Seth Rogen Honors Catherine O’Hara with a Heartfelt Speech at The Studio Actor Awards: Celebrating Kindness and Talent
Seth Rogen Honors Catherine O’Hara with SAG Award Acceptance Speech
Seth Rogen delivered a heartfelt acceptance speech at the recent SAG Awards, where he accepted the award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series on behalf of the late Catherine O’Hara, the star of The Studio. Describing the honor as "very sad," Rogen moved the audience to their feet as he paid tribute to his late colleague.
"I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, whom I know she respected so much. She was such a big fan of all of yours," Rogen began, as the camera captured the emotional reaction of his co-star Kathryn Hahn.
Reflecting on his time with O’Hara, Rogen praised her generosity and talent. "I have been fortunate enough to spend time working with her, and something 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,” he said.
The ceremony, streamed on Netflix, also featured Jenna Ortega, a nominee in the same category who had previously co-starred with O’Hara in Beetlejuice, visibly moved as she wiped away tears.
Rogen shared a personal anecdote about O’Hara’s dedication to her craft. “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…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."
In conclusion, Rogen urged the audience to remember O’Hara’s work. "If you have people in your lives that don’t know her work…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. 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.”
Catherine O’Hara, beloved star of SCTV, Home Alone, and Schitt’s Creek, passed away in late January at the age of 71 due to a pulmonary embolism with rectal cancer as the underlying cause. Her loss is felt deeply among her co-stars and the entertainment community.
