While summer 2022 was full of anticipated TV franchises, “Obi-Wan: Kenobi,” “Ms. Marvel,” “The Boys,” “Hacks,” etc., nothing came out of nowhere and bum-rushed audiences as much as FX’s “The Bear,” an unlikely hit that quickly became the talk of the internet when it arrived in June and in the weeks after. As word of mouth built, everyone was talking about “The Bear.” And no, it’s not a wilderness show, but perhaps everyone’s just as desperate to survive.
Created by filmmaker Christopher Storer—a producer on Bo Burnham‘s “Eighth Grade,” the “Inside” special, the director of many of Burnham and Jerrod Carmichael’s comedy specials, “Ramy” and more—“The Bear” is essentially about a dysfunctional restaurant and a dysfunctional family in Chicago. They are essentially one and the same. Co-showrun and co-written by Joanna Calo (a producer on “Bojack Horseman”), “The Bear” centers on Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a young chef from the world of fine dining, who comes home to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop after the suicide of his older brother.
This premise is really where “The Bear” tempo ratchets up to another level. Because while, yes, it’s a hilarious, fast-paced, angsty, and neurotic series about the chaos and intensity of working in a grueling restaurant—our review described it as “Uncut Gems” for the restaurant world with just as much anxiety—it’s also very much in many ways a show about grief, addiction and trying to solider on in the face of great emotional pain you don’t know how to deal with.
Center stage in that theme is Carmy’s cousin Richard “Richie” Jerimovich, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Richie is dysfunction personified, a hedonistic f*ck-up, still reeling from the loss of Carmy’s older brother Mikey (who doesn’t appear in the show outside of one starry cameo, which, warning, gets spoiled in this interview below). And while Mikey was Carmy’s older brother, it was his cousin, Richie, that lived by him, side, by side, ride or die for life in the family’s restaurant all the way until Mikey’s death. So, aside from a territorial dispute, both from a physical and emotional border, Richie and Carmy are totally at odds, and it’s just one aspect of the rich, soulful, funny, moving, deeply authentic, and lived-in series, “The Bear” (we put it on our list of the Best TV Shows of 2022 where it belongs).
Co-starring Ayo Edebiri, Lionel Boyce, Liza Colón-Zayas, Matty Matheson, Oliver Platt, and Abby Elliott as those who work in or around the restaurant, friction, impetuousness, and chaos is kind of the name of the game in “The Bear.” Or, as Moss-Bachrach likes to describe it, a twitchy, “high-sodium volatility.” Moss-Bachrach has had a hell of 2022. While you likely know him from Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” this year, he’s broken out even further on “The Bear,” appeared in the critically-acclaimed “The Dropout,” in Dunham’s new comedy “Sharp Stick,” and later this fall will be seen in a galaxy far, far away on the Lucasfilm series “Andor” from creator Tony Gilroy. We spoke to Moss-Bachrach about all these topics, but for this conversation, mostly focused on “The Bear” and the magnetic qualities of its rather toxic, but loving environment.
Hey, congrats on “The Bear” and your terrific 2022 with “Sharp Stick,” “The Drop Out,” and “Andor” coming up.
Yeah, thanks; I’ve been very busy. I’ve been lucky, I had a productive pandemic.
Yes, I would say so! Let’s start with “The Bear.” I admit, I watched it on a lark, but it’s fantastic. Is it fair to say its success came out of nowhere?
Yeah, I thought that they were just kind of being low-key; they didn’t do much advertising. I mean, where do you live?
Brooklyn.
Yeah, right, so. I saw some [advertising] on the subway, not on the platform, but we saw some signs on top of some Taxis, I know there were a few billboards, but I just figured it’s kind of going to be slow because it’s a weird show to describe. Every time I talk about it or when I talked about it before it came out, it always sounds sort of low-key. “Oh, you know, it’s about, a young chef who comes home to try to take over his family’s restaurant. He tries to make the sandwiches better.”
And people would kind of just look at me with a blank face, like, “this is really a show?” And I would be like, “yeah, it sounds terrible when I talk about it, but there’s a lot more going on. It’s more interesting. Because it’s wild and chaotic, and I thought that it would kind of be like a word-of-mouth thing and take a little while and find itself and find its audience and just be this kind of insider thing. I guess it still is, maybe, but it all just happened a thousand times faster than I thought it was going to happen. Maybe FX just knew. They have a tight ship, I think they know what they are doing over there, so maybe it’s all going according to their plan. Certainly, it surprised me and certainly the other folks, my castmates, you know?
Yeah, I think it was strategically pitched into a low-key lane by FX purposefully, but it paid off. Tell me how you got involved.
