The legendary Catherine O’Hara has died at the age of 71, and it’s hard to imagine a world without her. But it’s even harder to imagine a world where she didn’t play Moira Rose on “Schitt’s Creek,” the Canadian TV comedy about a wealthy American family who falls from grace. Yet, according to “Best Wishes, Warmest Regards: A Schitt’s Creek Farewell” (which aired alongside the series finale in 2020), she nearly turned her role down.

“It’s so stupid,” O’Hara admitted (via The AV Club). “Really, it’s lame to talk about not wanting to do it in the beginning. How stupid would I have been not to have done it?” As her co-star and longtime collaborator Eugene Levy put it, he didn’t want anyone else. “She’s always, like, a first choice,” the elder Levy explained. “She was a first choice with the movies that [Christopher Guest] and I did. I mean, number one name. ‘Let’s get Catherine.'”

Eugene Levy apparently told O’Hara, per her recollection, that it would take “just 15 minutes” for him to pitch her the show. “‘Then, even if it sells [without you], I won’t bug you about doing the role,'” she recalled him adding. It did sell without her, though, and Eugene Levy and his son Dan Levy, who co-created the show while also playing David and Johnny Rose (Moira’s son and husband, respectively), realized that they needed O’Hara to make it all work.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t think so. I’m kind of busy … doing nothing,'” O’Hara recalled, but Dan Levy had a solution. “I said, call her back … We’ll go one year at a time,” he explained in the documentary. “And if it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work. And he called her, and she said yes, and the rest is history.”