Besides all the prepping, cooking and serving on season three of “The Bear,” there’s a key ingredient that binds the series’ characters: Grief.
“Grief is the river that runs through all of us,” says Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays Richie. “It’s maybe one of the only common things we share in the human experience.”
For employees at The Beef, the restaurant that went through drastic changes in the first and second seasons, it’s the death of Mikey, the manager and owner. When his brother, Carmine (played by Jeremy Allen White), returns to run the place, there’s a shift in attitude and purpose.
Natalie (played by Abby Elliott) processes the loss while anticipating the birth of a child. “She’s grappling with the fact that her brother had this horrible demise and her relationship with her mom and her brother is not in a good place,” Elliott says. “So she’s dealing with the grief in that way.”
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Ayo Edebiri, who plays Sydney, one of the chefs, says grief has touched the characters in different ways. “It’s in the process of being dealt with by different characters in different ways.”
Considering it’s classified as a comedy, “The Bear” benefits from finding laughter in grief, according to Moss-Bachrach. “It overflows with all of these kinds…of behavior. It also doesn’t behoove us to live in that kind of heaviness.”
The actors, in fact, enjoy plenty of laughter while shooting.
“It’s almost impossible at times to take that stuff home,” White says of grief. “The set is such a joyful place. Everybody does laugh so frequently that even if you have to go to a sort of dark place in the morning, two hours later you’ll be hanging out and watching a scene and really laughing and enjoying the company.”
Liza Colón-Zayas stars as Tina in "The Bear." A third-season episode focuses on how she got to The Beef.
Too much grief, Moss-Bachrach says, and “you’d just run out of energy. So we have to sort of protect it, leave it there, rest and then come back and pick it back up.”
Diversion often helps.
In the third season, Edebiri directs an episode about Tina, the line cook played by Liza Colon-Zayas. It shows the grief she goes through as someone dealing with unemployment and the shift she has to make to stay solvent. Ironically, it involves her first meeting with Mikey, the brother who died.
When Edebiri was asked which episode she wanted to direct she said, “I would give you my firstborn child, who does not exist yet, if I could do the Liza episode because I would love to work with Liza in that way.”
Edebiri got her choice. “It felt like a bit of a master class, but also a gift,” she says. “I was in the best of circumstances (with) masters of their craft beside me; I felt so lucky.”
The episode – which easily could stand alone – shows the “demons of the past,” Colon-Zayas says, and how she’s struggling.
To achieve the level of excellence that brought 10 Emmys during its first season, “The Bear” needed cooperation and, as Carmy says in the third season, people bringing their best every day.
In the opening episode of the latest season, he offers a list of “non-negotiables” – rules the staff needs to adhere to.
“The Bear” has its own “non-negotiables,” the actors say. Among them: “Be nice to each other; learn your lines, show up prepared, be on time, and stay hydrated.”
“On time is a big one,” Elliott says.
