Ayo Edebiri has always been funny, but it has taken more than a decade for the rest of us to notice. She was funny when she was a kid: “My mom falls asleep very easily, but she stayed up for my whole improv show.” She was a funny adolescent: “What drew me to comedy as an awkward, insecure young person was how I could circumvent the laughter.” And she was funny when she was at college: “A sort of reverse vanity, not afraid to be stupid, not afraid to look honestly insane.” But it’s her bitingly astute, award-winning turn in The Bear — Disney+’s terrifyingly accurate portrayal of what it takes to make it in a professional kitchen — that has taken her from comedy-circuit-funny to global fame.
With her recent Golden Globe, Emmy and Critics Choice wins for best actress in a TV comedy, as well as a Bafta nomination, 2024 is already shaping up to be Edebiri’s year. Last year the 28-year-old appeared in five feature films — a shout out in particular to the groundbreaking Bottoms — and this year should see her in several more, filming the Marvel movie Thunderbolts, plus a third series of The Bear. But her increasing everywhereness hasn’t dented her cult appeal or her ability to deliver scene-stealing lines with tongue firmly in cheek.
We meet over Zoom, Edebiri from her apartment in Los Angeles with her dog, Gromit (part chihuahua, part terrier), her only entourage. She looks great — her eyes are huge — and is the dictionary definition of charismatic, with the ease and confidence that comes from knowing you’re funny and smart. The rapid success of the past couple of years has meant she has been “learning a lot about my own body and my own limits”, she explains, “and taking care of myself in a way that I think I might not have previously … But it’s also cool. I didn’t really see much of the world growing up. Like we weren’t a family that really travelled.”
Edebiri started her career on the New York stand-up comedy circuit, where she quickly made her mark — at just 24 she had her own series, Ayo and Rachel Are Single, on Comedy Central — alongside writing for several American TV comedies. But her breakthrough came in 2022, when she landed the role of Sydney in The Bear. The part came about while Edebiri was twiddling her thumbs mid-lockdown, trying to gauge the next strategic step of her career, but the script felt immediately familiar. “I remember that Chris [Storer — the show’s creator] was like, ‘You understand the rhythm of how these people speak.’ And I was like, ‘I’ve worked in restaurants.’ ”
There are so many things that make The Bear irresistibly captivating, but it is the zigzagging and at times confounding emotional tension between Edebiri’s sous-chef, Sydney, and her boss, Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy, that has remained tautly compelling after two series. Sydney is unflappable and aspiring opposite Carmy, a prodigal son returning to his family restaurant after a humiliating Michelin-star downfall. They are both at once livid and respectful, ambitious and inadequate, instinctive and yet emotionally ill-equipped, two tuning forks playing different but perfectly harmonised notes. Though tightly scripted — “we don’t do much changing of the dialogue” — the series feels almost improvised in line delivery, such is the closeness of the two as they battle and support each other, while also cranking out hot dishes on time.
She’s black and female while he’s white and male, a social contrast that simmers below their scenes without ever quite boiling over. Off screen, Edebiri and her co-star are close: when she won the Golden Globe earlier this month, the two were seen congratulating each other (White won best actor). “Jeremy is one of the most grounded, hard-working people I know,” she tells me. “I would describe my friendship and relationship with him as just a lot of trust and a lot of gratitude. We shot this show without any expectation, and to be on this journey with him, with everybody, it really does feel like a blessing and so I call him family. I call the whole cast and crew family because it really feels like a family endeavour.”
Every restaurant hinges on the chefs’ palates, and Sydney’s interest in the minutiae of eating is obviously a plot point of The Bear — a scene where she cooks an omelette with Boursin and crisps went viral. I hesitate to ask, but I have to know … how many times has Edebiri been asked if she can actually cook? “Many, and I’ll continue to be asked this,” she replies, unannoyed. Nowadays when she goes out to eat everyone wants to know what she thinks of the meal — her companions, the waiting staff, even occasionally the chefs in the kitchen. It’s an odd position for an actress with a relatively civilian interest in flavour compositions to be expected to give notes on the heat, the acid, the salt, the fat. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘Please can I just eat?’”
An only child, Edebiri was raised in Boston by her Barbadian mother and Nigerian father. Grown-up conversation filled her childhood home. “I feel like I was kind of in an adult club,” she says. “I loved being a little adult.” Her mother was religious and Edebiri was raised in the strict and conservative Pentecostal church: “There was definitely a lot of anxiety about, like, the end of the world. Am I a good person? The classic things that a seven-year-old is worried about!” What’s her relationship with religion now? Is she still worrying if she’s a good person? “I mean, probably always. And I’m probably always worried about the end of the world in a sense. I think when those things are encoded in your DNA, they’ll always be there. It might not be always from the lens of an evangelist, but I think as a human being those are things that I think about, however consciously or subconsciously.”
