The joke on the set of “The Bear,” the hit FX series about a faltering Chicago restaurant, is that there are two Ebon Moss-Bachrachs: New York Ebon and Chicago Ebon. And they are very different.
At home, in New York, Moss-Bachrach exercises, eats healthy and takes care of his family. Living alone, in Chicago, where “The Bear” is filmed, he likes to build up an indoor pallor — “I probably drink more than I should” — and what he called “a sodium crust.” (It involves a lot of Portillo’s hot dogs.) Chicago Ebon is the one who embodies Richie, the hotheaded consigliere in “The Bear,” a scuzzily charismatic dude whose masculinity lands somewhere between woefully misguided and willfully abrasive.
Just don’t call him a dirtbag, Moss-Bachrach pleaded. “I get a little sensitive,” he said. “My feelings get hurt.” He’s made a specialty of stunted men — see also: his cringey musician in “Girls” — but he loves and respects them nonetheless, especially Richie. He’s “passionate, and loyal.”
“The Bear,” a breakout last summer, returns with its second season on Thursday, on Hulu, looping ambition and desperation as Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and crew prepare to open a more sophisticated eatery in place of the Original Beef, the family sandwich shop that Richie so prizes. Though he has dipped into the Marvel and “Star Wars” universes (“The Punisher”; “Andor”) and played historical figures (John Quincy Adams; the journalist who helped expose Theranos), the series has given Moss-Bachrach, 46 and a working actor for a quarter-century, his highest-caliber role yet, the kind that gets guys on the streets of Chicago to shout him out, à la his character: “What up, cousin!”
That Richie is a fan favorite even as he is combative and prickly — a jagoff, in the words of his creators — is a testament to Moss-Bachrach’s heartfelt depiction.
“My job in anything is to sort of fight for the guy I’m playing and try to portray him with self-respect and dignity,” he said. “I never want to judge any of these people.” (He also appears in “No Hard Feelings,” the raunch-com premiering Friday, as Jennifer Lawrence’s demeaned ex-boyfriend.)
The new season of “The Bear” unspools the back story of its cast, with a pace and camerawork that is slightly less frenetic than before — the restaurant is closed, after all. But Richie personifies much of the show’s conflict.
“He’s just very, very good at the work-in-progress, somebody that’s a little bit lost but also confident,” said Christopher Storer, the show’s creator. “One of my favorite things about Richie, he’s sort of confident in his lack of self-awareness. And he’s great with people, just like Ebon is in real life.”
On a long walk around the waterfront near his Brooklyn apartment one recent afternoon, Moss-Bachrach greeted many neighbors. He’s been in the same airy, art book-filled loft — a fourth-floor walk-up — with his wife, the visual artist Yelena Yemchuk, and their two daughters, now 16 and 12, for over a decade; the couple’s unsleek vintage bikes are parked outside. In head-to-toe denim and hiking boots, his vibe is so quintessentially thoughtful Brooklyn dad — he bikes to the beach! He bakes bread and gives it away by the loaf! — that it verges, he acknowledged laughingly, on cliché.
He is, in effect, the opposite of some of the obnoxious characters he plays. “He is the biggest mensch in the world,” said the writer-director Jenni Konner, who cast him in that memorable part in “Girls” in 2014 and then befriended him.
Moss-Bachrach is an accomplished home cook, and he relishes the Chicago restaurant scene. When he’s in town, he and a friend, a Teamster driver he met on a long-ago movie, go out for martinis and a “meatball salad” (minimal greenery, marinara on the side) while he peppers his buddy for slang that Richie might use.
“What’s the word for somebody who’s greedy, who likes to eat a lot? ‘Oh, that’s a gavone,’” Moss-Bachrach said, recalling one such conversation. “That’s a really fun part of the job.”
The writer-director Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton,” “The Bourne Legacy”) unexpectedly deployed Moss-Bachrach as a resistance fighter in the “Star Wars” spinoff “Andor” last year. “He’s very, very alert as an actor,” Gilroy said. “What’s good about that is, that kind of alertness and energy, it can go anywhere from empathy to paranoia — it just means he’s on whatever is going around him.”
