When The Bear appeared on screens in the US this year, it arrived with few expectations. A small, indie-feeling drama about an ailing Chicago sandwich shop, it came with a semi-recognisable cast and a creator best known for directing standup specials. Three months later, when it debuted in the UK, the buzz was palpable. And now? The consensus is that it might be the best workplace drama since Mad Men.
The story of Carmy Berzatto, a celebrated chef who returns home to save the family business after the suicide of his brother, The Bear arrives at a gallop and never lets up. There’s obsession. There’s chaos. There is an episode delivered in a single breathless shot. The Bear has been such a sensation that media coverage has long since crept out from the television pages. We’ve seen articles about the food, the music, even Berzatto’s favourite brand of T-shirt. It has been called the sexiest show of the year and the most stressful. In an age dominated by spin-offs, knock-offs and prequels, people have taken to this wildly original series like it’s a long lost relative. And the show’s cast is as surprised as anyone by its success.
One of them is Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays the belligerent Richie. Speaking from his home in New York, he says: “I would tell people about the show and say: ‘Well, it’s about a young chef who has to go back home to take over his family’s beef sandwich shop.’ And people would just look at me like, ‘What?’ The blank stares I’d get. You know, you get only so many blank stares before you spiral into self-doubt.”
Nevertheless, Moss-Bachrach knew they were on to something special. “The writing was exceptional,” he says. “And when I got there, the cast was really strong. Even more important than that, everybody was so kind and enthusiastic, happy and such a hard worker. I started to get paranoid. There’s that saying: ‘If you look around the room and you can’t see the asshole, you’re the asshole.’”
But a good environment doesn’t automatically translate to a good show. “Whether anyone was gonna see it, we had no idea,” he adds. “Probably no one would, and it would just slip through the cracks because it’s such a strange soft-boiled little redheaded stepchild of a show.”
Ayo Edebiri, who plays the chef Sydney, similarly wondered if The Bear would find an audience. “I felt like we were all being challenged in ways that were new and exciting and different,” she says while on a walk around her neighbourhood in Los Angeles. “Around that time, I was reading a lot of pieces that were like, ‘Why positive TV matters’, saying that people just want to have a good time from TV. And I was like, ‘Well, this is not that.’”
Then there’s Jeremy Allen White, the 31-year-old New Yorker who plays Carmy. The reaction to The Bear has been so volcanic that White’s career went into overdrive. When we speak, he is in Toronto, filming the sci-fi movie Fingernails with Riz Ahmed and Jessie Buckley, having only just wrapped on a wrestling movie with Zac Efron called The Iron Claw. “I finished two weeks ago, and I’ve been in Toronto for a week,” he sighs over Zoom. “One more week here, then I get to go home for Christmas. It’s been a lot, but it’s been exciting.”
More than anything, White is excited that The Bear has found fans. “When we aired in the States, our producer Nate sent us a list of the most watched series of the last couple of weeks,” he grins. “It was Star Wars, Star Trek and Ms Marvel, and then it was The Bear. I thought it was just so cool that we could be on the same list as these massive television shows. It’s space. It’s superpowers. It’s lightsabers. And then it’s us, you know, a show about people trying to make sandwiches together.”
Which might be underselling it a little. Part of The Bear’s appeal is its sheer sense of chaos. “We wanted to make audiences feel anxious,” White smiles, then goes on to talk about the show’s creator. “Chris Storer and I talked a lot about Uncut Gems and the frenetic energy it has. We talked about what we could do to try to capture a similar energy.”
A lot of that energy comes from Moss-Bachrach’s Richie, as loud and obnoxious a character as you will ever meet. Some have claimed that Richie is TV’s most aggravating man, although Moss-Bachrach doesn’t agree. “I have sympathy for this guy,” he says. “I met somebody the other day who said: ‘Man, you are a walking asshole.’ But I think everybody on that show is kind of a prick. Richie is a strong flavour in the stew. But he had to be.”
Although The Bear is ostensibly about Carmy, the characters Edebiri and Moss-Bachrach play are just as integral, in that they have wildly different visions for the restaurant. Sydney is itching to push boundaries and win critical acclaim, while Richie is aggressively resistant to change.
