Jeremy Allen White just got screeners for the new season of The Bear — and he can’t stop watching.
“I just got a screener yesterday for all of the episodes,” the star of the hit FX series said during a Thursday visit to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “And I watched seven episodes in one sitting.”
Season three of The Bear drops all episodes next week, on Thursday, June 27. And White explained the reason for the late delivery of episodes.
“We just wrapped two weeks ago,” he explained, noting that their show “works a little bit differently.”
In the critically beloved and Emmy-winning The Bear, White plays Carmy Berzatto, an award-winning chef who, in season one, returned to Chicago to take over his family’s restaurant following the suicide of his older brother (played by Jon Bernthal). He spent the last two seasons — among a talented ensemble that includes Ayo Edebiri, Lionel Boyce and Ebon Moss-Bachrach — revitalizing and then redefining what the The Beef could be, ultimately closing it down in an attempt to flip the local haunt into a high-end and, hopefully, Michelin-starred restaurant.
The second season, however, ended with Carmy locked in the kitchen’s walk-in fridge amid a heartbreaking finale fight with his cousin Richie, played by Moss-Bachrach, and gut-wrenching break up with Claire (Molly Gordon).
“I get out,” White assured viewers when speaking to late-night host Stephen Colbert. “I get out of the fridge, which is good.”
White admitted he has a hard time watching himself on camera, but that creator and co-showrunner Chris Storer, along with the cast and crew, kept him watching seven of the 10 new episodes.
“I have a very hard time watching myself on camera. I don’t do it. I don’t like it. It’s very difficult for me. But I have to say, I started watching the screener. I usually wait a very long time or I don’t watch at all,” he said. [Storrer] “keeps messing with what the structure of television can be. Season one was so different to season two, and season three is even stranger and more kind of joyful and anxiety-ridden.”
When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the devastating finale, Moss-Bachrach had explained of the final fridge scene, “That was a really hard scene to make. It just felt bad. For me, what got me through the scene was looking at Molly’s face right before. I just wanted to be like, why would you — why would he — do something like that? What did you do to this girl? What is wrong with you? It’s infuriating and confounding and frustrating that he would be so callous and dismissive with his feelings and with her feelings. It just felt really shitty.”
And having a door between the cousins led to the honest scene, which season three will pick up from. “There’s a lot of stuff you can’t say to someone when you’re looking at them,” he said. “I just feel bad for him (Carmy). I think he hates himself, and that makes me sad.”
As for Richie’s journey, the actor recently sounded more hopeful. “He’s become aware that there’s a path for him to find purpose and live a maybe fuller life, a richer life, in a way,” Moss-Bachrach said during a recent appearance on The Daily Show. “But just because he’s aware of that path doesn’t mean that he’s cruising up to the top.”
Boyce also recently teased season three in conversation with THR, admitting that he resisted asking Storer for advance spoilers before filming. “If you ask, Chris will always tell you, but I’m still a fan of this show and I don’t want to know everything,” he said. “Sometimes we’ll be talking, and he’ll just drop a bomb about what’s going to happen.”
