Dan Levy Talks Movies, Dating, and Why He Gets His Tarot Cards Read ‘Every Six Months’ (Exclusive) 

Dan Levy just pulled the Wheel of Fortune card. The Canadian actor — best known as David Rose on the beloved 2015–2020 sitcom Schitt’s Creek — recently made his feature directorial debut with the Netflix drama Good Grief. Now he's having his tarot cards read in West Hollywood.

“I don’t worry about the future,” Levy, 40, says. “I am a worrier about the present.” Luckily, one of his closest friends, Trevor Ballin, is a tarot reader. (“Dan is actually a little bit psychic,” Ballin says later when Levy is out of earshot.)

“Every six months I get my cards read,” Levy says. “It’s a recalibration of where I’m headed.”

Where he’s headed, Ballin says, is up — and over a little, towards love. “There is tremendous possibility right now,” Ballin tells him. “Savor this moment. And take a break.” 

He pulls another card: “This is the year you’ll meet someone.”.

But first, Levy may have to take a moment to breathe. “I think I’m just pre-programmed to work. And I’m only now freeing up some space to, hopefully, meet somebody,” he says, pushing up his thick black frames. “The cards are screaming at me, ‘You’re gonna win big! Accept any and all dates!’ ” He pauses with a chuckle. “Cut to, me as the next Bachelor.”

It was a little more than 15 years ago that Levy debuted as a host on MTV Canada. Back then, he was a stylish guy with cool glasses known as the son of Eugene Levy, the dad in American Pie.

Folks began to ask where he got his frames. "I kind of felt guilty telling like a 12-year-old you to go and spend hundreds of dollars on, you know, some Tom Ford frames." So he founded DL Eyewear. He wants to clarify its beginnings. "It's not a celebrity brand because, well, it was founded before I was a celebrity."

The company now offers dozens of frames — sunglasses at $150, optical frames at $140 — and fans are still asking where he gets his. They also ask where he gets his clothes. But those will never bear his initials on the label.

"I would never go into clothing," he says. "Because I don't I don't know about design. I don't know about designing clothes, I love wearing clothes, sure." He knows he'd be, like the hundredth celebrity to start designing fashion. "But I don't know if having good style means that you should take a job from somebody who has gone to school for it."

In 2015 came Schitt’s Creek, a show about a formerly rich family exiled to a small, rural town. Cocreated by Levy and his dad and starring Eugene, 77, his sister Sarah Levy, 37, and Catherine O’Hara, 69, it was a pandemic juggernaut that swept the Emmys in 2020 and launched Levy as a bonafide style and meme star.

The gif of his TV sister saying, “Ew, David,” is still in heavy iPhone rotation. “Folks would even scream from passing cars, out their windows at me, ‘Ew!’” he says with a laugh. “If you create something that lives with people to the point where they forget who you are, I will never take offense to that.”

Asked about the possibility of a Schitt's Creek movie, Levy says: "One hundred percent...I don't know."

Levy reveals that he almost got to play another role which would have lived deep in the consciousness of everyone last summer: one of the Kens in the 2023 blockbuster Barbie. He had to turn it down due to scheduling conflicts.

“That was a tough, tough day,” Levy says. “It’s not like it isn’t one of the biggest movies of all time. Does it haunt me when I sleep at night? Sometimes.”

But with Good Grief, Levy moves beyond Schitt’s Creeks’ theatre of the absurd and deep into the shadows of the bereft. In the film, which he wrote, directed and stars in, Levy plays an artist who is getting over the death of his husband, played by Luke Evans, via a trip to Paris with his two best friends.

In the casting of Evans, whom he had never met, Levy says, "His character has such a small amount of time physically in the film. And yet lives in almost every scene of the movie. So it took someone larger than life, someone like Luke, who could hold that space in the first like 15 minutes of the film." He pauses. "We needed Gaston," he says with a laugh, referencing Evans' turn in the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. But, really, the movie is a love story about friendship, Levy says.

“As someone who’s single a lot, your friends are the loves of your life.” Levy says. “The friends I have are lifers. I love them dearly, to the point where I wrote a movie about that love and how it can save us in the hardest of times. I wanted the romance to be on the sidelines for once.”

Dealing with his own grief after the 2020 death of his grandmother, Patricia Divine, was a steep learning curve that Levy drew upon when writing the script. “I was asking a lot of questions: whether I was doing it properly or if I was feeling enough or if I was honoring the loss, the people,” he recalls. “And then my dog passed away.”

The double loss dovetailed with his 40th birthday.

“I had this belief that I had to have my life together by 40,” he explains. “And, as I explored in the movie, that’s simply an unrealistic expectation. We can talk about it, we can write about it, we can think about it, but nobody ever has their life together. And now I believe, if you had your life together you’d be an incredibly boring person.” He pauses. “Time time goes on. Or doesn’t, according to Mariah Carey. And she’s one of the great philosophers of our time.”

So his cards say take a break. “My brain is never still, but the tarot cards are telling me to stop. I don’t know why I struggle so much. But the cards say I have to say “yes” now?”

Ballin offers encouragement. ”It’s time to celebrate. You will meet someone who will inspire you," he says.

Now Levy is totally in. "Well, the answer is yes then!"