The actress did shifts in a real-life kitchen to prepare for her role as Carmy’s sister in the Disney+ show. But the stress of that was nothing compared with IVF.
Abby Elliott couldn’t believe the numbers — how they warped and morphed. She was shadowing a restaurant manager at Houston’s in Los Angeles, in preparation for her role in the television series The Bear. “It was crazy,” Elliott, 37, says. “As a creative person — and math is not a strong suit — it blew my mind.”
She watched the manager at work, spending 20 minutes — and not a moment more — checking that night’s food with the line cook. Then he would look at the bookings, compared against the outgoings and the incomings, the profits and losses changing night by night, minute by minute. It was like three-dimensional chess, it was like climbing shifting sands, it was Sisyphean.
It is also one of the reasons The Bear, in which Elliott plays the restaurant manager Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto, is so dicey and brilliant: because every time something in the kitchen gets good, everything changes.
Set in Chicago, the show stars Jeremy Allen White as Natalie’s brother Carmy, a masochistically obsessive and emotionally unavailable head chef who returns from his Michelin-starred career after the suicide of his brother to the chaos of grief — and to the chaos of his Italian-American family’s restaurant. The first series (2022) was about the botched-together crew trying to create a working restaurant, the Beef, with the pragmatist Natalie trying to keep it all on track; the second (2023) about the launch of a new one, the Bear; and the third is — well, I don’t know, because it is being kept a closely guarded secret until its release
It has won ten Primetime Emmys, four Screen Actors Guild awards and four Golden Globes (Elliott was nominated for best supporting actress this year), turning the actors into stars — and memes — and White into a tattooed kitchen hunk who you know would never call you back. What is it, then, about The Bear that makes it so white hot?
“Our director [Christopher Storer, also the writer] goes so fast on set — it’s unlike any other show I’ve worked on,” Elliott says, talking from her home in LA, wearing a Breton-striped T-shirt, her blonde hair beachy. She has just arrived back from a four-month stint filming the show in Chicago, where she lived with her mother, three-year-old daughter, Edith Pepper, one-year-old son, William Joseph Lunney IV, and their nanny (“who saved me”).
“It’s so punchy,” she continues, “it’s so quick. He will do one or two takes and he’s like, ‘OK, we’re moving on.’ It feels very reactionary, like it’s in real time, because it is.” As a result everyone had to come to set totally prepared. “My mum helped me run lines every night, I would just drill it. I’m still dreaming about it. Last night I dreamt that I had a monologue to memorise and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do it this fast!’ " Did it feel as though they were in a restaurant? “Absolutely.”
Jeremy’s an amazing actor — to be in a scene with someone working at that calibre is thrilling to me.
The kitchen, in fact, translates into a perfect drama, constantly dancing on a knife edge between perfection and disaster, where every night they must start again, a never-ending attempt to apply discipline to chaos. The script keeps a crackling pace, punctuated with choruses of “Yes, chef!”, “Hands!” and “Doors!”
There was pressure for the third series, she says, “but as soon as we all got to set in Chicago it felt like we’re back in this bubble, in a rhythm and with our family”. Does she tease White for becoming a pin-up? “I mean, we all kinda do. But he’s also an amazing actor, so to be in a scene with someone working at that calibre is thrilling to me.”
While Elliott shadowed a manager, White worked as a chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Santa Monica, and Ayo Edebiri, who plays Sydney, went to culinary school. They were also guided by Courtney Storer, a former chef, the show’s “culinary producer” and the sister of its writer-director. “She makes all the food you see on set,” Elliot says. “The walk-in fridge is cold, there’s fresh food in there.” Courtney also designs the kitchen and props so that everything is accurate — Carmy, for example, drinks out of a “deli”, a large plastic container that chefs recycle into water glasses.
But beneath the brutality of the workplace is tragedy. The most extraordinary episode is called Fishes — “sheer, magical genius”, wrote The Times — a flashback to the Berzatto family Christmas, when their mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), is sloshing around the kitchen trying to cook the feast while getting sloshed on wine, her alcoholism its own character who pleads for help but won’t let anyone come anywhere near.
