TV

Schitt's Creek stars on their tearful goodbye: 'It doesn't feel final'

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Published on April 7, 2020 11:45PM EDT

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Schitt's Creek series finale, "Happy Ending."

As they sometimes say, goodbye for now, not goodbye for good.

The wedding bells were rung, the vows were exchanged, Catherine O'Hara donned her last wig, and Schitt's Creek came to an end Tuesday night with the season 6 finale. For series co-creator and star Dan Levy, it doesn't feel like the end for these characters, just for the audience.

"The great thing about these characters and where we leave them is that we don't know as an audience what's going to happen to them, but we know it's going to be fine," Levy says on a new episode of the EW On Set podcast, arriving in full Wednesday morning. "That, to me, is a great thing because I don't want to know everything about these characters. When I leave a show, I want to think about what's going on and the lives that they're going to lead, and leave some things unsaid so that it doesn't feel final. It feels like now's the time that we get to go away from experiencing this, but they're going to keep living."

Levy, who has played David Rose since the Pop TV comedy premiered in January 2015, likens it to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag. "That was one of the most brilliant ends to a season… or series, I guess at this point, when she looks at the camera and tells it to go away," he says. "That's all you want from a series finale: This is the time where you guys can walk away and have everything else exist in private… or until I get an idea to go back and retell some stories."

In the finale episode, "Happy Ending," David and Patrick (Noah Reid) finally tied the knot, though their nuptials weren't without complications. No rain, no storm, no change of venue, no funny mixup involving a "happy ending" massage, no Alexis (Annie Murphy) wearing white to her brother's own wedding could prevent them from living happily ever after. But that also meant that by morning, Moira (O'Hara) would go off to start filming the Sunrise Bay reboot, Johnny (co-creator Eugene Levy) would move on from the town of Schitt's Creek to focus on his new business, and Alexis would start her journey to New York, leaving the newlyweds, with help from their best friend Stevie (Emily Hampshire), to set up their new home.

To say it was an emotional moment for the cast isn't saying much.

As Moira, who officiated the ceremony dressed in an outlandish but quintessential Moira outfit, O'Hara "had to cry over and over and over that day." But she says it was easy to summon the waterworks, "knowing that it was our last season."

"It was probably the most emotional blocking of a scene that I've ever experienced," Reid says of the wedding. "It was in the town hall set, completely covered with flowers and filled to the brim with people, the Jazzagals on either side singing these beautiful arrangements that are our choral arranger, Aaron [Jensen], came up with… It was a pretty magical day really, very emotional. Dan's eyes never stopped watering, I'm pretty sure."

Eugene Levy admits he cried the whole day: "I think it was only the very last shot where we're leaving — Moira and I are walking back down the aisle — [that] I just ran dry at that point. I actually had nothing left in the tank, and that was the only time I asked makeup, 'You've got to drop something in my eye because I don't have a tear left.'"

The final shot of season 6 left behind a gift for the Rose family: The billboard welcoming drivers to Schitt's Creek once depicted an ancestor of Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott) waving as he posed, ahem, rather awkwardly with his sister. Now it features the Rose family, courtesy of some strings pulled by Roland as a farewell gift.

"There was a lot of discussion, too, about whether we'd see it or not," O'Hara says of that moment. "At first they were going to have both of us see it, and then there was physically craning my head way over and out the same window as Johnny. I also liked the idea that Roland would have the last laugh on at least one of us. So Moira doesn't see it. Johnny looks out."

The crew had the billboard draped most of the day during production as drivers drove past. "Then, just for the quick shot, they unveil it," O'Hara recalls. "All of us are in front of it, taking picture after picture after picture, posing. It's so great. It's so well done."

In true Moira style, she adds, "I liked because my face looked pretty in it, too."