Why Gail From The Last Of Us Season 2 Looks So Familiar

Adding Catherine O'Hara to the cast of "The Last of Us" for its second season is absolutely brilliant. The actress, who got her start on "Second City Television" alongside other future stars and collaborators Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and Martin Short and became one of the most recognizable and beloved comedic performers in the entertainment industry, joins the ensemble of the massive HBO show as Gail, a character that also appears in "The Last of Us Part II" (the beloved Naughty Dog game for Playstation and sequel to "The Last of Us"). On the series — which is spearheaded by the game's creator Neil Druckmann alongside "Chernobyl" showrunner Craig Mazin — O'Hara's Gail is a resident of the highly protected settlement in Jackson, Wyoming that we saw in season 1 when Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and his surrogate daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) visit to see Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and she works as the town's therapist.

So where have you seen O'Hara before? Almost everywhere, but if you're having trouble with the specifics, here are some of the biggest projects starring Catherine O'Hara that you should check out if you love her performance as Gail — and if you haven't already.

Tim Burton's 1988 movie "Beetlejuice" is one of the best and most beloved comedy horror movies of all time — and it's also probably the movie that introduced most audiences to Catherine O'Hara in the first place. Within the fantastical story, O'Hara plays eccentric mother and rather terrible sculptor Delia Deetz, who moves into a Connecticut home with her husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones) and daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) ... all of whom are unaware that the house's previous inhabitants Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are ghosts haunting the property. As the Deetz family starts redecorating and renovating the house, Adam and Barbara turn to an unlikely source for help: a "freelance bio-exorcist" named Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), though he turns out to be more of a hindrance than anything (which is a seriouus understatement).

Keaton, O'Hara, and Ryder all returned for the 2024 sequel "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice," also directed by Burton — and this time, Ryder's Lydia is a mother to the sardonic Astrid (a perfectly cast Jenna Ortega) and is trying to keep her family together while Betelgeuse is lurking in the afterlife, harboring a serious obsession directed at Lydia. The sequel doesn't quite reach the heights of the original, but it's a fun time, and O'Hara is unsurprisingly great in it.

There's no question that the "Home Alone" movies belong to Macauley Culkin, who stars as the perpetually left-behind kid Kevin McAllister — though don't forget his Oscar-winning brother Kieran Culkin pops up in them too as Kevin's cousin Fuller — but Catherine O'Hara is on hand as Kate, Kevin's mom, and she's delightful. In the first movie, which came out in 1990 and was directed by Chris Columbus, the McAllister family plans to head to Paris to celebrate Christmas as a family, but after a huge snowstorm hits their Chicago home and everyone scrambles to catch the flight, Kevin ends up, well, "home alone." That would already be iffy considering he's only eight years old, but when two robbers — Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) — target the seemingly empty house, all hell breaks loose. Kate is the first to realize that Kevin is still home while they're literally mid-flight, and while the rest of the family waits for a flight, Kate desperately trades tickets and even hitchhikes to get back to her kid.

Everyone, including director Columbus and O'Hara as Kate, returns for the 1992 sequel "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" — where Kevin, now ten, ends up stranded in New York City as the McAllisters try to get to Florida. (Maybe they should stop trying to go on vacation over the holidays?) Also, this movie features a very famous convicted felon who may or may not have "bullied" his way into the movie in exchange for the project filming in one of his properties. See if you can spot him!

Actor, writer, director, and producer Christopher Guest made a series of films throughout the 1990s and 2000s featuring the same regular coterie of cast members, bringing a talented group together to largely improvise scenes in variously absurd settings. Somehow, this gambit worked a whopping four times, starting with the 1996 mockumentary "Waiting for Guffman," which takes place in the small (fictional) town of Blaine, Missouri as it prepares to celebrate its 150th anniversary with a show. Alongside Guest himself as the show's frankly insane director Corky St. Clair, Catherine O'Hara is brilliant as travel agent turned amateur actor Sheila Albertson (the scene where she's drunk during a double date is some of the finest "intoxicated" acting you'll ever see in your life). After that, O'Hara worked with Guest again on "Best in Show" in 2000, which, appropriately, might be her "best" turn in a Guest film; this time, she's Cookie Fleck (née Guggleman), who's happily married to Gerry (Eugene Levy) and is excited to show their dog Winky at a national competition. In one of the best running gags in any movie ever, Cookie and Gerry, who drive from Florida to Philadelphia for the dog show, keep running into a huge variety of Cookie's former lovers, making Gerry increasingly more agitated. ("Cookie? Cookie Guggleman?!") Beyond that, the silly walk O'Hara does when Cookie "hurts her leg" remains one of the funniest things ever committed to film.