Elliott’s Natalie is heartbreakingly obsequious and punished by her mother for it. “I really was feeling everything in real time [during filming],” she says. “I went somewhere else. I blacked out. Genuinely.” After it came out, she says people thanked her for her portrayal of being the grown-up child of an alcoholic parent.
Elliott was born in New York City, the elder of two girls, and grew up in Wilton, Connecticut. Comedy was in her blood — her parents met on Late Night with David Letterman, where her mother worked in casting and her father, Chris, was a writer and stand-up. A prolific comedic writer, he starred as Roland Schitt in Schitt’s Creek.
What was the family dinner table like? “It was wild,” she says, softly spoken and a little shy, correcting herself often. “You know, my dad’s really funny. We goofed around a lot and so I grew up laughing all the time.” The sisters put on plays and filmed parody adverts on the camcorder (today, her sister, Bridey, is a writer, actress and director).
At 19, Elliott moved to Los Angeles, where she took comedy classes at the Groundlings, a hallowed hall of improv, performed with the Midnight Show sketch troupe (“I was their impression girl”) and had a brief stint as front of house in a restaurant, but quit after she slipped over in the kitchen (“the hardest week of my life”).
She was hired by Saturday Night Live at 21, the youngest woman in the show’s history, the second generation of her family to be a cast member and the third generation to have featured in the show (her grandfather Bob Elliott was a radio comedian).
“I was so young,” she says. “It was my first job in the entertainment industry and it was shocking how you had to push people out of your way to get to the top.” The schedule was “nonstop”, working through the night until the live show every weekend. “I think Maya [Rudolph] had her first child while she was on the show,” she says. “Amy Poehler too. I think about that and I’m like, in what world? It’s not possible.” How much of the industry was and still is designed by men, I ask. “Most of it, honestly,” she says, then pauses. “Yeah. Most of it.” She was let go in 2012, after four years on the show.
After Elliott met her husband, the television writer Bill Kennedy, on the set of the film Sex Ed, which Kennedy wrote and Elliott starred in, they married and later tried to have a child naturally. They could not. In 2018 they decided to try IVF. “The process is so gruelling and emotional and you feel so foreign in your own body because of the hormones,” she says. “You don’t recognise yourself.”
It took a further two years of focused energy (“like a full-time job”) for a successful pregnancy in 2020. “When it finally worked it was miraculous and I was terrified,” she says. “And then Covid hit and I was even more terrified.” Elliott became hypervigilant, terrified she would lose the baby to the disease.
The couple left LA and drove as far as you possibly could across America, 5,150km to rural Maine, on the very northeast coast, where her parents were living and where the Covid rates were low. As they drove, Elliott, Kennedy and their yorkiepoo slept in a tent at campsites and did not go into service stations, to avoid contact. “I was six months pregnant, squatting on the side of the road,” she says. “My nerves were fried. But I absolutely had this feeling like I needed to go where we would be safe.”
On arrival they quarantined for two weeks in the tent before moving into her parents’ cabin, where she started hoarding supplies, like cloth nappies, terrified they were going to run out. Her daughter was born there in October 2020. After losing a second pregnancy, she conceived again by IVF, and had her son last June (she was pregnant while filming The Bear). “The part of me that went through this will always be there,” she says, “but it definitely shifts your perspective on the little things.”
Today her life in LA, when she’s not working, is “chill and simple and the best”, making breakfast, picking up her daughter from preschool, “working out” — she puts on a silly, high-pitched Californian accent — “hiking with my dogs”.
The Bear, she continues, has changed her. “It took me a while to get to a place where I felt comfortable in trying new things,” she says. “But on The Bear I felt truly believed in and supported by the producers and the director. So now I don’t feel as scared any more.” She has, like the chefs in the kitchen, been refined by the fire.
Series 3 of The Bear starts on Disney+ June 27.
Written by: Megan Agnew
© The Times of London