“Richie comes from a place of tradition and wanting to serve the people in the neighbourhood,” says Moss-Bachrach. “And Sydney’s idea to change it and make it more than what it was seems simple to me. But these two ideas are quite irreconcilable.”
This tension is what makes The Bear so compelling. And, according to Edebiri, Sydney’s entire character was right there on the page. “When I first read Sydney,” she laughs, “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a person. She doesn’t really feel like a device. She feels like an actual human being.’ It was so cool to play a young Black woman who doesn’t have all these perfect ideals. She doesn’t get up on a soapbox and go: ‘Here are my thoughts about race, gentrification, labour in a capitalist society, power structures, how power structures intersect.’”
The Bear is a slight career change for 27-year-old Edebiri. Although she trained as a teacher, briefly working in west London – “I’ve never felt more sure that I was on the wrong path than when I was trying to teach Shakespeare to high school girls in London as an American” – comedy has been her home. Until The Bear, she was best known as a standup and television writer, working on Apple’s Dickinson and What We Do in the Shadows. Was it strange to act in a show she didn’t have a hand in writing? “When I’m in TV rooms, it has always been working on other people’s shows,” she says. “That’s all about collaboration. You help somebody achieve their vision. This job is just a different way of exercising that muscle.”
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This has also been an especially big year for Moss-Bachrach, 45. Although he has been working solidly for more than 20 years, he had three hits on his hands this year. As well as starring in the Guardian’s best show of 2022, two more of his shows made the Top 50: the Star Wars series Andor (he played Arvel Skeen, whom Andor joins on the Aldhani heist), and The Dropout, in which he played John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal writer who helped expose the Theranos scam. “It’s so hard to make a TV show at all, let alone a good one,” he says. “So to be a part of three pretty great ones, I’m kind of pushing my luck.”
They were three wildly different experiences for him. “In Star Wars I was such a tiny little cog in the thing”, he says. “I was just looking through a little keyhole into that world. We made maybe three episodes of Andor in the time it took to make eight episodes of The Bear.”
And The Dropout? “I just thought it was gonna be bad,” he shrugs. Really? “I don’t want to go off on my tangent about dramatisations of recent events,” he sighs. “I was like, ‘OK, well, the Theranos podcast is really cool, and the documentary about it is fascinating. But what do we really have to gain by seeing a bunch of actors play these people?’” But The Dropout was great, I gasp. “I was proven completely wrong,” he says. “The series has its own life and energy, and it does shed some real insight into the story.”
Without giving too much away, The Bear’s first season ended with a twist that gave the characters the means to do anything they want with their lives. As such, season two could go anywhere. When I speak to them, the cast are a couple of weeks away from seeing any scripts. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped them from speculating just as hard as fans. Moss-Bachrach has hopes that the new season could take the lead from the real-life experiences of Matty Matheson, a professional chef who plays the handyman on the show.
“Matty has opened many, many restaurants,” he says. “While we were shooting, he was opening up his magnum opus, this place in Toronto called Prime Seafood Palace, a restaurant with zero compromises that he’s always wanted to build. It looks incredible, and they got it off the ground. But I mean, seeing one side of all these phone conversations he was having every single day on set? Like, it is an intensely fraught process. Most restaurants are unlikely to succeed. And so I think it’d be really cool if we see that. Rebuilding from the beginning. The whole season, just to get to the opening night.”
During our conversation, White lets two things slip. First is that season two of The Bear will contain a few one-off episodes focused on peripheral characters. He also reveals that he’ll soon be spending time with the chef Dave Beran at the Los Angeles restaurant Pasjoli. “He’s working on making a new restaurant,” he says. “So I’ll join him and see if I can learn about building something from the ground up.”
Edebiri, meanwhile, mainly sees the season one finale as a missed opportunity. “It is really funny to me that these people had an out. They could have walked away but, no, they’re going to make another business,” she says. “It’s like, yeah, of course you can’t help yourself. This is your thing. This is what you have to do, even when it’s the source of major stress and exhaustion.” And there, in a nutshell, is the entire appeal of The Bear.