From the moment Ayo Edebiri showed up on the set of The Bear three years ago, creator Christopher Storer always recognized her potential to direct.
“He’d say ‘When you’re not working on set, come to set,’” Edebiri tells us about Storer’s encouragement of her directing career.
“‘When you’re on another film, hit me up, call me, what do you see?’ he’d say” the actress and The Bear co-EP recalls.
In season 3, the stand-up turned Primetime Emmy winning supporting actress finally got her shot, directing episode 6, “Napkins” written by a Catherine Schetina.
Though “Napkins” aired on June 26 last year during a boom economic time under President Joe Biden, it was rather prescience and chilling, an episode that now speaks to the current times. Essentially, the episode deals with ageism, as a longstanding older employee, that being Liza Colón-Zayas’ Tina, gets pink slipped from her job. She hits the pavement in Chicago, but faces myriad doors in her face.
That is until, she walks into The Bear and meets Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie, who gives her a coffee and an Italian Beef sandwich on the house, and Jon Bernthal’s Mikey Berzatto who lends a shoulder when he notices her crying. Mikey also offers Tina a job.
“I wound up crying over ‘Napkins’” Edebiri tells us on Crew Call when she was chosen to direct that episode.
What shines in Edebiri’s first directing gig are the sublime performance she gets out of Bernthal and Colón-Zayas who have an 11-minute dialogue scene, the characters dropping their guards as they talk about life, jealousy, and family. While the overall episode entailed a six-day shoot, Edebiri landed a rehearsal day with the two performers in order to nail down what is arguably the most authentic, and moving moment of season 3. It’s a touching scene where we get to the know the tender bear (no pun intended) in Mikey, a notorious and big shadowy figure who looms over his starry chef brother Carmy.
Explains Edebiri, “For the show, we are getting to see these characters be vulnerable and create space for each other. But we’re also getting to see this character who is the object of a lot of characters’ fixations and hang ups. And we’re getting to see part of the magic that is him and why he meant so much to people, even in his chaos and his messiness and his complicated illness and the times where he could be hard. He still was a really beautiful person who created space for people.”
We also chat with Edebiri about Sydney’s ultimate end game (“It’s a fluid conversation” with Storer, she tells us). Also, we ask Edebiri to get philosophical: What is bliss for Sydney? And what does it really mean if she takes a job at another restaurant and leaves Carmy in season 4?
Edebiri has a busy fall and holiday season doing double duty in Luca Guadagnino’s Amazon MGM Studios college thriller After the Hunt on Oct. 10, and James L. Brooks’ 20th Century Studios dramedy Ella McCay out on Dec. 12.
Season 4 of The Bear drops on FX and Hulu on June 25. As we previously told you, Edebiri and Lionel Boyce co-wrote an episode for Season 4.
Listen to our conversation below in which Edebiri further details how she directed the episode from editing to soundtrack. Already, she notched a DGA Award for her Bear directing debut in the category of Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Comedy Series.