Taylor Ortega. Mary Ellen Matthews/Netflix © 2025 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’s Creek, the two didn’t formally meet until her final chemistry test for the role on Big Mistakes. Levy wrote a scene that he intended to use just for the audition — featuring his character and Ortega’s trapped in the back of a truck driven by one of the mob players, having a screaming match that is reflective of their combative, yet loving, relationship — but the rapport between the two actors was so palpable that he added it to the show. “I’m a big talker, I’m a Gemini, and I move very quickly in a conversation and have been told that in an argument I get too focused on the facts and the logic,” she says. “So I figured I could play this role pretty close to type. I didn’t have to come up with a whole persona.”
In addition to the more propulsive elements of the show, Big Mistakes also spends a lot of time with its main characters’ relationships. Levy’s Nicky is a pastor who is hiding his boyfriend from his family and his ministry, and Ortega’s Morgan is regretfully engaged to her longtime boyfriend (played by Adults‘ Jack Innanen). Ortega drew from her own life for this, too. “This might be a lesson that, as a queer person, I was gifted with learning sooner than other people, but it’s so important to know that if you’re findign yourself resenting the person you’re with, it’s time to go,” she says. The actress went through similar relationships in her early twenties, dating men with whom she was not well-matched, and feeling completely unable to be honest about the situation. “I would be like, maybe tragedy will befall him, and then no one will be mad at me for leaving him because I will be in mourning,” she laughs. “I should have just had the hard conversation, but at age 22 I just thought, surely he’ll drown in the ocean and no one will ever have to be upset with me for one second.”
Big Mistakes, which streams all episodes on Thursday, is Ortega’s first starring role (“I’m used to being comic relief”), and she says that the heavier lift of the show gave her a taste for more challenges — she’d love to try theater. But first, Ortega and the rest of the cast hope that the series connects well enough with audiences to greenlight more seasons. “Dan has a big picture for the show, from beginning to end, so we would love to do the version of the show that he’s envisioned,” she says. “So I hope that whoever finds this show really loves it — and I hope that it’s many people who find it and love it.”
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