Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s kitchen is untidy. So untidy that his people hop on the video call from Brooklyn to tell me Moss-Bachrach would prefer to have his camera switched off. Which is a shame. I really want to see the carnage in his kitchen. I imagine smoking pans, pizza dough dripping from the ceiling and me yelling across the internet: “Dude, your toque’s on fire!”
But Moss-Bachrach won’t let me glimpse the real-life chaos. “My house is a mess,” he says. “I’ve just been baking a bunch of stuff. Dirty stuff everywhere, pots and stuff. So I feel a little exposed. I promise you, you’re dodging a bullet.”
It would have been fitting, since, in the hit US drama The Bear, Moss-Bachrach plays Richie Jerimovich, a one-man chaos machine. He’s The Bear’s leading disruptor, a vein-popping nightmare of a sort-of-manager, out of step with his cordon bleu chef “cousin” Carmy Berzatto’s plan to open a fine-dining restaurant at a former sandwich joint called The Original Beef of Chicagoland.
Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) has his work cut out thanks to exploding toilets and terrible money worries, but mostly Richie – the one fixture from the old joint he can’t get rid of. Richie used to love running the cheap and cheerful sandwich shop with Carmy’s now-dead brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) and, in his grief, regards Carmy’s dream as not just a betrayal, but one that involves nauseating gentrification.
It’s a compelling performance that has already earned Moss-Bachrach an Emmy nomination and made him a style icon around the world thanks to his character’s fondness for track pants and Adidas high-tops. “He’s definitely struggling. He’s going through a rough patch when we meet him. He’s grieving. He’s self medicating with cigarettes and food and anger. He’s not self-actualised.”
Which makes it all the more poignant that Moss-Bachrach is meditatively baking in Brooklyn. What are you making? “A rye bread. And then a Pullman loaf, a white bread.
“I’ve been a baker for 15 years. I got into a conversation recently with a real baker. You know, he has a bakery. And the baker said, ‘You’re a baker? Make me 300 croissants.’ ‘You’re right. I’m not a baker.’” Moss-Bachrach laughs. “Like lamination in general? That is way beyond me. So I’m like, I like to bake bread. That’s about it.”
Because it’s soothing? “Yeah, it’s soothing. It’s something I return to a couple of times a week. It’s elusive, you know? They change from week to week. I’m chasing this thing that keeps receding.”
Is baking rye important to your heritage? “No, although my wife is Ukrainian and Ukrainians like their dark rye.” He has two daughters with the photographer Yelena Yemchuk. That relationship may well have given him a bead on how to play Richie. “Richie’s Ukrainian. He’s not from Chicago. And he’s a bit of an army brat, he moved around, but I think he wound up in Chicago when he was like 10, 11 or 12.
“He sort of grew up at the Berzattos’ table, they adopted him in a way. I don’t think Richie had the greatest home life.”
What viewers respond to, I suspect, is that Richie is an adorable loser. We project ourselves on to that loser and hope that he will, just once, triumph. That’s why the scenes where Richie butts heads with tortured genius Carmy are so resonant. At one point in the second series, Carmy is whining about how his compulsion to cook “is not fun” for him. “Yeah,” Richie snaps back, “but you love it.” “That doesn’t mean it’s fun,” Carmy says. “If this shit is not fun for you, Cousin,” Richie snarls, “what the fuck is fun for you?”
“Carmy is an endless source of frustration for Richie,” says Moss-Bachrach. “Because Richie’s a very fully expressed person, you know, and Carmy is deeply neurotic. He’s kind of like a closed-off box.” Quite so: at the end of the season two finale, Richie, having freed Carmy from the walk-in fridge where he’s been trapped on his restaurant’s opening night (years of therapy right there), has a stupendous row with his cousin over the latter’s coolness toward his new girlfriend, Claire.
What’s that about? “To see somebody squander something willingly, it’s just inexcusable,” says Moss-Bachrach. “You have a beautiful life waiting for you, like who do you think you are?” Especially to someone like Richie who has lost so much.
Wherever Moss-Bachrach goes these days, people shout “Cousin!” across the street at him even though, technically, he isn’t Carmy’s cousin. The Bear, like an unsupervised chip pan, has caught fire worldwide, discombobulating Moss-Bachrach, who hitherto made a career from a series of disreputable characters, notably the ex-NSA analyst turned hacker Daniel “Micro” Lieberman in Netflix’s The Punisher and the painkiller-addicted man-baby Desi Harper in Lena Durham’s Girls.
I tell Moss-Bachrach I like the idea of him quietly baking at home. There is very little serenity for Richie in The Bear, which is why a piquant two-hander with Olivia Colman in season two is so cherishable. This was the series in which Richie became a key character, and Forks was the episode where we saw how he might stop being a burdensome loser. Carmy sends Richie to learn basic food skills at a posh restaurant, though he balks at the menial tasks he’s assigned, such as washing forks. Then one morning, he finds the head chef Terry (Colman) peeling mushrooms – an emblem of the dignity of the most humble tasks. He joins in and the pair meditatively bond over their upbringings in military families. For just a moment, there’s Zen amid Richie’s more usual chaos.
Moss-Bachrach is pleased The Bear gave him what his characters don’t usually get – a redemption arc. But what he really likes about his character’s renaissance as maître d’ is that he won’t have to wear tracksuit bottoms any more.
What are you having for lunch, I ask, hoping he’ll mention some meaty monstrosity in a sandwich the size of a boat: “Soup and salad. Very un-Bear-ish.” And, you’d think, some delicious homemade bread. Ebon Moss-Bachrach is not Richie Jerimovich.
There is one key parallel, though. Like Richie, Moss-Bachrach isn’t a Chicagoan. “I’m a New Yorker, in New York for a very long time.” Such a long time that he is troubled by Brooklyn’s gentrification. He mentions a local joint, Sal’s Pizzeria. He and his family had been regulars for years until it went out of business during the summer, something that made his daughter cry.
“There’s a bakery now where Sal’s was, and you definitely can’t get like a loaf of bread for what a slice of pizza once cost.”
Where does Moss-Bachrach stand on the culture war between New York and Chicago over who makes best pizza? Chicagoans, I understand, deride mimsy New York slices? “Well, in Chicago, they’re famous for the deep pizza, which is strange, and, frankly, kind of unappetising.” Heretical talk that, you’d think, would get him run out the windy city.
“But it’s OK. I don’t mind. Because what I do like in Chicago is they do a bar-style or tavern-style pizza, which has a thin crust that I like.”
Good save. Perhaps he will be allowed after all to Chicago to film season three. He hasn’t seen the scripts yet, but Moss-Bachrach hopes there will be more kitchen-related chaos in season three and even more of Richie, whose transnational appeal, he reckons, is down to the fact that “dysfunction travels”.
“Nick Cave has talked a lot about the connective tissue of humanity, that we’re all connected through loss,” he says. “I think he’s right. You know, something we all have in common is that we’re all losing people, you know, people in our family. We’re all going down. So yeah, Richie travels.”
