‘The Bear’: 20 Facts You Need to Know Ahead of the Fourth Season

On June 23, 2022, a little show called The Bear quietly made its debut on Hulu. With a talented cast of actors but no household names (at least not yet), the series used the less hectic summer months to cut through the noise of an overcrowded television market to become a massive hit.

In the three years and soon-to-be four seasons since then, the series—about a young star of the fine dining world (Jeremy Allen White) who returns to his home city of Chicago to take over the family’s failing sandwich shop—has turned its talented cast into household names, shone a spotlight on the Chicago dining scene, set Emmy Award records, and ignited controversy with the question: Is The Bear a comedy? Here are some things you might not have known about the hit show.

1. The Beef is Mr. Beef.
2. Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri were put through culinary boot camp.
3. White got into character by cooking every day.
4. Thomas Keller was a massive influence on The Bear.
5. Season 1 holds a rare 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating.
6. No hand doubles are used in The Bear.
7. The Bear’s anxiety-inducing feeling is absolutely intentional.
8. The show’s characters drop a lot of F-bombs.
9. Edebiri could relate to Syd’s unique chemistry with Carmy.
10. A fan-favorite character is a chef, not an actor.
11. Paul Rudd has made a couple of cameos you probably missed.
12. Doughnuts are what sold Lionel Boyce on the show.
13. Jamie Lee Curtis kept her role in The Bear a secret from everyone.
14. Edebiri directed one of the show’s most acclaimed episodes.
15. The Bear is a family affair.
16. Edebiri wishes people would stop imagining a romance between Carmy and Syd.
17. Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal have become regular co-stars.
18. Chicago held a Carmy look-alike contest.
19. Real chefs love the show.
20. It broke an Emmy record—for comedy.
21. When does the fourth season of ‘The Bear’ premiere, and where can I watch it?
22. What’s the fourth season about?
23. How many episodes are in Season 4?

The Beef is Mr. Beef.

The Bear begins its story with Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (White) leaving his prestigious job as a chef de cuisine at a top restaurant in New York City to take over The Original Beef of Chicagoland, a.k.a. The Beef, the failing sandwich shop he inherited from his brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal). The Beef is based on Mr. Beef, an iconic sandwich shop in Chicago’s River North neighborhood that has been churning out Italian beef sandwiches since 1979.

Chris Zucchero, the owner of Mr. Beef, is an old friend of Christopher Storer, The Bear’s creator and co-showrunner. “He was my first friend I ever met,” Storer told Esquire of Zucchero in 2022. “I wrote a lot of the show hanging out with Chris in what they call the elegant dining room of Mr. Beef, which is actually just an added-on patio.” Storer appreciated what he described as the restaurant’s “lost in time” feel, and tried to bring some of that to The Bear. Zucchero’s relationship to his clientele, many of whom are regulars, also found their way into the show via the character of restaurant manager Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).

Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri were put through culinary boot camp.

In order to convincingly play the roles of talented chefs, White and Ayo Edebiri—who plays Carmy’s sous chef-turned-partner Sydney Adamu—underwent some pretty intense training, including two weeks at the famed Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena, California, and working in the kitchens of some of the country’s top restaurants.

“I spent probably the most amount of time at a restaurant called Pasjoli in Santa Monica with a really wonderful chef, Dave Beran, who actually got his start in Chicago,” White told Deadline of the Michelin-starred eatery where he trained. “At first, I was just a fly on the wall. I was just trying to watch the choreography of the kitchen and the line cooks.” After shooting the pilot, White went back to Pasjoli to work the line so he could be prepared if the show was picked up. “It’s a very, very serious kind of place, and it was the most anxious I’ve ever been,” the two-time Emmy winner said.

Edebiri told POPSUGAR how “grateful” she was for the training and being able to meet and speak with a number of chefs in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago for the role. She is particularly thankful to everyone at the Michelin-starred Chicago eatery Elske, where she trained, claiming they “saved my life [and] made me look not completely fake.”

White got into character by cooking every day.

White admitted that he wasn’t much of an at-home cook before he was cast as Carmy. But as part of his process for getting into the character, he told The Takeout that “Between shooting the pilot and the rest of the first season I made a point of cooking something every day.” Specifically, he said he cooked nearly all of the recipes in The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual, a bestselling cookbook from the proprietors of the Brooklyn restaurant of the same name, which was given to him by castmate/chef Matty Matheson. “He thought maybe Carmy wanted to make his restaurant something like what Frankies felt like,” White said.

