An Afternoon With Ayo Edebiri, People’s Princess Of The Republic Of The Very Online (2024)

There are worse places that a rising star can find themselves than at loose ends in Europe in July. In the middle of the summer of 2023, as the Screen Actors Guild joined the writers strike, every actor who was abroad for a gig suddenly found themselves abroad without one. In this group was the actor-writer-​comedian Ayo Edebiri, 28, who, suddenly released from her commitments, decided to take a quick vacation to Berlin with friends: Paul Mescal and Fred Hechinger (both fresh from the set of Gladiator II), playwright and actor Jeremy O Harris, and the actor Michael Seater. “We’re walking around with Mr Normal People and the guy from White Lotus, and the person who got stopped the most was Ayo,” Harris says. “People would be like: ‘Yes, Chef! Yes, Chef!’ And that’s when I knew. It was that moment.” Six months later in Los Angeles, over exorbitantly priced omakase at the preferred canteen of young Hollywood, Sushi Park, Edebiri, star of FX/Hulu’s runaway hit series The Bear, admits that Berlin “got a little hectic”, and then tells me what happened after, in London, when she still believed that she could take a bus.

“It’s my favourite thing to do,” she explains. “My friends always make fun of me, but I’m like, ‘It’s the city where I can take the bus and just be unbothered.’” And then it happened. She reenacts the wide-eyed tap on the shoulder, the wincing intake of breath, the “Excuse me, sorry, do you mind?” of the selfie-seeker. “You just hear the cadence,” she says. The Bear had been nominated for a BAFTA, but it’s not like they’d won, and so she didn’t think their show – a difficult-to-define family drama/workplace comedy/exploration of trauma and recovery set in a struggling Chicago restaurant – would amount to a British big deal. “And then you’re at Piccadilly, and there’s a billboard of Jeremy [Allen White].” Meaning: the other side of the Atlantic had caught up. Meaning: plausible anonymity – over. Directly across the four lanes of Sunset Boulevard, a sake bottle’s throw from where we sit, her costar is vertically spread across a billboard the size of a Brooklyn brownstone, clad only in his Calvins, as if the advertisem*nt was posted there to punctuate her point. “Talk about life-changing,” she’ll say later, looking at it as we headed to our separate cars. But she was one to talk: that night she was flying to New York to host Saturday Night Live.

Edebiri, puckish and gamine and, when we meet, clad in a label-less nubby black cardigan, blue jeans, and an Aritzia camel trench, is not looking to change her life. It’s changing enough on its own. She was raised an only child in Dorchester, Massachusetts, by a mother and father who immigrated from Barbados and Nigeria, respectively. They were devout Pentecostalists with high expectations and a low tolerance for disappointment. (She describes the energy of a Nigerian parent, especially, as: “I’m watching you, and I will never tell you I approve. You don’t want to hear me say that I disapprove. But until I say that, we’re good.”) Edebiri was a smart and curious child, but anxious, too, vibrating at a high frequency. “I didn’t identify as funny,” she says. “Iidentified as stressed.” It wasn’t until eighth grade at Boston Latin that she realised humour could be a tool to be more at ease in the world. “You’re like, ‘Oh. Wait. This can be my personality. I want to understand this.’” She started doing improv and began keeping a list of her favourite physical performances, topped by actors like Buster Keaton and Jim Carrey. Suddenly she was making people laugh on purpose. “I was like, ‘I like how this feels! I also feel like it means that I understand people, like I understand what they want.’” That ability has continued to serve her well. “I hate the word, but Ayo truly is relatable,” her friend Quinta Brunson, the Abbott Elementary creator and star, tells me. “When I watch her perform, I’m able to see so many people I know in one person. Idon’t think it’s easy to do.”

Still, when she went to NYU, Edebiri dutifully aimed for a job that would promise security and good health insurance. But then she switched her major from teaching to dramatic writing – and that led to stand-up shows and parts in digital skits and writing gigs on shows like What We Do in the Shadows, Dickinson, and Big Mouth. In the latter two, Edebiri made the jump from the writers room to the screen, and then she met with Christopher Storer, the creator of a new series called The Bear, to talk about playing the role of the plucky young chef Sydney. “The first time I met Chris, I was 21, and he was like, ‘You’re a director.’ I was like, ‘Mind your business, bro,’” she says, seizing a piece of king mackerel on her plate with her chopsticks. “But then last season, he said, ‘Come to set, just come to set, see what happens.’” So she started going every day. “And I was like, ‘Oh, okay. Yeah. I think I want to do this.’” She’ll make her foray into directing this spring on an episode of season three. Beyond that, who knows. Edebiri, down to earth, a little guarded, is loath to look too far into the future or talk about anything she isn’t “sure to be 100 per cent happening”.