Grill thrills

Grill thrills


By Michael Pickard
August 12, 2024

STAR POWER

US actor Edwin Lee Gibson takes DQ inside the making of acclaimed restaurant drama The Bear, playing chef Ebraheim, the key to the show’s success and why the food on set occasionally gets him into trouble.

Despite a 40-year stage career and screen roles in series such as Fargo, Law & Order and Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Edwin Lee Gibson has enjoyed a life of relative anonymity.

But ever since the US actor joined Disney+ and Hulu’s acclaimed restaurant drama The Bear, he has found himself sharing an increasing portion of the limelight alongside fellow cast members Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Lionel Boyce, Liza Colón-Zayas, Abby Elliott and Matty Matheson.

After three seasons of the series, “I’m very happy for Christopher [Storer, creator], happy for Joanna [Calo, executive producer] and the cast, and it’s been really interesting and funny and I’m very pleased with it,” Gibson tells DQ of The Bear’s global success. “I’m surprised at how it’s really touched people, but pleasantly surprised at that.

“I used to joke with everyone that they all get recognised because I don’t sound or look much like Ebraheim when I’m not working, so people are expecting a certain thing, but now it’s happening to me, so I can’t say anything to them now.”

But playing a character he doesn’t recognise as himself is nothing new for Gibson, who is used to transforming for different roles. Ebraheim is no different.

Edwin Lee Gibson as Ebraheim in acclaimed drama series The Bear

“I love this character so much, and here I am, an actor from the US that’s playing a character from East Africa. I understand what it’s like to be able to put on a character and be able to disappear. That’s what I like to do as an actor,” he says. “I like to disappear. That’s when I think I’m doing my job. People walk by, walk back, [and say] ‘Hey, are you..?’ They hear me speaking and say, ‘I wasn’t expecting that voice to come out of you.’”

In the series, which debuted in 2022, Ebra is a long-standing line cook at The Original Beef of Chicagoland (aka The Beef), the family-run Italian sandwich shop that was managed by Mikey Berzatto (Jon Bernthal) until he took his own life. The show beings as the restaurant is inherited by his younger brother Carmy (White), an award-winning New York chef who returns home to take over the business and, during the course of the series, transform it into a fine dining establishment known as The Bear.

Little is actually known about Ebra, except that he originally comes from Somalia and is close friends with fellow cook Tina (Colón-Zayas). And when Gibson first learned about the role, the character description summed him up as “a mystery who’s lived a thousand lives.”

“That’s all I needed,” he says. “I was really drawn in. As an actor, that’s a great amount of space for me. But what I love about him is this mystery. I was trying to really hold on to that mystery in each season, even episode to episode. Where is he really from and how did he get there? Moreover, how did he get to the US from East Africa? All of these things just keep my love for him growing.”

Though it might seem a challenge for an actor to build a character with such an open brief, Gibson has had some hints along the way, not least lines that point to a past “trauma” that is yet to be fully revealed.

Having started as a line cook, the character is now in charge of the restaurant’s ‘to go’ window

“So all the chaos in the kitchen, if you notice, he doesn’t really get bothered by much of it because he’s seen so much,” he explains. “We don’t know what that is yet so much. Maybe we find out – we have a treasure chest for him. All those things are just brilliant opportunity for me as an artist.”

Even so, “I like things that scare me. This scared me. I was like, ‘OK, what is this?’ But I just lean into it, whatever that is,” he says of the role.

Showrunner Storer, who has also directed the majority of The Bear’s episodes, first met Gibson on a Zoom call, during which he revealed he had first seen the actor on stage in Chicago five years earlier and had wanted to work with him ever since.

And it’s clear that, from the very beginning, Storer and the cast supported each other as the actors looked to find their characters in their own way.

“I remember this one moment,” Gibson says, “in season one, there’s the episode where he says, ‘I was in a [military] brigade once. Many people died.’ We did it [the scene], and then Christopher said, ‘Oh, that’s a great take.’ Then I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I figured it out. Can we do the scene again?’

