While “The Bear” captures the grittiness and intensity of working in a restaurant kitchen, it doesn’t shy away from showcasing the dreamy stares of Jeremy Allen White and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
“They both have insane eyes,” Ayo Edebiri, who plays Sydney on the hit FX series, told me Wednesday at a tastemaker screening of Searchlight Pictures’ upcoming comedy “Theater Camp.” “Ebon once told me, ‘I could turn them on.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you can’t.’ And he was like, ‘I know how to face the light in a certain way that will turn them on’. I was like, ‘You literally sound insane,’ but then he turned them on in front of me. It was the craziest thing I had ever witnessed.”
With Season 2 now streaming on Hulu, the pressure is on for “The Bear” team to live up to its first go-around. But don’t tell that to Edebiri. “I’m really trying not to feel anything,” she said. “It’s done so there’s really nothing I can do. And I think for the first season, we weren’t making it with people’s expectations. And that’s just what we we tried to do now. The second season is just holding ourselves up to a high standard, and a high standard of work and a high standard of connecting with each other. And if it wasn’t connecting, then we talked about it.”
She continued, “It felt really cathartic filming it this season. It’s one of the most pleasant working experiences I’ve ever had. Even though obviously it’s a show that lives in a space of stress, the actual process of filming doesn’t reflect that at all. It’s just kind and gentle.”
Edebiri’s “Theater Camp” co-star and co-director Molly Gordon (“Booksmart”) joins the new season of “The Bear” as a love interest from Carmy’s past.
Edebiri remembered watching Gordon when she guested on “Ramy.” Turning to Gordon, she said, “Your eyes just have this ability to bring you in. And Jeremy, similarly, it’s seriously like, ‘What the fuck is going on in those eyes? Are they that blue?’ I was like, ‘Wow, these two people just get to stare at each other.’”
Gordon was approached about “The Bear” by series creator and co-showrunner Christopher Storer, also a “Ramy” executive producer. “Chris was always like, ‘We’re gonna work together again one day,’” Gordon said. “So many people say that, but they don’t actually follow through. He followed through and he called me when we were finishing the edit of ‘Theater Camp’ and was like, ‘Do you want to join the show?’”
Gordon said working with the “Bear” ensemble was like being a member of a Shakespeare company. “It also felt like I was in a ballet,” she said. “I felt very, very lucky. I would have played a napkin. So playing opposite Jeremy was a dream.”
“Theater Camp” will be in theaters July 14.
