I have been with Ayo Edebiri for 15 minutes, tops, and already I’m getting her Pacino.
“What have I been listening to? I’ve been listening to, honestly, the Sonny Boy audiobook,” she tells me, unprompted, after we’ve ducked into her compact car. “You’re literally like, Wait, how is this a book? The way he delivers lines? It’s really shocking. Every actor should listen to that book. He goes—my impression of him is if RFK was raised in the Trump household. It’s like: ‘I had no idea! My mutha…gave me away…for six months…because my fatha’ ”—she takes on here the affect of a very sad clown—“ ‘wasawayinthewar.’ I’m actually going to pull it up.”
The plan for our morning is almost satirically LA: After meeting at 8 a.m. at a matcha place in Highland Park, she’s to drive us to a hiking trail in Angeles National Forest. (She’s an early riser, something that she attributes, in part, to being a former New Yorker: “No matter how early you get up in New York, there’s always somebody who’s either earlier or their day hasn’t finished. But in LA, it’s office hours.”) Dressed in a baseball tee emblazoned with the NBC logo, track pants, a printed headscarf—not unlike the ones she wears as Sydney Adamu, the hyper-competent, superdriven, rather anxious young sous-chef on The Bear, in fact—and Prada sunglasses, she certainly looks the part of a 20-something somebody in the industry, taking the air before she tootles down to Studio City for “meetings,” or whatever actors do. (In reality, Edebiri is due on Hollywood Boulevard later that day for an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.)
She’s been out here for five or six years—moving from Brooklyn, where she put down roots after attending NYU, when she began writing for television. But it took quite some time for Los Angeles to feel like home. “I don’t really think I started to enjoy living here until last year,” Edebiri says, swirling her iced latte. “I liked it, but I don’t think it really meant anything to me. And I missed a lot of my friends on the East Coast.”
What changed things was hanging out with people like Lionel Boyce, one of her costars on The Bear, and his former Odd Future bandmates Tyler, the Creator and Travis Bennett—native Angelenos all—who helped her find her footing in the city’s sprawl. (Asked what they like to do when they see each other, Tyler makes his and Edebiri’s milieu sound more like suburban teenagers than very famous adults. “We loiter,” he says. “We’ll sit in the parking lot. We’ll go to someone’s house and play Uno. We’ll eat. It’s just the most normal shit you could think of.”)
The strangeness of life in LA this year has also done its part to affirm her sense of community: In January, Edebiri was one of the hundreds of thousands evacuated during the wildfires (her home was ultimately unharmed, but she has friends and colleagues who weren’t so lucky), and at the time of our first interview, downtown LA had recently been under curfew due to the anti-ICE and “No Kings” protests of the days prior.
Edebiri had been out marching over the weekend; the sign she carried—now in her car’s backseat next to Gromit, her dozing Chihuahua mix—reads “Don’t tread on us,” a riff on the Gadsden flag from the Revolutionary War. (Very Boston-native of her, really.)
“It was actually amazing,” she says. “We’re in such a weird empathy drought, which it’s hard not to be—you want to save your own skin. But it’s like, If we’re supposed to be evolved people, we extend care to each other.” And then, in the very same breath: “Do you want sunscreen?”
Raised in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Edebiri is the only child of a Nigerian father and a strictly Pentecostal Barbadian mother. She’s said there was a time when her greatest aspiration was to be a pastor’s wife, but then she got into improv and theater at her public school and started recording episodes of 30 Rock and Conan at home. In college Edebiri veered from majoring in education to studying dramatic writing at Tisch, meeting, along the way, friends and collaborators like Rachel Sennott, her costar in the 2023 film Bottoms (directed by Emma Seligman, another NYU alum); and Tyler Mitchell, who has now photographed her for this magazine twice. (“We met at a Halloween party,” Edebiri recalls of Mitchell. “I was dressed as Solange on the cover of A Seat at the Table and he was dressed as Young Frankenstein. And we looked at each other and we said, ‘We are friends.’ ”)
Well-placed writing- and production-assistant jobs, paired with a growing profile in New York’s stand-up comedy scene, led eventually to Edebiri’s first writing credits—on series like the short-lived NBC sitcom Sunnyside, Apple TV+’s Dickinson, Netflix’s Big Mouth, and FX’s What We Do in the Shadows—as well as some supporting and voice-acting roles. But it was appearing on The Bear, which premiered in 2022, that made Edebiri suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, a proper star.
