Big Mistakes: How Taylor Ortega Landed Starring Role in Dan Levy Show
Taylor Ortega.
Mary Ellen Matthews/Netflix © 2025
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Taylor Ortega was filming Another Simple Favor on location in Italy when she got the opportunity to audition for a new comedy series — Dan Levy‘s Big Mistakes. It seemed like a perfect fit: the character was her age, from a similar New Jersey hometown, with a personality description eerily similar to her own. She enlisted the help of her castmates to put together a self-tape. “I was in Italy for a month, so I was doing a lot of tapes while I was there, and at one point I had to do a live Zoom audition and had Alex Newell as my reader,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Sometimes you have a Tony winner at your disposal and you just have to beg them to help you.” Then, she tried her best to level-set her expectations.
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“The role seemed like such a one for one with me, but you do so many of these and you know that the creative teams already has an agenda, and that’s fine,” says Ortega. The approach worked a little bit too well, and she quite literally forgot about it. Then, six months later, the producers asked her to send in another tape, and a couple days later the actress found herself in a room doing a chemistry test with Levy. The next day, the creator and Schitt’s Creek star called and told her he was casting her as his co-lead in Big Mistakes. “I found out then that I was the very first person to audition for it,” she says. “And when you’re the first tape, you’re like an opening act for all the other actors. Nobody’s brain is like, let’s pick her, but luckily I ended up being a good enough fit that it came back around.”
The Netflix comedy, which comes from Levy and his co-creator Rachel Sennott, follows a pair of siblings who become accidentally entrenched in a criminal organization. Ortega plays Morgan, a former New York City public school teacher who is struggling with a recent downgrading of her circumstances: she’s back living in her hometown, with a longtime boyfriend she can’t quite admit she’s outgrown. When Morgan steals a necklace during a shopping trip with her brother (Levy), they find themselves indebted to the wrong people. While Big Mistakes follows a propulsive, crime-heavy plotline, the heart of the story lies in the lovingly abrasive relationship between the siblings; it’s not dissimilar in tone to Levy’s breakout hit Schitt’s Creek.
Ortega has, of course, never been involved in the mob but she says her upbringing was very similar to what we see on the series. “My family, they all have really big personalities and even though they’re not comedians, they’re really funny. In New Jersey, humor and rage are a big part of the way that people communicate — I don’t know anyone from there who’s truly boring.” Though her parents were strict, her father was intent on showing her movies by auteur directors, despite their level of age-appropriateness; Reservoir Dogs was an early formative watch, as was Saturday Night Live. She went to Columbia University and then entered New York’s improv scene, where she first met Sennott.
Taylor Ortega as Morgan with Dan Levy as Nicky in Big Mistakes.
“I feel like I talk about improv way too much, but I think it’s one of the most perfect comedic forms of expression because it’s impossible to monetize; you cannot commodify your talent and art in live improv, and that makes it really pure and fun,” she says. “It also teaches you how to respect other people’s ideas, because you really are forced to accept people’s contributions. The form doesn’t work without it.”
In 2022 she booked her first big job, a recurring role on Paul Feig’s mockumentary sitcom Welcome to Flatch, which relied heavily on improv for its straight-to-camera, confessional style of filmmaking. Ortega has become something of a Feig repertory player — she’s since appeared in 2024’s Jackpot and 2025’s Another Simple Favor — and has also had roles on What We Do in the Shadows and The Four Seasons. “I’m so grateful to Paul for seeing me as someone that he trusts, and I’m having that experience again now with Dan,” she says.
Though she admits to having a “parasocial” relationship with the actor during her years of bingeing Schitt’