My worst moment: ‘Schitt’s Creek’ alum Emily Hampshire’s breakdown in front of Norman Lear

Emily Hampshire has a long resume, but for many American audiences she broke through with the role of the socially awkward, flannel-wearing motel employee Stevie Budd on “Schitt’s Creek.” Now she’s starring on the new Amazon series “The Rig,” a thriller about a crew trapped on an oil rig stationed off the Scottish coast.

As settings go, an oil rig is a long way from the Rosebud Motel of “Schitt’s Creek.” She plays an oil company rep. “She’s corporate so she isn’t very well-liked and she doesn’t give a (expletive) about anybody liking her — which for me, being Canadian, was something I really wanted to rub off on me because I’m not like that.”

When asked about a worst moment in her career, Hampshire talked about her first pitch meeting ever. “It was with Norman Lear, who is a TV legend. He created ‘Maude,’ he created ‘All in the Family’ — he basically invented TV.”

She picks up the story from there.

My worst moment …

“I was pitching him my modern-day remake of his ‘70s cult classic ‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’. The premise of the original show is that it’s a soap opera satire about this woman who is obsessed with being the perfect housewife and kind of has her mind shattered by consumerism.

“Now, I want to reiterate: I had never pitched anything in my life before this. This was in 2019 and I had just wrapped the final season of ‘Schitt’s Creek’ and was in L.A. taking meetings for U.S. representation — like, agencies — and I was doing this right before I was going to Italy for two weeks to have this end-of-show goodbye celebration with the rest of the cast.

“Most of my meetings were with talent agents. But when I met with one agency, they included a literary agent as part of the signing team. And at one point this literary agent said, ‘If you ever want to adapt a book or make a show, I can help you with that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to remake this show from the '70s called "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman."' And she, like most people now, wasn’t familiar with the series, but she jotted it down.

“Later, as I’m boarding my flight to Italy, I get a call from said literary agent — who is now my agent — and she said, ‘You have a meeting with Norman Lear in two weeks to pitch him.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t have a pitch! I just said that in the meeting as some blue sky thing that I’ve always wanted to do. But I don’t have a plan or an actual pitch. So do I jump off this plane and stay home and work on this?’ And she’s like, ‘No, no — it’s just going to be a super general meet-and-greet thing and getting to know each other and you can spitball about what a remake of the show could be like.’

“So I reluctantly stayed on the plane. But I’m a Virgo, I’m not the type of person who can go into a meeting and be chill and wing it. So the first thing I do with my in-flight Wi-Fi is download Norman’s autobiography on Audible — which I highly recommend, five stars, he reads it and it’s like having your grandpa tell you all these amazing stories, if your grandpa was a TV legend.

“After Italy, I was supposed to go back to my hometown of Montreal. But I changed my flight so I could go back to L.A. a few days before the totally chill, no big deal, non-pitch meeting with Norman, just so I could get back in the proper time zone and be prepped. And when I land, I get this call from my agent checking in to make sure that I’m all good for the pitch.

“And I say, ‘So when you say pitch, you mean the totally general non-pitch pitch, right? Because when you say pitch, it sounds to me like I’m supposed to pitch something.’ And then she says (laughs), ‘Oh no, did your manager not tell you? Since setting the meeting, everyone on Norman’s side got really excited about the prospect of this remake and now they really want to hear your vision for it!’

“So I lock myself in a hotel room for the next four days. I still have the note from the hotel that they slid under my door to see if I still did not want any cleaning services and if I was in fact OK.

“Somehow I managed to come up with a take for this remake that I actually thought was amazing. I had this breakthrough on day three of my self-imposed lockdown and it all came to me on pages and pages of a legal pad. So I wrote out my entire pitch, I had a vision and I was super excited to share it. And having listened to Norman’s book — having had him in my ear for the past week — I felt like I knew him and he would love me and love my pitch.

“So it’s the big day. I go to Sony Studios and I check into Act III, which is Norman’s company. His assistant is super lovely to me. And then a couple of other people in the office came over to tell me how much they loved the ‘Schitt’s Creek’ cabaret episode that had recently aired. I felt amazing. Everything was going great!

“Then his assistant tells me Norman and his partner Brent Miller are ready to see me. So I walk into his office and the minute I enter the room, Norman says, ‘Oh no, we don’t want any — wrong room!’ And I can tell he’s joking, so I say, ‘But I’ve never flown myself in for a guy before!’ And crickets. Nothing. I don’t think he even heard me.

