Moira Rose wouldn’t be caught dead admitting to having flubbed an audition or lost a role, but Catherine O’Hara in real life is a much more open book. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, which features an O’Hara photoshoot by drone, O’Hara reflects on her career in Hollywood, including passing up some more two-dimensional “wife” roles, like the Beverly D’Angelo part in the National Lampoon movies. But one role that she was “desperate” to play, and that she was in the running for, too, was the part of producer Jane Craig in Broadcast News, which ended up earning Holly Hunter a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
O’Hara recalls how director James L. Brooks “called her after her first audition to tell her how amazing she was,” but that she “blew it” so bad with the second audition that she wrote Brooks a letter asking to go in again. The third audition earned her a fourth: a chemistry test with Albert Brooks, which she describes as “a disastrous chemical misfire. On the way out the door, O’Hara remembers James Brooks stopping her and asking, ‘What happened to you?’” Hunter is perfect in Broadcast News and we wouldn’t have it any other way, but it’s definitely fun to imagine the heightened energy O’Hara could have brought to it. She’s no stranger to broadcast TV satire, after all. O’Hara also discusses how both of her sons worked as a set dresser and set constructor on Schitt’s Creek, which is such delightful, adorable knowledge.
