The Studio‘s creator and star, Seth Rogen, spoke on behalf of the late Catherine O’Hara, who won a posthumous honor from her peers at the 2026 Actor Awards.
Catherine, who passed at the age of 71, won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series for her role as Patty Leigh in The Studio.
Seth speech honoring Catherine:
“I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on O’Hara’s behalf,” began the Pineapple Express actor. “I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much. She was such a big fan of all of yours.”
“I obviously have been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her and working with her. Something that I’ve just been marveling at over the last few weeks was 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. 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 Evan [Goldberg] an email that always was pretty similar. 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, and literally 100 percent of the time, it made not just her character better, but it made the scene better and the entire show better as a whole.”
Catherine O’Hara proved “that you can be a genius and be kind. One of those things does not have to come at the expense of the other in any way, shape, or form.”
Seth assigned homework! (the good kind):
“I guess I’ll just leave you with this …”
“If you have people in your lives that don’t know her work, if there are kids in your lives or just people who are out of touch or stupid or something, just show them O’Hara dancing to Harry Belafonte in 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.”
Seth concluded, “We were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us.”
