Boston-born actor Ayo Edebiri has received accolades galore for her sensational turn as Sydney Adamu in hit show The Bear, most recently at the Primetime Emmys this week. As critics and fans alike say “Yes, chef!”, here’s everything you need to know about the talented actor making waves this award season.
Though The Bear is ostensibly about a family’s struggling sandwich shop, helmed by Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, its ensemble cast is the story’s strength. Zealous and driven chef Sydney Adamu is pivotal to the show’s narrative and heart, with Ayo Edebiri bringing deft layers of vulnerability and abrasiveness to the role.
Sydney’s relationship with Carmy (played by Jeremy Allen White) is a refreshingly platonic, nuanced example — not often seen in media — that goes beyond the camera. “Jeremy is one of the most grounded, hard-working people I know,” Edebiri told the Times after the Emmys, where both actors took home awards. “I would describe my friendship and relationship with him as just a lot of trust and a lot of gratitude.”
And from grappling with ambition, control and failure, to forging friendships in the heat of the kitchen, or just walking around Chicago, it’s hard to take your eyes off Sydney when Edebiri is on screen.
The performance has, rightly, garnered a rash of awards this season; the Emmys, Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, and she’s nominated at the upcoming Baftas and Screen Actors Guild Awards. The 28-year-old is commanding attention, and though The Bear may be your entrée to the actor’s career, she’s no flash in the pan.
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The Bear dominated The Emmys, with Christopher Storer’s show and cast taking home six awards — the same number as Succession — and Edebiri was awarded Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
She also stars in another Emmy-winning series: Abbott Elementary, Quinta Brunson’s mockumentary-style show about a public school in Philadelphia.
Beyond the realm of the small screen, Edebiri delivered a side-splitting turn as one of the lead roles in the 2023 film Bottoms, alongside friend and collaborator Rachel Sennott, which revives (and satirises) the gross-out teen comedy genre that thrived in the early 2000s, this time with a queer, feminist, acerbic lens. Think Fight Club meets American Pie, but girls.
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Advertise with NZME.Playing a believable chef in The Bear took a lot of real work
Though she had some experience — when starting out as a comedian and writer, Edebiri also worked in hospo — becoming a believable technically skilled chef is no easy feat.
Both Edebiri and White undertook training at the Institute of Culinary Education in Los Angeles, and Edebiri also seized opportunities to work alongside women chefs to prepare for the role. “When you’re a woman in a male-dominated industry, in an industry that’s not built for you to have a sustainable life, when your vocation is your passion, then you have to reconcile the thing that you love and then, turning that thing into capital, into money and to rent, how crazy that can all feel,” she told Variety last year.
Her work isn’t just in front of the camera
Edebiri also does writing, voice acting — taking on Missy in the hormone-charged adult cartoon Big Mouth after Jenny Slate stepped down from the role — and producing, including The Bear and Jemaine Clement’s What We Do in the Shadows, and writing. Her finely honed comedic timing is likely thanks to her experience in improv and stand-up early in her career. And podcast fans will be glad to know she has one of these too, Iconography, with co-host Olivia Craighead.
Not just productive professionally, she gets a lot done in her leisure time
“Ayo does seem to have more time in the day than anybody else. Like, we would show up the next morning after filming all day, and she’d already watched half of a series, a movie, read like 12 chapters of a book. She’s got through the crossword puzzle. She’s on the Wordle. And she’s memorised and worked on all the scenes for the day,” White told Vanity Fair in 2022.
Edebiri appreciates fashion (and understands its power)
Her red carpet style has been on Viva’s radar for a while, including an excellent turn in a painterly checkerboard print by London-based New Zealand designer Emilia Wickstead.
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Advertise with NZME.As Edebiri’s profile has risen, the actor has met the spotlight by upping the style stakes. “I’ve definitely been thinking a lot more about what I wear and how I wear it,” she told W Magazine last year.
Edebiri works with Danielle Goldberg — the stylist who also dresses Greta Lee, Kaia Gerber (also in Bottoms) and Olivia Rodrigo — and together they’ve racked up an impressive list of public appearances in great work from leading labels.
She frequently wears Prada — most recently this phonebox-red satin sheath to the Golden Globes — and Loewe. There was a custom-made leather dress by Louis Vuitton at the Emmy Awards, and other appearances count Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, Dior, Alexander McQueen and Versace.
Beyond the red-carpet gowns, there was a sublime slouchy suit by The Row (Goldberg used to work exclusively with Mary-Kate and Ashleigh Olsen) and Edebiri often wears American designers like Bode, Proenza Schouler and Rosie Assoulin. Thom Browne is also a frequent choice; Edebiri attended the CFDA awards with the designer and the label makes a moving appearance in The Bear’s season two finale.
Through this label-agnostic approach — demonstrating the freedom of not having a brand ambassador contract (yet) — the actor has been sweeping the style front as she picks up numerous awards.
Refreshingly, she understands and respects the role presentation plays in her vocation and the work and knowledge that goes into getting dressed as an actor in the public eye.
“Fashion can help you tell stories,” she told W. “As an actress, as a storyteller, that’s so crucial. Being able to mould and create new stories for yourself, new journeys, it’s very freeing. And being able to do it in clothes that are so carefully thought out and made and so explorative and more conceptual is very cool.”
Off duty, she still favours the “big T-shirts” that she says were a uniform when she started in comedy — think vintage Blur, Bernie Sanders merch — and vintage denim.
Though she’s from the East Coast of the US, Ireland has embraced her
Born in Boston to parents who emigrated from Barbados and Nigeria — they attended the Emmys with her — Edebiri studied at New York University.
A snowballing gag that began with a joke about going “method” to play Jenny the donkey in The Banshees Of Inisherin and thanking “Barbados, Nigeria, and Ireland in many ways” in her Critics Choice Award speech, provided online fodder, with audiences declaring her “Irish” online, and the nation’s media, including The Irish Times and Film In Dublin embracing her as one of their own.
She’s proved adept at diffusing a situation
While doing press at the Golden Globes, she and her co-stars were confronted (inappropriately) by Extra reporter Melvin Robert brandishing co-star and friend Jeremy Allen White’s recent Calvin Klein campaign — a decision that shows a striking lack of respect for everyone involved — she cannily sidestepped the play. “I’m putting it away … That’s my boy! This is a work function,” she said, placing the poster against a wall. “He’s my co-worker.”
It’s a reminder of where the focus should be — the work, the craft — and how to navigate the industry with courtesy.
‘The Bear’ has been renewed for a third season, and the first two are streaming on Disney+ in New Zealand, as is ‘Abbott Elementary’, while ‘Bottoms’ is available on Prime Video. Her next film, picturesque drama ‘The Sweet East’, should be released locally later this year, and ‘Opus’ — a horror with John Malkovich — is currently in production.
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