Abby Elliott is aware of her method round a comedy. A veteran of the Groundlings and the Upright Residents Brigade, she joined “Saturday Night time Dwell” at 21 and has since appeared in laugh-track-ready reveals like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Odd Mom Out.” So within the spring of 2021, when FX approached her a couple of pilot for a brand new comedy, she was .
“I type of went into it like, Oh, ought to I do a voice?” Elliott stated. “Or I might perform a little catchphrase? That could possibly be enjoyable.”
That present was “The Bear,” which returns for its third season on Thursday, on Hulu. Set largely within the fraught kitchen of a Chicago restaurant, it stars Jeremy Allen White as a troubled chef. Elliott seems as his forbearing sister. “The Bear” is a comedy solely within the classical sense, in that it emphasizes human foibles and doesn’t finish in catastrophe. (Is a office rife with panic, cash hassle and suicidal ideation not a catastrophe? Take it up with Emmys voters, who in January awarded it finest comedy.) In any other case it’s dramatic, frenetic, extraordinarily aggravating.
“I didn’t actually fairly perceive how excessive the stakes can be,” she stated.
For what it’s value, Elliott does take into account “The Bear” a comedy. “It’s identical to actual life,” she stated. “Lots of people discover comedy within the darkness and the stress. It’s so relatable in that method.” However a humorous factor occurred on the way in which to the kitchen: “The Bear” made Elliott a dramatic actress. She doesn’t do a voice.
I met Elliott, 37, at an Higher West Aspect cafe on a summer season morning, the solar set to low broil, a couple of week earlier than the Season 3 premiere. Although she lives in Los Angeles and works in Chicago, she had come to the East Coast for a household wedding ceremony and was having fun with a number of days within the metropolis afterward.
At breakfast, she was crisply dressed and fresh-faced (she did admit to a thick coat of self-tanner), regardless of the warmth. She has huge eyes, a sardonic, closed mouth smile and a expertise for fast intimacy, particularly when describing how she spent the 2024 Golden Globes pumping breast milk backstage alongside a equally postpartum Sarah Snook.
If there’s an allele for laughs, Elliott has it. Her father is Chris Elliott, a longtime late-night fixture seen extra lately in “Schitt’s Creek,” who spent a season on “S.N.L.” His father is Bob Elliott, half of the greatest-generation comedy duo Bob and Ray, who additionally made an “S.N.L.” look. (Abby’s mom, Paula Niedert Elliott, is a former expertise coordinator for David Letterman.)
Elliott doesn’t really feel that she was pushed into efficiency. Her father, whom she idolized, confirmed her {that a} showbiz life was potential, even fascinating. However he by no means made her watch his appearances on “Late Night time With David Letterman,” and he inspired her to go to school.
“I imply, there have been choices,” she stated. “I simply don’t know tips on how to do the rest, and I’ve by no means actually recognized.”
She dropped out of school after a semester and relocated to Los Angeles, dwelling with family and taking improv lessons. She was invited to “S.N.L.” a number of years later. Title recognition, a mild type of nepotism, doubtless obtained her within the door at 30 Rock, nevertheless it was a present for riotous movie star impressions (Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep) that stored her there.
She left after 4 years on the present and labored steadily all through the next decade, although sometimes within the sorts of daffy supporting roles that not often ping the tradition radar. She made peace with that.
“I used to be in such a protected zone of like, OK, effectively, that is simply what I do,” she stated. “It’s like, OK, I’m not going to have the ability to get these roles or play dramatic components.”
Christopher Storer, the creator of “The Bear,” thought in a different way when he was trying to find an actress to play a loving, no-nonsense sister. He had by no means labored with Elliott earlier than, however he remembered her from “S.N.L.” — significantly her impressions.
“There was one thing simply so real,” he stated. “You could possibly really feel the love for the those that she was impersonating.”
He needed that affection for Natalie Berzatto, nicknamed Sugar, the older sister of White’s Carmy and clearly the one member of their household who has ever been to remedy. And Storer suspected that Elliott, a skilled improv comedian, was versed in working very, in a short time, a necessity on a present that values rawness and budgets few takes. She auditioned remotely; Storer was smitten. “She felt very human,” he stated.
Natalie has a sole scene within the pilot, a second by which she speaks with Carmy about their older brother, Mikey, who has died by suicide. Although temporary, it communicates the love and trauma between the siblings. She and White didn’t talk about the scene earlier than they shot it — or earlier than they reshot it, months later. However White remembers feeling a direct kinship.
“No matter our imaginations had finished, we had been telling ourselves the identical story,” White said in a telephone interview. He described the scenes between Carmy and Natalie as a respite from the chaos of the kitchen. Different solid members felt equally.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who performs Cousin Richie, stated that Elliott “in some methods is the straight man — sensible, surrounded by this wildly erratic prolonged household.” If he hadn’t recognized higher, he by no means would have guessed that Elliott did time on “S.N.L.”
“Not as a result of she’s not humorous, however simply because she’s grounded,” he stated. “She’s not a showboat. She actually has a lot integrity and rigor.”
Within the first season, Natalie is siloed from the restaurant, however in Season 2 she comes inside, first as a venture supervisor throughout a intestine renovation after which as the overall supervisor. That was not essentially what Storer and Joanna Calo, the 2 showrunners, had deliberate. However Elliott’s efficiency satisfied them to convey her in.
“I used to be like, Oh, thanks,” Elliott stated of lastly coming into the kitchen. “I had a lot FOMO.”
As Season 2 was being written, Elliott discovered that she was pregnant together with her second little one. (Her husband is the screenwriter Invoice Kennedy.) She informed Storer and Calo, they usually determined to put in writing a being pregnant for Natalie, too.
Nonetheless, Elliott’s being pregnant was distinct. She was energetic whereas Natalie was exhausted. And in a consoling scene by which Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney makes Natalie an omelet, Elliott wanted a spit bucket — being pregnant had given her an aversion to eggs. By the point filming began on Season 3, which explores the concept of legacy — genetic and in any other case — she had already given delivery. She needed to put on a prosthetic stomach and mimic heartburn.
Natalie is probably the most nuanced character Elliott has ever performed. Her scenes contain subtext, knowledgeable first. “My profession has been all textual content,” she stated. “I’ve finished issues the place I’m explaining precisely how I’m feeling, like so many instances.”
Capturing Season 3 whereas additionally caring for a child and a toddler has not made Elliott’s schedule any simpler. (Her mom accompanies her to Chicago, as does a nanny.) But it surely has made her right into a extra centered, extra targeted actor. Her time on set is, she stated, “grownup time.” Then she goes residence and child time begins.
“I’m so fortunate to have these lovely, great youngsters,” she stated. “I don’t go residence and drink a bottle of wine and obsess about that one bizarre take, like I did in my 20s.”
If “The Bear” has made Elliott a greater actor, it has not made her a greater cook dinner, although the meals within the present, ready by Storer’s sister, Courtney Storer, is seemingly wonderful. (The piccata Natalie makes within the present’s second episode? Elliott wrapped it in a plastic bag and ate it within the van on the way in which residence.)
“I’d like to cook dinner,” Elliott stated. “However I’m barely showering day-after-day. It’s all air fryer and Goal orders.”
