The Bear Serves Up Cameo Chaos
By Roxana Hadadi, a Vulture TV critic who also covers film and pop culture
Spoilers for all 10 episodes of The Bear season two follow.
Two Academy Award winners, an MCU supervillain, an Emmy winner, and a stand-up who may have accidentally thrown $3,000 into the garbage walk into The Bear. What do they order? The meteoric popularity that comes with a breakout hit, of course. But the taste is bittersweet.
Like Jon Bernthal’s unannounced casting as Mikey, the tortured Berzatto brother whose death incited the events of season one, The Bear kept a tight lid on the abundance of guest stars who pop up throughout the FX on Hulu series’ second season (all ten episodes are streaming today). A couple new faces were already known to us, including Molly Gordon recurring as Carmy’s love interest and Bob Odenkirk in an unknown guest role. But Robert Townsend in “Sundae”; Will Poulter in “Honeydew”; Sarah Paulson, John Mulaney, Gillian Jacobs, and Jamie Lee Curtis in “Fishes”; and Olivia Colman in “Forks” all appear as surprises.
The presence of these marquee names confirms The Bear is no longer an out-of-nowhere success, and there’s a visceral thrill to spotting a recognizable face in the least expected place. There’s a little bit of nostalgia, too, in seeing A-list movie stars like Curtis show up on TV. Before limited series and anthologies normalized fluidity between the big and small screens for actors like Nicole Kidman, Kathy Bates, and basically everyone on True Detective, it was a big deal when Marisa Tomei stopped by Seinfeld and Brad Pitt showed up on Friends. Once the initial delight of Curtis going for broke, Mulaney keeping things wry, and Paulson being Mommy fades away, though, what’s left is a sense that The Bear’s cameos are their own kind of chaos menu.
All fictional media requires suspension of disbelief, and that is a delicate and difficult thing. Various elements can take you out of a TV show — too-dark visuals, nonsensical treatments of space-time, incorrect geography — and puncture the fragile balance required to keep you under the magic box’s spell episode after episode. In its first season, The Bear almost dared viewers to quit if they couldn’t keep up with all the yelling, grief, and self-loathing; at times, it felt like a purposefully unpleasant show. But as season two starts, everyone’s trying to be calmer and more considerate as they work on transforming the Beef into a Michelin-worthy restaurant, and initially, the unveiling of these guest stars matches that measured energy.
Take Poulter’s appearance in “Honeydew” as Luca, the pastry chef to whom Carmy and Syd send Marcus for training in Copenhagen. The Bear is often best in one-to-one scenes where actors can really dig into their character motivations and offer distinct, present reactions to their scene partners, and in this departure episode, Poulter and Lionel Boyce get to do exactly that. As Luca and Marcus work together on the dessert station, they discuss their paths into the kitchen and relationships with colleagues and family. They cook, they blanche, they mold, they use tweezers to drop minuscule slivers of hazelnuts onto beautifully piped mounds of pudding. (All of this is a hoot if you know that Poulter loves to cook when he’s not acting.) They learn about each other and themselves with food — and the passion and technique making it requires — as their common ground.
The same goes for Olivia Colman’s single scene in “Forks,” when she’s revealed as the much-whispered-about Chef Terry, owner of the three-star restaurant where Richie is staging. If Ebon Moss-Bachrach devoted himself to “playing the obstacle” in season one, Richie’s arc in season two is about his desire for a more stable, regimented, and purposeful life. That yearning comes through when he stumbles across Chef Terry quietly peeling mushrooms in an empty corner of her kitchen and accepts her invitation to pick up a knife and get to work. Their easy camaraderie — Richie’s self-deprecation, Terry’s frankness — as they discuss her failures and belief that life needs to be defined as “time well spent” again situates the kitchen as a place of both discovery and routine. Poulter and Colman deliver non-showy performances in a series that initially centered on characters jockeying to be the loudest person in the room; their self-assuredness, then, echoes the series’s evolution.
