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Seth Rogen paid tribute to his The Studio costar Catherine O'Hara in a heartfelt tribute at the 2026 Actor Awards.
O'Hara was posthumously honored with the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series at the ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday (March 1), just over one month after she unexpectedly passed away at the age of 71. After a standing ovation when her name was announced, there wasn't a dry eye in the house as Rogen accepted the award on her behalf and gave an emotional speech honoring his late costar.
"I was asked to assume the very sad honor of accepting this award on O'Hara's behalf," he said. "I know she would have been honored to receive this award from her fellow performers, who I know she respected so much. She was such a big fans of all of yours."
He continued, "I obviously having been reflecting on the time I was fortunate enough to spend with her and working with her, and something that I've just been marveling at over the last few weeks was really her ability to be generous and kind and gracious, while never, ever minimizing her own talents and her own ability to contribute to the work that we were doing."
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Rogen shared that O'Hara knew how much she could "destroy" and "wanted to destroy every day on set," even sharing an anecdote where her creativity and dedication to her craft shined bright behind the scenes of The Studio.
"I haven't said this to the other actors because I didn't want them to get ideas, but pretty much every evening before she had a shooting day on our show, she would email me and Evan [Goldberg] an email that always was pretty similar," he said. "It said, 'Hello, I hope you'll consider the following.' And then there would be a completely rewritten version of the scene she was in, and literally 100 percent of the time, it made not just her character better, but it made the scene better and the entire show better as a whole."
He added, "She really showed that you can be a genius and be kind and one of those things does not have to come at the expense of the other in any way, shape or form."
The This Is The End actor expressed how he hopes O'Hara's legacy can live on in the joy she brings to all who watch her past projects.
"If you have people in your lives that don't know her work... show them O'Hara dancing to Harry Belafonte in Beetlejuice. Show them O'Hara hurting her knee in Best in Show and doing that amazing thing where she hobbles around," he said. "And tell the people, as they are laughing, that that's Catherine O'Hara, and we were lucky that we got to live in a world where she so generously shared her talents with us."
O'Hara passed away January 30 following a brief illness, with her cause of death later being determined as pulmonary embolism. Tributes to the Schitt's Creek actress began pouring out following news of her death, including a heartbreaking post from her Home Alone on-screen son Macaulay Culkin and a sweet remembrance from her Beetlejuice costar Michael Keaton.