Once I inform Liza Colón-Zayas that I cooked asopao de pollo, a conventional Puerto Rican stew, in preparation for our interview, her eyes mild up. The dish, just like one she makes as beleaguered line prepare dinner Tina Marrero in “The Bear’s” Emmy-nominated Season 3 episode “Napkins,” brings again deeply comforting reminiscences for the Puerto Rican actress, 53, who was raised within the Bronx. (She tells me she even consulted on which substances to make use of for authenticity.)
“You come home, and it smells like Mom was cooking for you,” Colón-Zayas says of the favourite Latin American meals she grew up with. “It’s like, ‘Ahhh.’ My habits have improved. My knives are better. But I still want my go-tos.”
“Napkins,” which earned Colón-Zayas’ co-star Ayo Edebiri an Emmy nomination for her first-ever directing credit score, tells Tina’s story, a part of the present’s custom of spotlighting particular person characters. (Sorry, Jeremy Allen White groupies, there’s no Carmy right here.) We see Tina earlier than her gig on the Beef, struggling to discover a job, to maintain her household collectively and, most of all, to really feel seen.
“I did not expect it. When I got it and read it, I was just so emotional. I loved it. I thought it went so above and beyond showing her humanity and life before we got to see this refresh,” Colón-Zayas says.
However “Napkins” can be, in so some ways, Colón-Zayas’ personal story. She’s a 30-year veteran of tv and the New York theater scene, the place she was a mainstay within the Nineteen Nineties alongside co-star Jon Bernthal and now-husband David Zayas (who in “Napkins” performs Tina’s partner named, sure, David). Nonetheless, few viewers might conjure her identify earlier than “The Bear,” for which she made Emmy historical past final 12 months as the primary Latina to win for supporting actress in a comedy collection.
“I love a montage. Shout out Eisenstein, shout out Sam Raimi.”
— ‘Napkins’ director Ayo Edebiri
Which is to say, Colón-Zayas is aware of the ups and downs of being gifted, hardworking and typically straight-out ignored, as Tina is in a lot of “Napkins.” This leads as much as the pivotal last scene between Tina and Bernthal’s Mikey, who runs the Beef.
Although “Napkins” is front-loaded with montages that present Tina being laid off from a sweet firm and trying to find new employment — “I love a montage,” Edebiri tells me. “Shout out Eisenstein, shout out Sam Raimi” — what makes it nice is the climactic sequence between Colón-Zayas and Bernthal. Tina walks into the Beef, will get a sandwich, sits down and tries her finest to benefit from the meals. However her eyes are ringed with the suggestion of tears and dejection. Mikey checks in on her (in addition to the probably horrible meals) and asks about her crying. “But not, like, sobbing,” Tina says, in an ad-lib by Colón-Zayas. “She and I just sort of speak the same language immediately,” Bernthal says of the chemistry between him and Colón-Zayas. That, coupled with Edebiri’s distinctive model, add to the scene’s sense of discovery: On the outset, Tina and Mikey don’t but know one another, a lot much less know that they want one another.
Colón-Zayas’ real-life husband, David Zayas, performs Tina’s husband in “The Bear.”
Edebiri’s highway to such assured filmmaking started with a first-time director’s course via the Administrators Guild of America and a surrealist music video for Clairo’s “Terrapin,” starring “Weird Al” Yankovic and his floating head.
An authorized film nerd, Edebiri lists inspirations for her and creator Christopher Storer as numerous as “Star Wars,” “Johnny Guitar,” Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” “The Pink Panther” and “The Hudsucker Proxy.”
Which can clarify the auteurist high quality to “Napkins,” significantly the “slightly strange or unnatural blocking,” or association and actions of performers in a scene, that Edebiri present in Kurosawa’s movies. She additionally has sturdy emotions in regards to the music within the episode, combating skeptical producers to make use of nearly the whole lot of a Kate Bush deep minimize, “The Morning Fog,” even after “Stranger Things” had introduced “Running Up That Hill” again to the charts.
“It’s a song that I’ve always really loved, and the more I listened to it, I was like, there’s this woman who’s being shipwrecked and she’s being born again,” Edebiri says. The self-described Bush “freak” Edebiri bought her approach in the long run, although it required a letter-writing marketing campaign with Bush, who accredited with one qualification: “You have to use the lyrics.”
For her actors, although, it was Edebiri’s restraint that shone via most vitally in “Napkins.” Bernthal and Colón-Zayas have been reverse one another the entire time the cameras rolled, including an irreplaceable rawness to the interplay.
What they’re in a position to painting, with out ever explicitly addressing it, is the highly effective connection between two strangers that may change your life. Or what Colón-Zayas calls “this act of insane kindness.”
“I withdrew, like, ‘We just have to hold this as long as possible, and it has to be as still as possible,’” Edebiri says of her notes as a director. Colón-Zayas confirms: “It’s almost hands-off. She really let us do our thing.”
“That’s the nicest compliment, because I’ve never heard that before in my life,” Edebiri responds. “That’s not, like, a feature of mine.”