Critics have jabbed at The Bear for competing for awards as a comedy series, when really it walks and talks like a lightly comic drama. Whatever it is, an upshot of its tonal ambiguity has been getting to see someone as obviously, instinctively funny as Edebiri play in every kind of key: delivering punch lines and making wry asides, sure, but anchoring surreal dream sequences and executing sobbing monologues too. “She’s very smart but also silly,” says the actor, writer, and director Will Sharpe, with whom Edebiri will soon star in the Apple TV+ show Prodigies. “She has the ability to be a serious, sophisticated, dramatic actor, but also has funny bones.”
The performance as Sydney has won Edebiri an Emmy, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Critics Choice Award, among other prizes. So, too, did The Bear—and the deft work of Danielle Goldberg, Edebiri’s stylist and good friend, on all those important red carpets—launch her into the fashion firmament: Suddenly, Edebiri was flitting freely between high-femme silhouettes and looks drawn from menswear, whether in a red satin column from Prada for the 2024 Golden Globes or a floor-length shirtdress and leather tailcoat from Ferragamo for May’s Met Gala. And then, this fall, in a true cool-girl coup, she was named a brand ambassador for Matthieu Blazy’s new Chanel.
In an email, Blazy, a big fan of The Bear, praises Edebiri for “carving a unique path for herself” in her work, as well as for her “effortless” sense of style, both on the carpet and off. “Coupled with her laugh and smile,” he adds, “you can’t really look away.” (Edebiri, for her part, speaks to me admiringly of Blazy’s “wonderful energy”—which, she adds, “really does matter. When you’re doing anything creative in nature, you don’t realize how much your energy is up for grabs.”)
I wonder if Edebiri has a sense, as yet, of what she’ll remember, or want to remember, from her time on The Bear. (The most recent season found Sydney at a crossroads between accepting partial ownership of the titular restaurant or moving on.) While it’s still too soon to say—the show has been renewed for a fifth season, with no clear signs of winding down—she offers, “I do try to journal a lot, and not let anything overshadow the other, good or bad. When I was in school, I took these Feldenkrais classes. It’s a lot about body awareness, but a huge thing is, How do you have awareness without judgment?
So I feel like that’s also this moment—where I’m like, How do I have presence and awareness, but also just allow this experience to be what it is and enjoy it?”
As a performer, Edebiri is world-class at registering bewilderment. Whether it’s Sydney navigating the web of family feuds undergirding The Bear; Josie, her character in Bottoms, sorting out if her best friend is being truly serious about starting a feminist fight club; or Ariel, the young music journalist Edebiri played in Mark Anthony Green’s Opus, slowly understanding that she and the other guests at a reclusive pop star’s desert compound are in terrible, terrible danger, the turning gears are writ wonderfully, often hilariously large on her face—but not in the way that Katharine Hepburn once disparaged Meryl Streep for, suggesting that you could see the drama-school training clicking away. Frantic problem-solving, or else doing her level best to keep calm when she is obviously in hell, comes quite naturally to Edebiri. (In fact, I witness this firsthand: After maybe 30 minutes of cruising the Angeles Crest Highway—the San Gabriel Mountains rearing up around us—it dawns on Edebiri that she’s plugged the wrong trailhead into the GPS…. And later, that she simply doesn’t know where she’s going. Her panic is mostly communicated in short, comic riffs, including about how I’ll render what’s happening in my story. She even has a working headline, intoning it like a disc jockey: “Ayo Edebiri Is on the Ride of Her Life.”)