In “The Bear,” that often means rapid-fire emotional peaks and valleys, as the camera swirls in for sometimes unflattering close-ups. They do long takes but only a few of them — “that really keeps the manic energy pulsing,” Storer said. In a Season 1 episode in which Richie was stabbed in the butt, he reacted differently in every beat.
“I don’t have a prescribed path,” Moss-Bachrach said. “I want to be open in this thing to surprise myself.”
He grew up around Amherst, Mass., near where his father founded a community music school and his mother ran a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. Heading off to college at Columbia University, he thought he would be a jazz pianist, before the realities of the talent pool caught up with him.
One semester, out of curiosity, he took an acting class and then did a play at the Williamstown Theater Festival. He had an agent before he graduated and has been working steadily ever since, bouncing between theater, film and TV, studying performers like Gene Wilder, a castmate in Moss-Bachrach’s first onscreen appearance.
His first New York play was directed by Horton Foote, who was 84 at the time but still came to the theater daily. “He had this completely tireless, childlike curiosity,” Moss-Bachrach recalled. “He was ancient and still so alive, so connected to every second and every moment.”
Those early experiences “fueled and helped get me through periods of down time,” he said.
He still gets nervous before big scenes — but it’s helpful, he said; it means there’s something to risk. “I’m probably attracted to people that are in periods of crisis or loss or confusion — when they can’t find their way home, you know?” And though his own upbringing was supportive, he’s had his share of dirtbags to draw on. “One rowdy Masshole can do a lot of damage,” he said. “I had my feelings hurt a lot.”
In “The Bear,” Matty Matheson, the Canadian chef and restaurateur, plays the hanger-on and handyman Neil, his first scripted role. “I’m a student of the acting school of Ebon,” he said. The two share more moments in the second season — and more fights. “I’m like this soft blade, trying to constantly be nice,” said Matheson, who is also a producer and consultant on the series. “Ebon’s character is allowed to be the most Richie with me. I’m not telling him to be woke.”
“There’s definitely Richies” in the food world, he added. “Richie doesn’t want change, and now more than ever, restaurants are changing.”
Storer, the series creator, did his own time behind a stove and comes from a Chicago restaurant clan. His sister, Courtney Storer, a celebrated chef in Los Angeles, is the show’s culinary director (she helps whip up the gourmet dishes for their close-ups), and Christopher spent his childhood at the Chicago institution Mr. Beef, which is owned by a friend’s family and was the model for the onscreen Original Beef.
“The Bear” has drawn praise for its verisimilitude. Before they began production, White and Ayo Edebiri, who plays the determined chef Sydney, were sent to culinary school and to intern at fine dining establishments, developing their bond in the process. Moss-Bachrach instead went to bars on the South Side to commune with Chicagoans. He had no idea his co-stars were training; back then, he thought they were doing a restaurant show the way “Taxi” was a show about drivers.
For him, “The Bear” was a character study in loss and change. After suffering the death of his best friend — Carmy’s brother, the original owner of the Beef, who is played by Jon Bernthal, Moss-Bachrach’s friend offscreen — Richie is “deeply distressed and mourning and volatile, and not in a place of self-reflection,” Moss-Bachrach said. “He’s medicating with, like, Bacardi and nachos.”
The depth of Chicago Ebon’s transformation was “very inspirational,” said Joanna Calo, a co-showrunner with Storer. There are no throwaway lines for him: “He’s not just making a joke — he always finds a way to add meaning to the dumb stuff people say.”
In Moss-Bachrach’s signature role before “The Bear,” on “Girls,” he played Desi, the manipulative love interest to Allison Williams’s Marnie, giving what could’ve been a Brooklyn hipster stereotype some comic heft.
“The part was not much before he came on — he really took him and gave him a heart and needs and desires,” Konner said. “Desi always dressed like if you pulled one thread, he would be naked, and that came from Ebon.”
Even back then, he had a culinary streak: “We were shooting, and he left for a while and came back with bags and bags of ramps that he had picked,” she recalled.
In his own kitchen, he is partial to roasting chickens, striving to master the classic French omelet. “I’ve watched this Jacques Pépin YouTube dozens of times,” he said.
His cooking philosophy mirrors his creative life: He loves the process of returning over and over to the most familiar, homey stuff “that you can really try to perfect,” he said, “and never actually get there.”