‘The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White & Abby Elliott on Favorite Season 3 Episodes

[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Season 3 of The Bear.]

The Big Picture

• ‘The Bear’s third season explores the challenges of opening a fine dining restaurant in the competitive culinary world.
• Co-stars Jeremy Allen White and Abby Elliott talk standout episodes, character dynamics, and the show’s storytelling.
• The FX series from creator Christopher Storer innovates with chaotic kitchen scenes and character growth.

From creator Christopher Storer, Season 3 of the FX series The Bear showcases the challenges of trying to establish a fine dining establishment in the cutthroat culinary world where you set a bar of perfection for yourself that seems impossible to achieve. Before anyone has ever even had a bite, a chef can spend endless hours putting together ingredients and blending flavors to decide exactly what the menu should be, only to decide none of it is good enough and it all has to start over again. That never-ending quest for excellence still isn’t a guarantee that you’ll achieve long-lasting success, let alone open for service the next day.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, co-stars Jeremy Allen White, who plays Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, and Abby Elliott, who plays Carmy’s sister Natalie, talked about standout episodes this season, pushing what the structure of television can be, building the character dynamics, how the kitchen scene in episode two kept building toward chaos, finding comfort in frustration, the Carmy and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) dynamic, and the importance of plating.

Collider: To start with a silly question, before doing this show, did you guys ever realize the extent that food needed to be prepared and plated with tweezers?

JEREMY WHITE: Certainly not the extent. I knew that was a thing and probably, before the show, would have made fun of it, I feel like.

ABBY ELLIOTT: Yeah. No, I didn’t really know. I worked in a kitchen for a week, and no, I never saw tweezers. But apparently, it’s a huge part of it.

WHITE: The plating is big. The display is a big part of it.

‘The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White & Abby Elliott Share What Makes Season 3 So Special

Which episode this season are you each most looking forward to fans seeing and why?

WHITE: There are a lot. It’s hard.

ELLIOTT: I’m really excited about episode one.

WHITE: Yeah, episode one is really dealing with the aftermath, obviously. You pick up with everybody very shortly after the incident of the finale of Season 2.

ELLIOTT: They’re all just getting back into it.

WHITE: And Duccio [Fabbri]’s episode is so good. Our first A.D. directed episode three, which is so incredible. And Ayo [Edebiri] directed episode six, which is so beautiful. A lot of the episodes are really good. It’s a good problem to have.

ELLIOTT: It is. They’re different. There are a lot of different stories that we’re telling, so it’s hard to pinpoint one because there are so many specific things that I cannot speak of.

This is one of those shows where it’s not just about the story and the characters, but it’s also about the approach to the storytelling and the way the different episodes are shot. It’s constantly surprising.

ELLIOTT: And there’s more of that, for sure.

WHITE: I feel like Chris [Storer], Joanna [Calo], our showrunner, and Joanna [Naugle], our editor, and everybody is really pushing what the structure of television can look like. It takes a lot of confidence to keep pushing in the way that they are, and trusting that the audience will keep coming back and stay with us.

There’s Such Rich History in the Character Dynamics in Season 3 of ‘The Bear’

Because we know we’ll get to see screen time with Carmy and Sydney, and also with Carmy and Natalie, what would you say your favorite character dynamics for your characters are, outside of those relationships?

ELLIOTT: I love Natalie and Neil Fak together. They have such a history with each other. They’re childhood friends.

WHITE: There’s so much there, but they don’t make a whole thing about it. There’s no exposition. It’s just the way that they communicate with each other. The way that they protect one another or get upset with one another is so rich with history. I do love watching you guys.

ELLIOTT: Yeah, you just see them as 12-year-olds in a basement playing Super Nintendo, and then it’s cut to 25 years later.

WHITE: For Carm, his relationship with Sugar, you get to see in a different way, and a lot was revealed to me throughout the process. Carmen is so inside of himself all the time that oftentimes my approach can also feel like I’ve got blinders on, or something like that, to the way that he interacts with everybody else. I feel like you get to see through some flashbacks and also some stuff going on in present times, as they’re building the restaurant, their relationship and their patterns flushed out a little bit more. I also think you get to see Carmy come to some really important realizations about how he treats his family and how he treats people, generally.

There’s something so interesting about the second episode, “Next,” with seeing Carmy alone in the kitchen, and then continuing to add more and more characters to that. Natalie is the first one that comes into the room, and then it just keeps building until you really have most of the cast and everyone is talking over each other or yelling at each other. What was that like to do, as it continued to get bigger and louder?

WHITE: It was so fun to shoot that second episode. We shot it just in two days. It’s all about one location, so we shot 20 pages the first day, and then maybe 15 pages, or whatever it was, the second day, so it felt very much like theater. Carmy’s experience through that, you’ve seen him with so much like solitude, and then people are introduced, problems are introduced, speed bumps and barriers are introduced. There’s so much doubt flowing through him and so many voices. And then, the way it ends is my favorite, with sweet Marcus and what he’s been through. Stepping outside yourself, looking at Marcus and getting Marcus’s thumbs up when he says, “Take us there,” the writing in that episode is so beautiful. It was just so easy.

ELLIOTT: It was really easy and so fast. We just did a few takes each day. That whole scene, you could just feel the tension when we were shooting it. There’s just this push-and-pull of, “Calm down.” And then, Richie comes in and gives it to [Carmy]. It’s the chaos that’s going on inside [his] head. At the top [he’s] just so laser focused, and then everybody comes in and [he snaps].

Abby, how much stress and pressure is Natalie going to be under this season, and how differently does she deal with that than her brother?

ELLIOTT: She is so anxious to become a parent. She really just focuses and tries to just put her head down and do the work in the restaurant that needs to happen. Her anxiety comes out in different ways, but it calms her to be in the restaurant, with everything going on in her head at this point, and it gives her purpose. There is a dysfunctional thing with Carmy, where they just repeat this pattern of her rolling her eyes at him and trying to get him to change, and he just won’t. It seems like they have the same conversation sometimes and just repeat the same patterns, but at this point, that’s something that’s reliable for her.

WHITE: There’s familiarity and comfort, even in that frustration.

ELLIOTT: Even in the frustration and the pressure to get the restaurant to work.

‘The Bear’ Has Never Had a Plan for Romance Between Carmy and Sydney

Jeremy, you and Ayo Edebiri have both talked about how you aren’t really on board with a romance between Carmy and Sydney. Is that how you’ve always felt about the two of them? Did you ever think that could be something interesting to explore, but then it became clear that that’s just not the relationship they have?

WHITE: Truly, it’s not even that we’re not on board with it. It was never, ever discussed, by our writers, by Chris, or by me and Ayo. It’s something that happened entirely outside our experience and the show’s experience. It’s wild. It’s not something we considered, and then we were like, “No, let’s not do that.” It was just never happening or going to happen.

The Bear is available to stream on Hulu. Check out the Season 3 trailer:

Watch on Hulu