Laurie Metcalf showed up on the first day of filming Netflix’s Big Mistakes with something she needed to say to Dan Levy: she knew she had “extremely big shoes to fill.” The Emmy-winner is stepping into the role of Linda Morelli, a frenetic mayoral candidate and the mother of Nicky, played by Levy, and Morgan, played by Taylor Ortega.
The reason that landed so sharply is simple: Levy’s first TV mother was Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek, and that performance left a mark. Metcalf did not try to talk around it. She told Levy they never discussed comparisons and that he wanted the dynamics to feel different, but she also said she wanted to be there for his character “just as much as Moira Rose was for him in Schitt’s Creek.”
That kind of pressure is part of what has made Metcalf such a useful screen presence in recent years. She has been cast in roles that ask her to play mothers who are not comforting in any easy way. This year, she also played Augusta Gein in Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story, opposite Charlie Hunnam as serial killer Ed Gein, a part she described as perhaps the darkest of her career since 1997’s Scream 2.
In that series, Metcalf said she wanted the darkness to come from the damage inside the relationship, not from an “evil mom” performance. She and Hunnam tried to find “a little bit of heart,” “a little connection,” and some sense that he looked up to his mother, even as the scenes moved toward something far more disturbing. Augusta Gein is presented as a deeply religious woman who haunts her son’s psyche even before she dies, which gave Metcalf another version of the same challenge: how to make a mother feel alive on screen without making her simple.
That is what makes Big Mistakes worth watching now. Metcalf is not just taking on another TV mother; she is doing it in a role that asks viewers to remember O’Hara’s iconic turn while watching Levy build a new family dynamic around Linda Morelli. The series has no release date yet, but the first-day exchange already suggests Metcalf is not trying to replace what came before. She is trying to make sure this mother leaves her own bruise.
