After I inform Liza Colón-Zayas that I cooked asopao de pollo, a standard Puerto Rican stew, in preparation for our interview, her eyes mild up. The dish, much 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 recollections 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 dwelling, and it smells like Mother 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 higher. However I nonetheless need 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 didn’t anticipate it. After I obtained it and skim it, I used to be simply so emotional. I beloved it. I assumed it went so above and past displaying her humanity and life earlier than we obtained 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 yr as the primary Latina to win for supporting actress in a comedy collection.
“I really like 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 proficient, hardworking and typically straight-out ignored, as Tina is in a lot of “Napkins.” This leads as much as the pivotal ultimate 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 really like 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 presumably horrible meals) and asks about her crying. “However not, like, sobbing,” Tina says, in an ad-lib by Colón-Zayas. “She and I simply form of converse the identical language instantly,” 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 by the Administrators Guild of America and a surrealist music video for Clairo’s “Terrapin,” starring “Bizarre Al” Yankovic and his floating head.
An authorized film nerd, Edebiri lists inspirations for her and creator Christopher Storer as various as “Star Wars,” “Johnny Guitar,” Akira Kurosawa’s “Excessive and Low,” “The Pink Panther” and “The Hudsucker Proxy.”
Which can clarify the auteurist high quality to “Napkins,” significantly the “barely unusual or unnatural blocking,” or association and actions of performers in a scene, that Edebiri present in Kurosawa’s movies. She additionally has robust emotions in regards to the music within the episode, preventing skeptical producers to make use of virtually the whole lot of a Kate Bush deep minimize, “The Morning Fog,” even after “Stranger Issues” had introduced “Working Up That Hill” again to the charts.
“It’s a tune that I’ve at all times actually beloved, and the extra I listened to it, I used to be like, there’s this girl who’s being shipwrecked and he or she’s being born once more,” Edebiri says. The self-described Bush “freak” Edebiri obtained her approach ultimately, although it required a letter-writing marketing campaign with Bush, who permitted with one qualification: “It’s a must to use the lyrics.”
For her actors, although, it was Edebiri’s restraint that shone by most vitally in “Napkins.” Bernthal and Colón-Zayas had been reverse one another the entire time the cameras rolled, including an irreplaceable rawness to the interplay.
What they’re capable of 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 simply have to carry this so long as doable, and it needs to be as nonetheless as doable,’” Edebiri says of her notes as a director. Colón-Zayas confirms: “It’s virtually hands-off. She actually allow us to do our factor.”
“That’s the nicest praise, as a result of I’ve by no means heard that earlier than in my life,” Edebiri responds. “That’s not, like, a characteristic of mine.”
