee in Best in Show and doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around, and tell the people, as they are laughing, that that’s Catherine O’Hara, and we were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us.”
The beloved SCTV, Home Alone and Schitt’s Creek alumna died of a pulmonary embolism with rectal cancer as the underlying cause in late January of this year at age 71. The two-time Emmy-winning actress was mourned by her co-stars across series like The Studio and The Last of Us.
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