In 2003, O'Hara joined the Christopher Guest Cinematic Universe for the third time in "A Mighty Wind," the story of three folk bands coming back together for a once-in-a-lifetime performance in which O'Hara plays Mickey Crabbe, musical partner to Mitch Cohen (Levy again) who perform the act "Mitch & Mickey" together. Though the former lovers used to end their songs with a signature kiss, Mickey is remarried and seemingly over their relationship by the time the movie takes place, whereas Mitch is decidedly not. Three years after that, both O'Hara and Levy worked with Guest yet again in "For Your Consideration," a mockumentary about a fictional film called "Home for Purim" that's vying for several major awards; this time, O'Hara is character actress Marilyn Hack, who's desperate for an Oscar nomination and pretends not to be crushed when her young and inexperienced co-star Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan) is the only one to get honored by the Academy. All of these movies are, frankly, incredible, and all of them are a must-watch if you're a fan of O'Hara.

There are two different major adaptations of Daniel Handler's bestselling children's novels "A Series of Unfortunate Events" — which he wrote under the whimsical alias Lemony Snicket — and incredibly, Catherine O'Hara appears in both of them playing two vastly different characters. In the 2004 film titled "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" directed by Brad Silberling, O'Hara plays Justice Strauss, a kindly, empathetic, and extremely fair woman who happens to live next door to the obviously evil aspiring actor Count Olaf (Jim Carrey). When the orphaned Baudelaire siblings Violet, Klaus, and baby Sunny (Emily Browning, Liam Aiken, and Kara and Shelby hoffman) are forced to move in with Olaf, they befriend Justice Strauss right away, and even though she hopes to adopt them herself and save them from the scheming Olaf (who wants to steal the Baudelaire family fortune) that plan falls through due to, well, a series of unfortunate events.

In the Netflix television adaptation that ran for three seasons from 2017 to 2019, O'Hara reappears, but this time, she plays a character in cahoots with Count Olaf (now portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris). The show's first season adapts the first four novels (there are thirteen in total, appropriately), and in its seventh episode, we see O'Hara as Dr. Georgina Orwell, an optometrist with a pretty spot-on name who hypnotizes mill workers to keep them complacent, despite terrible conditions, as well as anyone else in her path who presents a problem. (She's also Olaf's ex-girlfriend.) O'Hara is the only person to appear in both adaptations, and even though they're ostensibly made for children, the two parts definitely show off her considerable range.

People knew who Catherine O'Hara was before "Schitt's Creek," but there's no question that her six-season run as the absurdly dressed and flowery speaker Moira Rose was the biggest move of her entire career when she joined the series in 2015. Conceived by Daniel Levy — Eugene's son who also stars in the show — "Schitt's Creek" imagines what would happen to an incredibly wealthy family if they lost their massive fortune save for a small town they once bought as a joke (which is, yes, called Schitt's Creek). The first season is a little rough as Moira, her former video store chain CEO husband Johnny (the elder Levy), and their spoiled kids David (the younger Levy) and Alexis (a spectacular Annie Murphy) simply spend their time hating Schitt's Creek and everything about it, but when the central family becomes a part of the town's DNA, the show improves drastically. With that said, O'Hara knows who Moira is right from the jump, and the way she inhabits this character is absolutely outstanding.

Between her outlandish wardrobe, her collection of wigs, and the brand-new ways she pronounces various words from her massive vocabulary (the way she says "baby" comes to mind, as does her use of words like "churlish," "pettifogging," and "frippet"), Moira is one of the very best TV characters in recent memory thanks to O'Hara's performance, and that's not a secret. At the Emmy Awards in 2020, both Levys, O'Hara, and Murphy took home all the trophies in the comedy acting categories, Daniel Levy won a few for writing and directing, and the show won outstanding comedy series to boot, so it's not as if O'Hara hasn't been handsomely rewarded for her game-changing work ... and memed to death, as a nice little bonus.

In March 2025, Apple TV+ — riding high after airing the buzzy second season of "Severance" — introduced a brand-new comedy series and packed it full of stars, including Catherine O'Hara. "The Studio," which was created by lifelong collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (alongside Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez), brings Hollywood stars in to play themselves — including, in early episodes, icons like Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard — as well as a star-studded central cast led by Rogen as Matt Remick, a studio executive who's suddenly elevated to the head of Continental Studios and tasked with keeping it profitable (which interferes with his desire to make films with artistic integrity, considering that he first thing he's told to make is a "Kool-Aid movie"). 

O'Hara appears in the series as Patty Leigh, a former Continental executive who was essentially forced out of her job despite being Matt's longtime mentor who keeps trying to help him as he, in turn, tries to keep the studio afloat despite his own hysterical incompetence. The episodes favor long takes and dramatic pans, which serves O'Hara's comedic style beautifully; in the series premiere "The Promotion," a hysterical argument between Matt and Patty at her palatial home makes great use of the show's frenetic camerawork and high-octane pace, building to a point where Patty savagely manages to get a very lucrative deal out of Matt in exchange for her help. O'Hara is always a welcome addition on-screen, but she's particularly excellent in "The Studio," which makes great use of her ability to go from zero to 100 in no time at all.