Growing up doused in organised religion affected her in myriad ways (“We’ll be unpacking that one for the rest of my life”), including the appeal of performance and comedy. “I don’t think there’s more riveting public speaking than seeing a pastor in the pulpit on Sunday morning. [Church] was the first place that I was exposed to art and music and public speaking and reading.”
Things fell further into place on a theatre course in eighth grade when she was assigned to create a character and constructed a neurotic pastor whose humdrum daily life had to be rigorously crosschecked against the Bible. She felt bad for making stuff up, for lying, but “the teacher was like, you’re not lying. You’re doing improv. It’s two days a week, come by.” For Edebiri, it was the first time that she got to be herself, or at least begin to “figure out who that was” outside her church upbringing. Isn’t improv the scariest thing a human being can do? “I know, I know. But my brain just was like an exploding galaxy brain, so fearless.”
She launched herself on to the New York comedy circuit after graduating from New York University, where she had changed her major from teaching to dramatic writing. It was while she was a student that she met her longtime collaborator and best friend, Rachel Sennott. The two starred together in last autumn’s Bottoms, a film that subverted traditional teen movies by following two high school lesbians who start a fight club to pull hot girls (including Kaia Gerber). It struck a chord deep in the heart of many — who can’t relate to being a horny teenage loser? I assumed she and Sennott were in stitches on set, but Edebiri understands comedy is beyond the laughter. “Rachel is such a great dramatic actress and such a good comedy actress. I think so many really good comedy actors I admire are also really good at drama.”
There are many clichés about comics having a hidden pain, but Edebiri doesn’t subscribe to the idea that making people laugh is masking something else. The world is sad, she says, and “you understand the innate humour of the saddest moments of our lives … [Knowing there’s always a duality is] what makes things so funny.”
Her next film, The Sweet East, is a road movie with the man of the moment Jacob Elordi (“nice and cool” is how she describes him) in which she plays a delusional director. “I love getting to play somebody who is so abrasive and brash.” After that will come Opus, a horror movie with John Malkovich. Next year, though, is when she goes properly stratospheric with her Marvel debut in Thunderbolts alongside Florence Pugh, David Harbour and Harrison Ford. She is also up for this year’s EE Bafta Rising Star award, to be awarded in February, voted for by the public and previously won by Kristen Stewart, Daniel Kaluuya and Tom Holland.
The fashion world has picked up on Edebiri’s rising star. She looked killer in Thom Browne recently at the Critics Choice awards, while her fantastic front row tux at Proenza Schouler threatened to steal the show. Has she always loved clothes? “For a while, as a comedian, I really wanted to hide. It was a lot of big shirts and big pants. I didn’t want anybody to imagine my body. Now I have more opportunities to wear clothes so I can be a bit of a chameleon. I can give people a different image when they see me casually versus when they see me on the red carpet versus when they see me as a character.” She is currently working with the stylist Danielle Goldberg (whose other clients include Greta Lee and Olivia Rodrigo), who reminds her that clothes are “straight up a weapon in your arsenal, a tool for showing up and being like, I’m a woman”. At the Golden Globes earlier this month, she wore red Prada, and found herself on best- dressed lists the world over. “It was very classic but modern and fun — it felt like me,” she says.
Speaking of fun, The Bear gang all “hopped in” a “glorified party bus” after the awards ceremony. “It was really cute because it was our first moment to come down from everything and just be together, without being photographed or interviewed,” she recalls. “Then we went to a party, we ate, we vibed a little.” If it all sounds a little too cool for school, fear not — surrounded by the likes of Oprah and Steven Spielberg, “It was hard not to spin my head and be star struck,” she says. And there’s always time for some unintentional comedy when Edebiri is around: she approached the French director Justine Triet, “and I told her in hideously broken French that I loved her film Anatomy of a Fall, and she fully responded in English and was like ‘Thank you very much.’ She was basically like, you and I will not have a conversation in French … and she was correct. I thought it was really hilarious.” Like I say — she has always been funny.
Voting for the EE Rising Star award is now open at ee.co.uk/Bafta until 12pm on Friday, February 16. The winner will be announced on Sunday, February 18
Styling: Sean Knight. Hair: Miles Jeffries at The Wall Group using Bumble & Bumble. Make-up: Holly Silius at R3-Mgmt using Lyma and Chanel. Set design: Kelly Infield. Local production: Ilona Klaver for Home Agency