Thomas Keller was a massive influence on The Bear.

In 2013, nearly a decade before The Bear’s premiere, Storer wrote and directed Sense of Urgency, a short documentary about famed chef and restaurateur Thomas Keller. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the man behind New York City’s Per Se and Napa Valley’s The French Laundry inspired various elements of the show, including The Bear’s “every second counts” mantra.

According to Joel McHale, Keller was also the (very loose) inspiration for his David Fields character—the exacting and seemingly evil chef who Carmy trained under. In an interview with Seth Meyers just ahead of Season 3’s premiere, McHale shared that he was “portraying Chef Thomas Keller,” then added that “He’s going to be so happy that I’m saying these things and poison me if I ever meet him.”

McHale conceded that, “I don’t think he’s as awful as I was, but he does whisper at his employees.” Representatives for FX, meanwhile, insist that Fields is not based on Keller.

Season 1 holds a rare 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating.

While Rotten Tomatoes ratings aren’t perfect, a 100 percent score on the aggregated ratings site is rare. Yet, Season 1 of The Bear maintains a 100 percent score on the Tomatometer even today, three years after the show’s debut. Season 2 dipped to a still-impressive 99 percent, while Season 3 has an overall score of 89 percent. 

No hand doubles are used in The Bear.

As The Bear utilizes many close-ups for scenes featuring food preparation, it would be easy to swap out an actor’s hands for those of a professional chef, in order to make sure that it all looks as seamless as possible. But as TV Insider revealed, no hand doubles were used in the making of The Bear—which was enough to make White a little nervous.

“We had pretty much a day of just shooting us, and I was really nervous,” White said about the prep scenes. “When you’re nervous, [your] hands get a little shaky. And you don’t want your hands to be shaky when you’re holding a super sharp knife and the camera’s on it.”

The Bear’s anxiety-inducing feeling is absolutely intentional.

Stressful and anxiety-inducing are two terms you’ll likely find in any review or discussion of The Bear—and it’s very much on purpose. From the very beginning of the series, the audience is thrown right into the action of what it feels like to work the line of a busy restaurant. “It’s 100 percent intentional,” Storer told Esquire. “It was the only way to explain how a restaurant works. You just have to f***in’ get thrown into it. I remember very vividly two days when I thought I wanted to be a chef, and being on the line, and thinking, ‘This is the most insane f***ing thing I have ever seen.’ Anyone who’s ever worked the line during a brunch service knows that it’s just hell on earth. But it also shows Carmy’s struggle and where his mindset is.”

The show’s characters drop a lot of F-bombs.

As yet another odd to the authenticity of the kitchen experience, The Bear rates pretty high on the f-bomb meter. According to IMDb’s Parental Guide, the word is used 475 times in the first season’s eight episodes, 578 times across the second season’s 10 episodes, and 465 times in the third season. That’s only accounting for straight f-bombs, not derivatives of the word.

The Season 2 finale actually tied Martin Scorsese’s infamously profanity-laden The Wolf of Wall Street. According to ScreenRant, the episode—also titled “The Bear”—included 124 uses of the expletive over its 40-minute runtime, which means it averaged 3.1 f-bombs per minute. This is the same frequency with which it’s uttered in Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated biopic.

Edebiri could relate to Syd’s unique chemistry with Carmy.

The relationship between Carmy and Syd is central to The Bear, but their dynamic is a challenging one. Though there is clearly deep love and respect between them and a profound love of food, the duo have been regularly butting heads since Season 1. According to Edebiri, she could relate.

Edebiri told POPSUGAR that she and White “had this little, mini competitive thing going on” when they were undergoing their culinary training together. “We were cooking together, and I kind of had more experience than him, just in terms of the kitchen,” she explained. White, however, had more experience as an actor, having just spent 11 seasons playing Lip Gallagher in Shameless, which was also shot in Chicago.

“There were just a lot of dynamics, and then we got to kind of build them together, and it felt really fun and very special,” Edebiri said. “Jeremy has so much experience, and I felt like Sydney where I was like, ‘I want to learn from this guy how to be on set, how he approaches character.’”

