Dan Levy stars as Nicky Dardano, a gay pastor in the Netflix sitcom “Big Mistakes.” Photo: Netflix trailer screenshot
[Episcopal News Service] The Rev. Warren Thomas Swenson is a happily married gay Episcopal priest with an “ordinary” routine. As a former associate priest serving small mission churches in southeast Tennessee, he has preached, presided over the Eucharist, made pastoral visits to homebound and hospitalized parishioners, and led Bible study and Sunday school sessions.
Understanding Swenson’s “ordinary” life and career was just what Canadian actor, writer and executive producer Dan Levy needed to create the co-protagonist of his latest sitcom, “Big Mistakes,” for Netflix. In the crime comedy show, which is now streaming, Levy portrays Nicky Dardano, an openly gay pastor of an unspecified Protestant denomination who gets blackmailed into the world of organized crime after his sister steals a diamond tennis necklace. Swenson consulted with writers to create a convincing religious character and settings for the show’s eight-episode first season.
“The show is, of course, unconventional and bizarre because it’s a comedy, but Dan and the showrunners wanted to be as faithful as they can and bring authenticity to depicting a religious life,” Swenson, a doctoral student at the University of Chester’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies in England and an incoming homiletics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, told Episcopal News Service. “It was fun to see what they did or didn’t use of my commentary, like the aesthetics of the church and the parsonage, or the language the parishioners and Nicky use with each other.”
Before he was offered the consultant position, Swenson already was a fan of Levy, who’s best known for co-creating and starring in the critically acclaimed sitcom “Schitt’s Creek” with his father, Eugene Levy. Dan Levy, who is openly gay, portrayed David Rose, one of the first openly pansexual characters depicted on TV.
“Like ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ ‘Big Mistakes’ is hysterical and entertaining because it’s character-driven. It’s about people and relationships and families,” Swenson said. “In both shows, there’s an attentiveness and a sincerity with which Dan approaches these topics. His work is so relatable.”
In a May 28 interview on ABC’s late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” Levy, who grew up in a mixed Jewish and Protestant home, said he wanted a religious consultant for “Big Mistakes” because, to him, depicting religion on screen is “not a funny thing.”
“People’s relationships to God, their faith, is something that needs to be respected,” Levy said. “I wanted to authenticate my character’s relationship to his faith in a way that allowed everything around it to be funny. So, it was important, I think, that we had somebody who was able to go through the scripts and say, ‘You would say this. You wouldn’t say this. You would have a relationship to this thing. You wouldn’t participate in this.’”
Swenson’s working relationship with Netflix and the “Big Mistakes” production team began in February 2025 after one of Levy’s assistants asked a mutual friend if he knew of a gay clergyperson who’d be open to consulting for the show. Over the course of six months, Swenson, Levy, and the show’s writers gathered regularly via Zoom to review the teleplay of each episode. Swenson provided feedback on how scenes inside the parsonage should be depicted, for example.
Minor spoilers follow.
In one of the first scenes, a parishioner with no personal or professional boundaries frequently enters the parsonage – Nicky’s house on church property – without knocking first, to ask questions that, according to Nicky, “could have been an email.”
“As a clergyperson, you have to really be intentional with setting professional boundaries from the beginning of your new position in a church,” Swenson said. “The work-life balance in vocational ministry is really different from other careers because your work doesn’t regard the clock for pastoral care, like when you have to meet people in their most vulnerable or sorrowful moments. Still, those professional boundaries must always be in place.”
Swenson also advised on how, as a clergyperson, Nicky would react to certain situations stemming from working for the mob that would conflict with his faith. In one scene, for example, Nicky is forced to abuse his status as a pastor to convince a rancher to sell “the church” two bulls. The rancher, a devout Christian, insistently donates the bulls instead, quoting James 4:17: “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” Like in many other scenes throughout the show, Nicky is visibly uncomfortable and later expresses his internal conflict and frustrations to his sister.
Sometimes, the situations Nicky faces are life-threatening, and his responses are one “big mistake” after another. While the correct responses seem obvious to viewers, Swenson said he doesn’t know how he’d respond to the same dangerous hypothetical scenarios.
“On one hand, I’m a sinner, so I can’t rule out the possibility of making the same ‘big mistakes’ as Nicky. A part of me wants to say I’d never compromise my sincerely held beliefs or my ethics, but it takes an extraordinary human being – a literal saint – not to compromise their ethics when their life is on the line,” Swenson said.
The Rev. Warren Thomas Swenson preaches on Easter Vigil, April 19, 2025, at All Saints’ Chapel at University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Photo: Courtesy of Warren Thomas Swenson
Swenson didn’t write any of the show’s lines, but he said he appreciates the “nuanced” commentary and “genuine insight” on LGBTQ+ issues throughout “Big Mistakes.” Even though Nicky’s congregation accepts that he is gay, he’s not allowed to be in a same-sex relationship. This is an added source of conflict and stress for Nicky, while his secret boyfriend, Tareq, pressures him to “come out of the closet” so they can date publicly.
In one scene, Tareq asks Nicky, “Why is it that religion has such a problem with two people who are in love with each other?” Nicky replies, “Because God is perfect, but the people who interpret him are not.”
“That’s exactly the kind of perfect window into the soul of a gay clergyperson – someone of immense faith whose identity is at odds with his church, and he’s had to make peace with that,” Swenson said. “What a great line in the show.”
Swenson is scheduled to consult for the second season of “Big Mistakes,” which has been greenlit, though he doesn’t know yet when he’ll receive the teleplays for review.
For now, he can show people his name in the first season’s end credits, and he’ll continue to reflect on his positive experience working with Levy, Netflix and the “Big Mistakes” production team.
“I absolutely loved every minute working on ‘Big Mistakes,’” Swenson said. “It’s been an incredible opportunity, and I’m delighted and thrilled and honored to be a part of it.”
-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.