“That’s how we are as a group, even though it was our first season. I said, ‘I think I got it, Christopher.’ So we went back and we did it again, and what you saw was the take when I figured out the character in a much better way and was able to go from that to everything you see in the rest of that season and then in seasons two and three. Sometimes you just figure out things. You never know where it comes from, but fear is a great motivator.”

Across 28 episodes, as The Beef has become The Bear, Ebra has faced numerous struggles, not least his brush with culinary school in season two when he failed to attend classes, much to Tina’s disappointment. In season three, he is left to face the pressure of running The Bear’s ‘to go’ window while the rest of the kitchen crew attempt to meet Carmy’s exacting expectations.

Notably in season three, viewers also learned how Tina came to start working at The Beef in one of the standout episodes, Napkins (which is directed by Edebiri). Yet Ebra was there before Tina arrived, and like many of the characters in the series, he too is still working through his grief from Mikey’s death.

“That’s something no one’s really asked about. But I see him just growing, and we see by the end of season three that he’s grown to the point that he’s now taking over [the ‘to go’ window] and he can run this, he’s got this responsibility totally independent of everyone else. So it’s really, really great. But hopefully we find out more about what his actual trauma is because we haven’t found out exactly what it is.”

Ebra has a close relationship with fellow cook Tina, played by Liza Colón-Zayas

Filled with tension, drama, emotion and touches of humour, the series is characterised by periods of fast dialogue – not least the sweary back-and-forths between Carmy and ‘Cousin’ Richie – and numerous moments that take viewers to the heart of the cooking process inside The Bear’s kitchen.

Filming the series involves numerous rehearsals for the more choreographed scenes, but Gibson says the cast always show up ready to work and support each other no matter what the day’s shooting schedule has in store or how much they might be directly in front of the camera. In such a busy kitchen, numerous actors are often simply visible in the background.

“How wonderful for Christopher and Joanna that they have a cast like this!” he laughs. “And how wonderful for us that we have people that believe in us in this way. But it’s great. It’s hilarious. We have so much fun on set, we think the show’s a comedy already, but if you were there with us, it’s a really good time.”

When it comes to those shots of the cast preparing the food in the show, “if you notice, we don’t use any hand doubles. Those are our hands,” Gibson reveals. “Go back and look at it. Those are our hands doing the work, so there’s choreography there. But I do have to admit that a couple of times, because the food is so good, a couple of times I might have got into trouble because I thought we were done with a scene and I wanted to taste something – and it wasn’t the right time to taste it. I’m not the only one.

“Christopher’s sister, Courtney Storer, and Matty Matheson, who plays Neil Fak, do such a brilliant job [overseeing the food] – Matty in the first season and Courtney over two and three as the culinary producer. They have their own kitchen on set and they’re making all this incredible stuff and experimenting. It’s just great.”

Much of the East African character’s background remains a mystery 

Gibson puts The Bear’s success down to the fact that no one working on the show is ever complacent about the numerous accolades it has received, with more awards surely to come from 23 nominations at the Emmys on September 16. “We come back ready to work each season, and we care enough about each other to really come back to work. We’ve retained maybe at least 90% of our crew, and anyone that knows how fluid this business is, especially on the crew side, knows you’ve got a really good thing going when the crew remains, and we all know each other. It’s really beautiful in that way.”

With season three ending on a cliffhanger and details of an upcoming fourth season under wraps (reports suggest it was filmed back to back with season three), what are Gibson’s hopes for the future of the show?

“I’d love to give you the tea, but all I have is coffee,” he jokes. “I hope we continue to engage audiences in different ways, that we continue to bring people together around food and around family – the family that you inherit and the families you find.

“For Ebra, I would just love to know more about this trauma. I’m interested in what Christopher and Joanna think. I have my own ideas, because if you’re going in the show, the further you go on, the more the character becomes yours. I’m really interested in just finding out if he starts to make his own dishes in the ‘to go.’ It’s moving along really quite well. I just hope people continue to receive it well and that we keep doing the hard work that it takes to be worthy of the reception.”

tagged in: , , ,