A fan-favorite character is a chef, not an actor.

Matty Matheson, who plays a lifelong friend of the Berzatto clan and sometime handyman Neil Fak, a.k.a. Fak, has become a beloved character on the series but is one of the few cast members who isn’t an actor at all. In fact, as he told Variety in 2023, “Acting scares the sh*t out of me.”

This isn’t to say that Matheson, who is also one of The Bear’s executive producers, is afraid of the camera. Prior to The Bear, the Toronto-based chef and restaurant owner hosted two shows for Viceland: the cooking show It’s Suppertime and the culinary travel series Dead Set on Life. He’s the author of three cookbooks, most recently 2024’s Matty Matheson: Soups, Salads, Sandwiches, and maintains a popular YouTube channel with more than 1.5 million subscribers.

White, for one, is thrilled that Matheson is there. “Having Matty on set, he's so knowledgeable about so many crazy niche specific things because there are so many things that relate to the preparation of different dishes,” the actor told The Takeout.

Paul Rudd has made a couple of cameos you probably missed.

From Olivia Colman to Bob Odenkirk, The Bear has featured a number of cameos from A-list actors. But one star whose connection to the show has fallen a bit more under the radar is Paul Rudd.

Throughout the show’s three seasons, we’ve gotten three glimpses of the actor: once as a signed celebrity photo hanging on The Beef’s wall, another as a random cardboard cutout with no context, and a third voice role as the video game character from the restaurant’s Ballbreaker video game. So far, no one has said a thing about why Rudd keeps popping up, but fans are hoping it will eventually lead to an onscreen appearance from the Ant-Man actor.

Doughnuts are what sold Lionel Boyce on the show.

When we first meet Lionel Boyce’s breadmaker-turned-pastry chef, Marcus Brooks, he appears to be working at The Beef for a paycheck. But he quickly becomes inspired by Carmy and Syd’s dedication to the art of culinary perfection, which is what Boyce loved most about the character.

“I thought it was cool that he had something that he wanted to strive for,” Boyce told Vulture. “He starts off as a person who’s just kind of working in this restaurant as just a job. It’s not like he has direction; you don’t feel that he wants to pursue food, but he gets inspired by Carmy, and that sends him on a journey. It’s the first person who believes in him and sees that he has talent in this, he can do it. And I think that’s what I responded to—someone striving for a goal and actually going for it.”

Boyce’s love of a certain deep-fried breakfast treat also played a part in his connection to the role. “I love doughnuts, and I love desserts,” he said. “It’s the best research. I didn’t need to, but I was like, Well, now you gave me a reason to go around L.A. and try to find the best doughnut in the whole city. I spent a lot of time doing that. But no lie, the doughnut is what connected me to it because I do love doughnuts.”

Jamie Lee Curtis kept her role in The Bear a secret from everyone.

One of The Bear’s most unexpected surprises has been Jamie Lee Curtis’s phenomenal turn as Donna Berzatto, the mentally unstable, alcoholic matriarch of the Berzatto clan. Though we often heard about Carmy’s mom, she didn’t make an appearance until more than halfway through Season 2, in the celeb-packed “Fishes” episode.

Curtis told The Hollywood Reporter about the secrecy required behind the scenes. “None of us said a word to anyone—not our families, not our friends, no one,” the actress said of her role on the show. “They changed the name on the buses, the vans—the call sheets didn’t have our names on them … There was no word ‘Bear’ anywhere near me. I stayed at a hotel, [but] the hotel didn’t know who was paying for my room. It was a secret until the day it dropped.”

Edebiri directed one of the show’s most acclaimed episodes.

Though Storer writes and directs most of The Bear’s episodes, Edebiri tried her hand at taking the helm in one of Season 3’s most critically acclaimed episodes, “Napkins,” a flashback to how Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas) met Bernthal’s Mikey and began working at The Beef. Edebiri was nominated for a DGA Award for her work.

The Bear is a family affair.

Speaking of Tina: In that very same “Napkins” episode, we meet her husband, David, for the first time. David is played by actor David Zayas, who is perhaps best known for his role as Angel Batista on Dexter. Zayas also happens to be Colón-Zayas’ real-life husband of 27 years. But they’re not the only players who make the show a family affair.

