In “The Bear,” Abby Elliott follows a new recipe
Abby Elliott knows her way around comedy. A former member of the Groundlings and the Upright Citizens Brigade, she joined “Saturday Night Live” at age 21 and has since appeared on laugh-out-loud shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Odd Mom Out.” So when FX reached out to her in the spring of 2021 about a pilot for a new comedy, she was interested.
“I thought, ‘Oh, should I do a voice?’” Elliott said. “Or could I do a little catchphrase? That might be fun.”
That series is “The Bear,” which returns for its third season Thursday on Hulu. Much of the action takes place in the cluttered kitchen of a Chicago restaurant and stars Jeremy Allen White as a struggling chef. Elliott appears as her indulgent sister. “The Bear” is a comedy only in the classic sense of the word, in that it emphasizes human weaknesses and does not end in disaster. (Isn’t a workplace rife with panic, money woes, and suicidal thoughts a disaster? Discuss it with Emmy voters, who in January awarded her the award for Best comedy.) Otherwise, it’s dramatic, frenetic and extremely stressful.
“I didn’t really realize how high the stakes would be,” she said.
For what it’s worth, Elliott considers “The Bear” a comedy. “It’s like real life,” she says. “A lot of people find comedy in darkness and stress. It’s so relevant in that way. But a funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen: “The Bear” made Elliott a dramatic actress. She doesn’t make a voice.
I met Elliott, 37, at an Upper West Side coffee shop one summer morning as the sun was setting, about a week before the Season 3 premiere. Although she lives in Los Angeles and works in Chicago, she had come to the East Coast for a family wedding and then enjoyed a few days in the city.
At breakfast, she was well-dressed and fresh-faced (she admitted to wearing a thick layer of self-tanner), despite the heat. She has big eyes, a sardonic, closed-off smile and a knack for instant intimacy, especially when describing how she spent the 2024 Golden Globes pumping breast milk backstage alongside a similarly postpartum Sarah Snook.
If there’s an allele for laughter, Elliott has it. Her father is Chris Elliott, a longtime character most recently seen on “Schitt’s Creek,” who spent a season on “SNL.” Her father is Bob Elliott, one half of the Greatest Generation comedy duo Bob and Ray, who also made an “SNL” appearance. (Abby’s mother, Paula Niedert Elliott, is a former talent coordinator for David Letterman.)
Elliott doesn’t feel like she was pushed into performing. Her father, whom she idolized, showed her that a life in show business was possible, even desirable. But he never forced her to watch his appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” and encouraged her to go to college.
“I mean, there were options,” she said. “I just don’t know how else to do it, and I never really did.”
She dropped out of college after one semester and moved to Los Angeles, living with relatives and taking improv classes. She was invited onto “SNL” a few years later. Her name recognition, a mild form of nepotism, probably got her into 30 Rock, but it was a gift of boisterous celebrity impressions (Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep) that kept her there.
She left after four years on the show and worked steadily throughout the next decade, though usually in the kind of goofy supporting roles that rarely crack the cultural radar. She’s made peace with that.
“I was in such a safe zone of like, OK, well, this is exactly what I’m doing,” she said. “It’s like, OK, I’m not going to be able to get these roles or play dramatic roles.”
Christopher Storer, the creator of “The Bear,” had a different opinion when he was looking for an actress to play a loving, no-nonsense sister. He had never worked with Elliott before, but he remembered her from “SNL” — especially her impersonations.
“There was something really authentic about it,” he said. “You could feel the affection she had for the people she played. »
He wanted this affection for Natalie Berzatto, nicknamed Sugar, the older sister of White’s Carmy and apparently the only member of the family who had ever been to therapy. And Storer suspected Elliott, a trained improv comedian, was accustomed to working very, very quickly, a necessity on a show that values rawness and schedules few takes. She auditioned remotely; Storer was spellbound. “She felt very human,” he said.
Natalie has just one scene in the pilot, a moment in which she talks with Carmy about their older brother, Mikey, who died by suicide. Though brief, it communicates the love and trauma between the siblings. She and White didn’t discuss the scene before shooting it — or before reshooting it, months later. But White remembers feeling an immediate kinship.
“Whatever our imaginations came up with, we were telling ourselves the same story,” White said in a phone interview. He described the scenes between Carmy and Natalie as a respite from the chaos of the kitchen. Other cast members felt the same way.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays cousin Richie, said Elliott “is sort of a down-to-earth, honest guy surrounded by this wildly erratic extended family.” If he hadn’t known better, he never would have guessed Elliott had spent time on “SNL.”
“Not because she’s not funny, but simply because she’s grounded,” he said. “She’s not a star. She really has so much integrity and rigor.
In season one, Natalie is isolated from the restaurant, but in season 2 she goes inside, first as a project manager during a gut renovation, then as general manager. This was not necessarily what Storer and Joanna Calo, the two showrunners, had planned. But Elliott’s performance convinced them to bring her on.
“I was like, Oh, thank you,” Elliott said of entering the kitchen. “I had so much FOMO.”
While Season 2 was being written, Elliott learned she was pregnant with her second child. (Her husband is screenwriter Bill Kennedy.) She told Storer and Calo, and they decided to write a pregnancy into Natalie as well.
Still, Elliott’s pregnancy was unusual. She was full of energy while Natalie was exhausted. And in a consolation scene where Sydney, played by Ayo Edebiri, makes Natalie an omelet, Elliott needed a spittoon: pregnancy had given her an aversion to eggs. By the time filming began on Season 3, which explores the idea of inheritance — genetic and otherwise — she had already given birth. She had to wear a prosthetic belly and mimic heartburn.
Natalie is the most nuanced character Elliott has ever played. Her scenes involve subtext, a professional first. “My career has been entirely text,” she said. “I’ve done things where I explain exactly how I feel, like so many times.”
Filming Season 3 while caring for a baby and toddler didn’t make Elliott’s schedule any easier. (Her mother accompanied her to Chicago, as did a nanny.) But it made her a more centered and focused actress. Her time on set is, she said, “adult time.” Then she comes home and kids time begins.
“I’m so lucky to have these beautiful, wonderful children,” she said. “I don’t go home and drink a bottle of wine and obsess over this weird take, like I did in my 20s.”
If “The Bear” made Elliott a better actor, it didn’t make her a better cook, even though the food on the show, prepared by Storer’s sister, Courtney Storer, is apparently excellent. (The piccata Natalie makes in the second episode of the series? Elliott wrapped it in a plastic bag and ate it in the van on the way home.)
“I would love to cook,” Elliott said. “But I hardly shower every day. I spend my days cooking in the air fryer and ordering from Target.”
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