Martin Scorsese Broke U.S. Law to Hire Catherine O'Hara

Aside from members of the “eight-year-olds who have been abandoned by their parents at Christmastime” community, pretty much everybody loves Catherine O’Hara. Now the Schitt’s Creek star is appearing in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, reprising her role as Delia Deetz, aka the most unfairly maligned artist of our time.

Arguably one of O’Hara’s most underrated performances can be found in an existential black comedy directed by legendary filmmaker, and archenemy of YouTube Marvel bros everywhere, Martin Scorsese.

If you haven’t seen it, 1985’s After Hours is about a horny nine-to-fiver who just can’t find his way home following a late-night date that goes disastrously wrong. O’Hara plays a Mister Softee ice cream truck driver who befriends the doomed protagonist, Paul, before quickly turning on him and leading the vigilante mob hell-bent on taking him down. 

How did one of Canada’s greatest comedy stars connect with the director of Raging Bull? As O’Hara recently revealed in an interview with Parade Magazine, she randomly encountered the director while attending “a film festival in Toronto one year in the ‘80s.” Presumably this was the 1982 Toronto International Film Festival, which honored Scorsese at an event hosted by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

After going backstage at the University Theater along with her sister, O’Hara spotted Scorsese who was “waiting to be introduced.” And she was floored that he was the one who was starstruck. “He looks over and goes, ‘Hey, SCTV!’ Like, what?!” O’Hara recalled. “Then he invited us to join him, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and other people for dinner.”

Scorsese is reportedly a big fan of SCTV, the seminal Canadian sketch comedy series, so much so that he organized a cast reunion in 2018 and directed a documentary about the show for Netflix, which has frustratingly never been released. 

At the dinner, Scorsese was so excited about the possibility of working with O’Hara that he may have committed a crime. “He rips out a piece of his passport to give me his phone number, which I held on to forever but never called because I’m shy. That’s how I ended up in After Hours,” O’Hara explained.

From what we can tell, according to U.S. law it is illegal to intentionally “mutilate” one’s passport which technically “remains the property of the United States.” Granted, that’s seemingly just to prevent fraud, not to stop acclaimed filmmakers from giving out their phone numbers, but Scorsese later realized he probably should have just used a napkin or something. “He did end up telling me that he got into a lot of trouble for that page missing from his passport,” O’Hara confessed. 

But at least it was all in the service of a great movie, albeit one that liberally pilfered from an uncredited writer.

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