Community star Gillian Jacobs, who plays Richie’s ex-wife Tiffany Jerimovich, has been Storer’s partner for more than 13 years. And Storer’s sister, Courtney “Coco” Storer, is a chef who has worked at renowned restaurants around the world and now serves as the show’s culinary producer or, as she says, the “luckiest culinary producer in the world.” She’s the person charged with making sure the food on the show looks as good as it does, and her connection to her brother seems to mirror some of what we see between Carmy and his onscreen sister Natalie, a.k.a. Sugar (Abby Elliott).

“Chris and I grew up in Chicago, and we kind of got pulled apart after our parents split up,” Courtney told Eater. “We came back into each other’s lives when I moved to L.A., and it’s been a real joy for me.”

Edebiri wishes people would stop imagining a romance between Carmy and Syd.

Since the very first season, some fans of the show have been rooting for a Carmy-Syd coupling—which Edebiri does not understand. “I don’t personally think there’s anything romantic there,” she insisted to The Cut. “I don’t think the show is a sexual one. These people don’t have … very robust personal lives. They’re devoted to their jobs. If anything happened between Sydney and Carmy, nobody would be happy. It would be disappointing and jarring and weird. I don’t think people actually want that.”

Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal have become regular co-stars.

Though Jon Bernthal’s character, Mikey Berzatto, has died by suicide in The Bear, we get to witness him—and his relationship with his family and friends—via flashbacks. In addition to his one-time closeness with Carmy, we see the dynamic between him and his best friend Richie play out in these scenes. For the actors behind the roles, it was a bit of a throwback.

Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach previously co-starred in the Marvel TV series The Punisher, with Bernthal playing the title role and Moss-Bachrach as his best friend and sidekick, David Lieberman, a.k.a. Micro. The two will also be making their Broadway debuts together next year when they co-star in a stage adaptation of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, with Bernthal playing Sonny Amato (Al Pacino’s role in the film) and Moss-Bachrach playing Sal DeSilva, Amato’s accomplice (played by John Cazale in the movie).

Chicago held a Carmy look-alike contest.

To say that the city of Chicago has embraced its role in The Bear would be an understatement. In addition to shining a renewed spotlight on the city’s dining scene, the Windy City’s association with (the fictional) Carmy led to a Carmy look-alike contest in late 2024 that brought out dozens of White wannabes, including at least one toddler. It’s a good thing that the youngster didn’t triumph, however, as the prize was a pack of cigarettes.

Real chefs love the show.

Given Storer’s dedication to getting things right—especially the extreme amount of pressure a kitchen staff is under during every meal service—it’s hardly a surprise that real chefs have fallen in love with the show. And some of the culinary world’s biggest names have happily appeared on The Bear.

In the third season alone, we get to see Keller, who has collected seven Michelin stars throughout his career; Elske’s Anna Posey; Daniel Boulud, who was named the Best Restaurateur in the World by Les Grandes Tables du Monde in 2021; René Redzepi, the head chef at Copenhagen’s Noma, which is regularly cited as the world’s best restaurant; Grant Achatz, chef/co-owner of Chicago’s three Michelin star-rated Alinea; Milk Bar owner Christina Tosi and her husband, restaurateur Will Guidara; experimental chef Wylie Dufresne, who is known for his groundbreaking approach to molecular gastronomy; Genie Kwon, pastry chef at Chicago’s two Michelin-starred Oriole (among others); and pastry chef Malcolm Livingston II, whose resume includes Le Cirque, Per Se, WD-50, and Noma, and whose story served as an inspiration for Marcus Brooks.

It broke an Emmy record—for comedy.

In 2023, The Bear officially became an awards darling when it won 10 of the 13 Emmy Awards for which it was nominated, including Outstanding Writing, Outstanding Directing, Outstanding Supporting Actress, Outstanding Lead Actor, and Outstanding Comedy Series. Its designation as a “comedy,” however, has been massively divisive.

Still, in 2024, it became the most nominated “comedy” series ever when it earned a total of 23 nominations, besting 30 Rock, which had received 22 nominations in 2009. It won 11 of those awards, but lost Best Comedy Series to Hacks. A recent article at Vulture contends that “an undercurrent of industry resentment toward The Bear” for competing as a comedy may have been partly to blame for the series losing some of the night’s bigger awards.

Quick Questions About The Bear’s Fourth Season, Answered:

Discover More Stories About TV: