‘Schitt’s Creek’ Star Annie Murphy Reveals Battle With Depression

Before the pandemic, Annie Murphy was scheduled to begin filming her new show, Kevin Can F**k Himself, in March 2020, around the time she was first diagnosed with depression. The Schitt’s Creek star opened up about her mental health in a new interview with The Zoe Report, sharing, “I think I have a big dose of my dad’s Irish melancholy.”

Murphy added that she first felt that something was off a few months earlier when she was on the Schitt’s Creek live farewell tour in January 2020, where she said she could barely perform and her co-star Noah Reid would have to help her get her “brave face” on. She flew home to Canada on March 12 for a planned vacation, only to have lockdown start soon after. “My mom was like, ‘You’re crying 12 times a day hysterically, to the point where your teeth are chattering. That’s not normal,’” she recalled. After seeing a therapist, she was diagnosed with depression. “I was like, ‘Damn it, I’m depressed,’” Murphy said. “Ugh.”

“A lot of people are going to think that I sound like I’m playing a tiny violin for myself,” she noted. “‘Oh, you’re rich and famous. Why the f— are you sad? You have nothing to be sad about.’ But I’m not going to post photos of me covered in my own snot, lying on the floor, unable to get up. I don’t want people to have to see that. [And] as excited as I was to get this huge part on [Kevin], I do not think if I had gone to work when I was supposed to go to work, I would have been able to do my job.”

She now attends therapy regularly and takes antidepressants, which she credits for helping her feel like a “functional human being” again. “I do not cry every single day on the floor 12 times… I am able to focus on other things in my life,” Murphy shared. “Now, honestly, if a friend’s like, ‘I’m having a really hard time,’ I’m like, ‘Get on drugs. Get on drugs!’ You don’t have to be on drugs for the whole time, but they truly, truly saved my life in the sense that I was not a functional human being and I was able to be a functional human being.”

Production on Kevin Can F**k Himself eventually began in the fall after a hiatus, and Murphy, who stars as a sitcom housewife intent on killing her husband, said that she felt “a sense of resilience” after “being in a real messy mental state going into it” and was pleased to find herself working hard, making friends and having fun. Kevin Can F**k Himself airs Sundays on AMC.