It was the pretty standard way. They sent me a script; I was in London working on “Andor,” pretty busy on that, but I eventually made a tape, and they were into it, I guess. A couple of weeks later, we did a Skype with Jeremy Allen White and co-showrunner Joanna Calo, and then I had to wait forever. For some reason where they always, make you wait for like six weeks where I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. But then it’s like, “Ok, it’s gone, whatever. I have to stop thinking about this thing that’s sort of infected my brain for the last few weeks,” but it’s gone cool.
And then, as soon as it goes away out of my mind, they come back and are like, “this will be great!” So, I go from Scotland, where we’re shooting “Andor,” and I go straight to Chicago. I went from this one set, where we had lots of all sorts of wild weapons and sets, and stunts and really intense action stuff going on with hundreds of extras and all the crazy trappings that come with “Star Wars.”
And then I went to live in a kitchen in Chicago in the back of this beef restaurant, that was like a million times more dangerous than a “Star Wars” set [laughs], cause we had like a lot of real knives, real flames, real hot grease and no stunt coordinator [laughs]. It was a surprising transition.
Funny, you were talking about the difficulties of describing it, but one of the things that strikes me is that there’s never really been a restaurant movie or shot that really hit the culture in any big way. And certainly nothing like this with its really heavy emotional throughline.
Yeah, exactly, that’s what it was for me. When I first read it it was so funny. I thought it was hilarious on the page, and there was just so much energy and chaos just through the written word, which is so hard to do.
You know, usually, the stuff that comes through with performance and a good reader can understand that the actors and directors and camera will, will bring that to all to life, imbue it with all that and plus what’s on the page. But Chris and Joanna are really so terrific and smart, and so there was so much life on the page already that it just got extra lifted by all of us. It had been a very long time since I read something like that that was so thoughtful and funny. And then through the making of it, and the thinking about it more, you know the whole thing is kind of a wake in a way, you know? There’s so much grief there, but the first thing that struck me was the humor and wildness of it all.
It sounds like an immediate “yes” after reading it.
Yes, but you know what else I loved about it was how specific it was, how specific this world is. It’s not a world that I particularly knew. I haven’t spent much time in Chicago. I’d never had an Italian beef sandwich. But the specificity of it, and the honoring of this very real little thing in this restaurant and what goes on inside. I think in art, the truer and more specific something is, the more universal it gets. And when you try and say something that speaks to everyone, it just ends up being stupid and derivative and kind of bland and like nothing.
So this had a genuine authenticity to it. Chris has put his time in his 10,000 hours in these places, in these restaurants, or whatever. I mean, God, good luck to him; that’s a lot of time spent in a Chicago beef restaurant. So, but yes, it was an immediate yes, but then it was like, we’ll make the pilot, but I did not think anyone would ever let us actually make it, you know? [Laughs] I know FX does exceptional and different stuff, but we’re so adrift in genre stuff right now. So, I had to develop a kind of healthy skepticism to find myself, so I don’t get disappointed too much. This time I didn’t get disappointed [laughs].
Jeremy has talked about doing a lot of culinary training. Did you do any of that, or was that even necessary for Richie? [laughs]
Man, you know? [laughs] We shot the pilot, you know Matty Matheson [a real-life Chef and actor on the show] was there, people are working, he was working with actors, cooking stuff. Then we go away and wait to hear if we got picked up. So, we come back in February [of 2022], we got picked up, I hadn’t seen anyone [from the cast] in six months, and then it quickly became apparent that everyone’s skills were like amazing [laughs], and Jeremy and Ayo Edebiri spent months shadowing these chefs, and Lionel [Boyce] who plays Marcus, he went to Copenhagen and like spent two weeks with Richard Hart who is a famous baker. And I love to bake, I’m a pre-COVID baker, been baking for many years.
And when I heard, I was like, “Oh my God, they all got to spend all this amazing time with these serious chefs,” and no, they were like trying to keep me away from the kitchens [laughs]. They were like, under no circumstance, like let Ebon know anything about any of this stuff [laughs].
Ha, well, that fits, right? Richie’s kinda supposed to be the exact opposite, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, even when Michael was alive, I think what Richie did there was not really clear. It was not clear to be in the practical sense. But what I think he brought was his dedication; he’s like Rudy or something; he’ll do whatever it takes. But even in that seventh episode, when it’s all hands on deck, he picks it up. Those are probably not the best French fries that they’ve ever turned out, but he’s doing what he can.
How did you prepare for Richie, or what do you do to get into that character’s mindset? Though on some levels, I’m thinking, like, buy a six-pack, some smokes, and sit on the couch [laughs].
