‘Like an unsupervised chip pan’: how The Bear caught fire worldwide
Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s kitchen is untidy. So untidy that his people hop on the video call from Brooklyn to tell me Moss-Bachrach would prefer to have his camera switched off. Which is a shame. I really want to see the carnage in his kitchen. I imagine smoking pans, pizza dough dripping from the ceiling and me yelling across the internet: “Dude, your toque’s on fire!”
But Moss-Bachrach won’t let me glimpse the real-life chaos. “My house is a mess,” he says. “I’ve just been baking a bunch of stuff. Dirty stuff everywhere, pots and stuff. So I feel a little exposed. I promise you, you’re dodging a bullet.”
It would have been fitting, since, in the hit US drama The Bear, Moss-Bachrach plays Richie Jerimovich, a oneman chaos machine. He’s The Bear’s leading disruptor, a vein-popping nightmare of a sort-of-manager, out of step with his cordon bleu chef “cousin” Carmy Berzatto’s plan to open a finedining restaurant at a former sandwich joint called The Original Beef of Chicagoland.
Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) has his work cut out thanks to exploding toilets and terrible money worries, but mostly Richie – the one fixture from the old joint he can’t get rid of. Richie used to love running the cheap and cheerful sandwich shop with Carmy’s now-dead brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) and, in his grief, regards Carmy’s dream as not just a betrayal, but one that involves nauseating gentrification.
It’s a compelling performance that has already earned Moss-Bachrach an Emmy nomination and made him a style icon around the world thanks to his character’s fondness for track pants and Adidas high-tops. “He’s definitely struggling. He’s going through a rough patch when we meet him. He’s grieving. He’s self medicating with cigarettes and food and anger. He’s not self-actualised.”
Which makes it all the more poignant that Moss-Bachrach is meditatively baking in Brooklyn. What are you making? “A rye bread. And then a Pullman loaf, a white bread.
“I’ve been a baker for 15 years. I got into a conversation recently with a real baker. You know, he has a bakery. And the baker said, ‘You’re a baker? Make me 300 croissants.’ ‘You’re right. I’m not a baker.’” Moss-Bachrach laughs. “Like lamination in general? That is way beyond me. So I’m like, I like to bake bread. That’s about it.”
Because it’s soothing? “Yeah, it’s soothing. It’s something I return to a couple of times a week. It’s elusive, you know? They change from week to week. I’m chasing this thing that keeps receding.”
Is baking rye important to your heritage? “No, although my wife is Ukrainian and Ukrainians like their dark rye.”
He has two daughters with the photographer Yelena Yemchuk. That relationship may well have given him a beadon how to play Richie. “Richie’s Ukrainian. He’s not from Chicago. And he’s a bit of an army brat, he moved around, but I think he wound up in Chicago when he was like 10, 11 or 12.
“He sort of grew up at the Berzattos’ table, they adopted him in a way. I don’t think Richie had the greatest home life.”
What viewers respond to, I suspect, is that Richie is an adorable loser. We project ourselves on to that loser