But then there’s “Fishes,” which is narratively essential but at its worst seems like everyone’s attempt at a guest Emmy nomination. In quick succession, relatives and close friends are introduced in a flashback episode to Christmas dinner five years ago: Curtis plays Donna, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, manic, and abusive Berzatto matriarch; Paulson is Michelle, a Berzatto cousin, and Mulaney her romantic partner Stevie; Jacobs is Tiffany, Richie’s pregnant then-wife; Odenkirk is Uncle Lee, suggested to be either a friend of the kids’ absent (maybe dead?) father or an ex of Donna’s; and Bernthal returns as Mikey, but an angrier, more brittle version of the man from Carmy’s halcyon season-one memory. This family’s problems include the failing of the Beef but aren’t contained to it: The hour fills in Carmy’s competitive, fractured relationship with Mikey and brings in Sugar’s desperate concern about Donna, who treats her daughter like an intolerable nuisance. The approval that Carmy wanted from Mikey, Sugar also needs from Donna, and their family dynamic recalls The Beef’s in season one. Everyone’s screaming at each other, kitchen timers contribute to the cacophony, and family-recipe dishes take on so much outsized importance that any enjoyment of the dining experience itself dissolves.
It’s not that The Bear can’t return to its previously established methods. It’s important, actually, for the show to contextualize the Berzattos then so we can understand Carmy and Sugar’s motivations now. The best scene of this episode is probably the protracted fight between Bernthal’s Mikey and Odenkirk’s Uncle Lee, during which Lee accuses Mikey of being on drugs, irresponsible with money, and a drain on Donna. In return, Mikey essentially holds the table hostage as he throws fork after fork at Lee’s face. We already know about Mikey’s destructive temper, but this confrontation — and the way series creator and director Christopher Storer guides the camera around the dinner table, capturing a parade of uncomfortable, guilty reactions — underscores the feeling of a family’s volatility spiraling toward catastrophe. (It helps that Bernthal looks positively agonized, delivering a bone-deep performance of self-hatred.) But unlike “Honeydew” or “Forks,” which use their cameos to add another facet to characters we already know and care for, “Fishes” pulls attention from the core crew. It’s pleasant to watch Mulaney’s Stevie josh around with Matty Matheson’s Fak while Paulson’s Michelle encourages Carmy to pursue his dreams outside of Chicago, but are these moments must-haves? The new characters feel thinner, their presence less crucial and more ornamental. And in Curtis’s case, her go-for-broke performance, in which she goes even bigger than her work in Everything Everywhere All at Once, is a distraction.
Donna is, to put it nicely, monstrous, a whirlwind of passive-aggressive parental guilt who traumatizes her children in real time, coddling Mikey, diminishing Carmy, and outright attacking Sugar. Everything about her is a little bit garish and uncouth, from her blood-red nails dipping into a tub of butter as she prepares garlic bread with her hands to the omnipresent smoke and ash of her cigarettes (there’s no way that food is cinder free). It wouldn’t make sense for this character to be diminutive since we need to understand why Carmy and Sugar spend both seasons avoiding her. But Curtis never disappears into the writing or the character’s connections to everyone else at the family dinner. In each moment, she’s doing a little too much. Every line delivery is either an irritated scream or an agonized whisper; every expression a sneer or a snarl; every lean against the wall, or posture in a chair, a slump. Curtis plays Donna broadly but superficially, and while her scenes with her children demonstrate their inherited damage, these interactions feel less organic and naturalistic than the series has elsewhere shown itself to be. Although Donna’s return in finale “The Bear” serves a plot function in driving a wedge between Sugar and her husband Petey, Curtis’s anguished sobbing and pacing are again overly abundant — the rare false notes in an otherwise stellar concluding episode. She stays the movie star instead of transforming into the Berzattos’ mom, and all the leeway she’s given in “Fishes” very nearly steers The Bear off course.
Cameos (unless they’re of the omnipresent Ryan Reynolds self-promotion variety) aren’t inherently bad. It’s a sign of The Bear’s ambition that it keeps expanding, populating its universe with chefs, teachers, waiters, and expediters who illuminate the varied corners of the culinary world and relatives and friends who reflect different elements of the core group’s personalities. But the casting and creation of those characters needs to serve the show’s ambiance and ensemble, not overwhelm them. The Bear deserves to grow, but it shouldn’t overindulge.
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