What would I do? You know, I would definitely listen to some Public Enemy [laughs], get fired up. I had like calamari running through my veins when we were shooting this thing. Chicago makes it easy to get into this sort of high sodium volatility. Right?
That’s a good way to describe the show: High-sodium volatility. [laughs]
Clearly, Richie’s not a very healthy dude though. Even in his sort of normal parameters are on the unhealthy side for him, he’s really spinning his wheels. He’s lost his family pretty much. He’s lost his best friend, who’s everything to him. And he’s not being very nice to himself or to anybody else really. He’s living in a—it’s not quite hedonism— but he’s living in, “what’s going to make me feel good right now for two seconds?” Oh, that donut? Great. This glass of Fernet Branca? Maybe that’ll like help me for like the next couple minutes. This cigarette? Sure, you know?
I hung out at a lot of bars in Chicago. I spent some time in [legendary dive bar] Richard’s bar. There’s a great Italian restaurant I love called Viaggos that I went to. I ate a lot of meatball salads there [laughs], which if you don’t know what that is, that’s just like, it’s just meatballs, but they call it a meatball salad.
[Laughs] Right. Though underneath it all, it’s all really a mask for grief, right? I mean, arguably, the whole show is, at least for those that knew and loved Michael, and of course, not one person can discuss that.
Oh, 100%. Yeah. That, to me, is everything and everyone is like filling that space in their way. And, I don’t think any of them are doing it in a healthy way. think a lot about Richie; he’s just kinda like screaming into the void left by his friend. Left by the betrayal of his friend killing himself, right?
And the self-loathing and trying to deal with the fact that he didn’t see it coming. And this is a dude who would’ve happily taken a bullet for Mikey and then that he missed that one. I think it’s going to take a lot of time for him to forgive himself. I’m not sure if that’s even possible, or at least, that’s not happening anytime soon. His reeling with [Mikey’s death] and trying to make sense of having his world upended is a justification for a lot of his bad behavior. I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of his backstory or whatever, but I also think he sees that he’s maybe a certain kind of person or a certain generation, his and Mikey’s generation, that is feeling a little endangered, you know what I mean?
Oh yeah, for sure, he’s not woke. He’s not on Twitter [laughs], and he feels like he’s being edged out in every way. A lot of his anger feels like pain mixed with insecurity.
Oh, yeah. So, I think a lot of the time he feels like he’s not just fighting for his seat at the table, but he’s also just fighting for his life, and I mean that literally, not metaphorically.
Yeah, he’s old-school; the new school is in; it’s an interesting metaphor for our cultural shifts too. But tell me about Mikey and getting Jon Bernthal for the role. He really just does what needs to be done in that one scene, right? Just fucking light everyone up, light the scene up and remind the viewer what a fucking force of nature and good vibes Mikey was.
Yeah, man. How great is John? I really don’t know anyone else who could really do that, there’s not many. That’s not even about acting, it’s just pure charisma. John’s so great. I love him so much. But in fact, I was telling them— we didn’t have anyone in that role for so long. And whenever anyone wanted to hear from me, I was suggesting that we just cut it. It’s like in “Pulp Fiction,” where he opens the case, and you don’t see inside it, and it lights up with that glow to signify how amazing it is.
That was so super, and it’s like, you don’t really want to see what’s in there because you can’t live up to it. And it’s like the same thing. I just thought if we put an actor in there, it would just fall short.
So, I was like, “guys, this is going to be really rinky dinky, it’s going to feel like amateur hour,” and it’s going to be like some kind of stunt casting that distracts from the story. But when we thought of him, then it made total sense, and again, I really don’t know who else could’ve done it like that.
You knew him too from your time together on “The Punisher,” right?
Yeah, I mean, we spent a lot, a long time on ‘Punisher’ together, which was really intense. That was an intense show; that was some brutal shit [laughs]. But yeah, we came out of that as friends. I don’t talk to John all the time, we’re both pretty busy, and we live on different sides of the country, but he’s a great dude. But, I called him, and he said he’d be interested if we could figure it out. And when it worked out, wow, it was a huge get for the show.
Any hope, dreams, wishes, or hopes for season two of “The Bear”? Or do you have any insights into it you can share?
[Long pause, then the phone call drops out, minutes later, Moss-Bachrach reconnects]
Uhh, where were we? I’ll be full disclosure, dude. I’m on like day four of my COVID here. [laughs]
“The Bear” is now available on FX and is currently streaming on Hulu.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Look for a second part about “Andor,” closer to release.