Schitt’s Creek star Dan Levy reveals he lived in London in early 2000s and loved British celebrities

Dan Levy has revealed he lived in London for about seven months in the early 2000s and used to love reading about British celebrities of the day.

The Schitt’s Creek star, 37, opened up about his memories from his time in England on the podcast Table Manners on Wednesday.

He worked in a talent agency but said his guilty midweek pleasure was buying Heat magazine and reading about celebs like Jordan, Jade Goody and Sienna Miller.

The Canadian actor emigrated to London after he finished university, around 2005, in order to get some space from a ‘tricky’ relationship and to find confidence.

Dan said: ‘[I] had a tricky romantic situation that I needed to take some space from and I always had a highly romanticised fascination with England. Notting Hill, Bridget Jones are all my favourite movies.’

Describing the move as an ‘eat pray love situation’, he said he moved in the hope the experience would help him come out of his shell and set him up for life.

‘I had a lot of social anxiety,’ he said. ‘It was an eat pray love situation where I knew I had to make this choice to be a better person.

‘And to hopefully find a kind of peace and a kind of confidence I had with myself that would set me up for a better relationship, or set me up for a better job cause I could barely talk to people.’

Dan landed himself with an internship on Oxford Street in the talent agency, ICM, where he was thrown in the deep-end answering phones all day and in order to de-stress he would read gossip magazines. 

‘Every Wednesday when I knew that work was getting overwhelming, I had a ritual that made me so happy,’ he said.  

‘I knew that the latest issue of Heat magazine came out on Wednesday morning. This was early 2000’s, so the prime of Heat magazine. 

‘At the time, it brought me a tremendous amount of joy. I also didn’t understand celebrity culture in England cause a lot of it didn’t translate over to North America. 

‘I was finding myself almost episodically Wednesday after Wednesday, learning about the antics of these incredible British celebrities… Jordan, Jade Goody. Very much in the Sienna Miller phase.’

In 2005, Jordan – aka Katie Price – was dating Peter Andre, after meeting on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! the year before, and was pregnant with their first child, Junior.

Jade Goody found fame when she appeared in the third series of the reality show Big Brother in 2002 and was often pictured in celebrity magazines of the time, until her death from cervical cancer in 2009.

Sienna Miller was constantly in the media spotlight in the 2000s due to her relationship with Jude Law and the famous friends she partied with. 

Dan, who now splits his time between Toronto and Los Angeles, said that London still holds a special place for him as he believes it is where he will eventually find love.   

The award-winning actor said: ‘I had the best time. I date a lot in England, but I don’t date a lot in America. 

‘I don’t quite know why but I have to go back there [to London] cause that’s where I’ve had the most successful dates. It’s where I’m going to find love.’