“The Bear” is ready to serve its last supper — and the cast is getting emotional just thinking about it.
The fifth and final season of the Emmy-winning restaurant dramedy premieres this Thursday at 9 p.m. ET on Hulu, and it’s a case of life imitating art, with the staff of The Bear banding together to serve one final meal before they have to close their doors for good. So did the emotions of filming the final season seep into the performances at all?
“There was a moment where I realized I was in the middle of my feelings,” Lionel Bryce, who plays dessert chef Marcus, admits to TVLine in the video above. “I just reflected a lot” while shooting the final season, he adds, “and it’s very bittersweet.”
Matty Matheson, who plays Neil Fak, remembers feeling nostalgic, too: “We’ll never have this group of people coming together at that time, and I think it’s such a special thing. We never thought it would be what it became… I love these people, and it is incredible, but it is very sad.”
Jeremy Allen White, who stars as Carmy, says that his character’s frame of mind and his own overlapped a lot while filming: “There was something really nice about, especially for Carmy, knowing there is a goodbye, trying to be incredibly present in the kitchen in this last service, Jeremy trying to be as present as possible, and ignoring the inevitable and the elephant in the room, which is the ending of this thing. And that’s the same for Carm: He knows where this is going, but he’s trying to like give himself over to the moment, and I felt very much in the same position.”
The actors also share what they’ve learned in the kitchen
The final season of “The Bear” all takes place in one night at the restaurant, a la “The Pitt,” but Liza Colón-Zayas, who plays cook Tina, says the pressure of shooting in real time is nothing new. “There’s always been this” feeling on the show, she says, “where, on any given day, it felt cataclysmic… But of course, the clock is down to zero, and so the urgency that we’ve been enduring, we’re better at doubling down on it.”
After shooting five seasons of TV in a high-pressure restaurant kitchen, though, the actors must’ve picked up some useful cooking tips, right? Jeremy Allen White says he’s still working on making the perfect omelette: “It’s this very simple dish, [and] the spectrum of how well it can be done is so large, and there is this pursuit in the perfection of this simple thing… That’s still something I’m trying to perfect, and can try to perfect for the rest of my life.”
Lionel Bryce (aka Marcus) proudly says “I learned how to quenelle,” referring to the French technique of using two spoons to form oval shapes of soft foods like mousses and ice creams. “I feel like that’s an impressive party trick.”
Colón-Zayas notes that she’s picked up some of the show’s lingo, too: “My kitchen is really tiny, so my husband and I are starting to say, ‘Behind!'”
Press PLAY at the top to hear more from the stars of “The Bear,” and hit the comments to share what you’d like to see in the final season.