“Brent suggests we sit at the table, so I start unpacking my school bag, taking out my legal pad with its handwritten pitch — which, in retrospect, must have looked insane — and I say, ‘I guess I’ll just start.’ And I launch into my pitch. In the original ‘Mary Hartman,’ she yearns to be the perfect housewife that she sees in commercials and she believes if she buys these products, she’ll have this beautiful life they advertise. And ultimately she has this nervous breakdown on live TV. But my modern ‘Mary’ pitch was to bring the original show’s satirical spin on commercial culture into our present social media world where we have now become the ads and we are the product consumed.

“The point of me telling you this is that my whole pitch relied on a basic knowledge of social media. And Norman is 100. He’s literally 100 years old. I wanted to make sure he was following so I said, ‘Let me know if I’m going too fast or if any of this is making sense for you, because I want you to get it.’ And he says, ‘Oh, I haven’t understood a word for the last 20 minutes.’

“And I was like, ‘Oh. Do you want me to start over?’ And he was like, ‘God, no!’

“And this is the thing: I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or serious. I was looking at Brent because Brent seemed to be kind of laughing but maybe a little embarrassed? I kept thinking that he was playing with me, but I didn’t know. And then he said, ‘You’re telling me all about this show — so do you want to produce this thing or star in it?’ And in the smallest voice that has ever come out of me, I was like: ‘Both?’

“To which he then said, ‘Oh, well, Brent and I have already seen eight actresses today who came in saying the exact same thing as you.’ And that’s when I really wasn’t sure — this isn’t a joke, but I wanted to make it a joke. So I was like, ‘Well, why did you let me in then?’

“And then I started to — wait for it — cry.

“And I said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I tried to leave and Norman said, ‘Wait, you thought I was serious?’ And I said, ‘Uh, yeah. Yeah, I did.’ And he’s like, ‘Do you think there’s anyone in the world like you?’ And it was sort of sounded like he was giving me this compliment, but I couldn’t stop crying. And I was like, ‘Well, we’re all snowflakes,’ shrug-arms. And then he proceeded to compliment my unique vision and asked me to tell him more about my life and where this was all coming from.

“He also gave me a tissue because I was leaking all over his office. So I just got really honest and I was telling him where this all came from. And at one point Norman looked down at my seat and he said, ‘What have you done?’ And I looked down and I had anxiety-shredded all my little snot-filled tissues. They were all over the carpet and tried to clean them up but the snot made them sticky.

“So I just ran out of there. And his assistant was yelling after me, ‘Did you get a photo with Norman?’

“I go back to my hotel and I made a video of myself having a drink at the bar, crying, that I sent to respond to anyone who asked me — because everyone was asking — how did it go? I couldn’t bring myself to answer, so I just sent them this sad video (laughs).

“I was so devastated. Not just because I had bombed — because believe it or not, I have actually bombed many things with snotty tears — but this one was so hard because I actually believed in my vision for this show.

“The next day I get an email from my agent and it was a forward from Brent of an email he had sent companywide to Act III with the subject line: ‘We found our modern Mary Hartman.’

“I was really confused. My first thought was that they were (messing) with me. I didn’t fully understand what this meant.

“It happened to be awards season at the time, and I would run into producers who would come up to me and say, ‘Heard about your pitch with Norman,’ with this glint in their eye. And I was like, what is happening?

“And then I saw Brent, and he was so lovely to me. And then I saw Norman at a Golden Globes after-party and I went over to introduce myself, because I guess I was hoping he wouldn’t remember: ‘Hi, I’m Emily.’ He was sitting down and he looked up at me and he was like, ‘Don’t cry on me now.’ And I couldn’t believe he remembered, I was so embarrassed. And I didn’t understand why everyone was being normal and nice to me when that meeting had been such a disaster.

“But what I have realized now that I’ve gotten to know Norman in working with him — because we are doing ‘Mary Hartman’ together — is that he likes the humanity in people. And he likes taking the piss out of people.

“I was so ashamed that I lost control and let my emotions take over. But what he got was the real deal. It wasn’t what I had written out in my legal pad but what I had locked up in my human heart that he found the most interesting. And the truth is, the messy human stuff is what I find most interesting, too.

“This changed my career. I know a lot of the stuff hasn’t come out that I’ve been working on as a writer, but it’s what I always wanted to do and I never thought I could be taken seriously at it because I was an actress first. A little bit of encouragement makes all the difference.”

The takeaway …

“I’ve cried in auditions before and I’ve always thought it’s a liability and people won’t take me seriously and think I’m bad. And my experience with Norman has kind of turned that into an asset. He made it not only not a bad thing, but a connecting thing.

“What I love in other people is when they’re not performing or practiced, but just being in the moment and honest. And my being in the moment and honest was crying and not knowing what I was doing.

“I need to remember that’s the magic. The idea of that perfection or how you think you should be seen? That’s the wrong idea.”

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