Making Luca Guadagnino’s new film, After the Hunt, demanded an altogether different approach. A foil to the sexy, sunlit dramas for which the director is primarily known, it sees Edebiri play a PhD candidate at Yale named Maggie who accuses a popular philosophy professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. Another professor, Alma (Julia Roberts), is the first person Maggie speaks to about what happened, and Alma’s reaction sets up the film’s faceted examination of privilege, identity politics, and what goes on in a cloistered community hamstrung by its own mores.
The result is heady—readily referencing Giorgio Agamben and Theodor Adorno and relitigating the flaws of cancel culture—and Maggie, to put it plainly, is a bit of a pill. She’s affected, sneaky, entitled (her adoptive parents are major Yale donors), and she takes a grating pleasure in talking down to people, especially men. Edebiri will often build playlists around her characters, and for Maggie, the sound profile was “a lot of noise. A lot of chaos and depressed, misplaced anger.” She also had, from early on, a very clear—and fairly devastating—vision for her look: “I sent Luca a bunch of girls with bad wigs, basically,” she says. “I was like, I think that’s who Maggie is.”
Guadagnino, who had met Edebiri a handful of times through the designer Jonathan Anderson, knew her work but was also just drawn to her as a personality. “I was following her public persona, and the grace and the irony, the wicked intelligence that she exudes was too attractive to me,” he says. “I feel that comedians are always so ready to bring something so powerful to a scene because of their ability to be ready every time. So she was someone that I really wanted.”
Rehearsals took place over two weeks at Roberts’s home in San Francisco, “literally at her kitchen table,” Guadagnino tells me. It was a time not only for poring over the script, by first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, and finding the visual language to match it (Edebiri remembers Zendaya, who starred in Guadagnino’s Challengers, cautioning that the ideas and motifs that lit the director up during rehearsals could take a while to make sense to anyone else), but also for establishing a basic trust among the actors and director before the six-week shoot in England last year. “This sounds so corny and artsy, but we knew we were going to be in really kind of dangerous territory,” Edebiri says, “so it was about making sure that we all felt safe to take risks.”
The period also forged a close bond between Edebiri and Roberts, who share several of the film’s most emotionally knotty scenes. “I felt we went from relative strangers to friends extremely quickly. It was almost bizarre,” Roberts says in an email. “She is incredible to be around—the way her mind works, the way she expresses herself. She’s tremendously engaging.” (Guadagnino recalls a day when production was stopped for several hours due to a power outage: “I couldn’t work in the editing room, I couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t do anything,” he says. “And then I get a message from Ayo and from Julia saying, ‘Join us. We are at an amusement park.’ ”)
With all that runway laid down, the most difficult day on set for Edebiri involved negotiating a scene that, for obvious reasons, they hadn’t rehearsed much. During a climactic confrontation on campus, Maggie, in a pique of outrage, slaps Alma across the face—something that Roberts insisted Edebiri do for real. “It was horrible,” Edebiri mutters now. “I had to slap literally God’s gift to humanity, Julia Roberts.”
She’d had, by that point, enough conversations with both Roberts and Guadagnino to feel that the outburst was earned, narratively and emotionally. The only thing left to do was to let go a little—a recurring theme during the filmmaking process. “There were moments where—and I’m saying this, really, in a good way—I was being challenged by Luca,” Edebiri says. “He’d be like, ‘I can see you analyzing this, or intellectualizing it, or justifying it. But I think that while Maggie is very intelligent, she leads with her feelings.’ ”
He’d given his actors little viewing assignments, and one of Edebiri’s was Ken Russell’s 1969 film Women in Love; she was to pay special attention to Glenda Jackson as the headstrong, withering, unvictimizable Gudrun. This was a help. “I watched it, and I was like, Oh, maybe people just won’t understand Maggie,” she says. “There’s something really freeing to being like, People might just not like her or might not understand her actions.” In the weeks before the film’s world premiere in Venice—where Edebiri would don an off-white bouclé wool suit and a strapless red dress with winking ruby buttons, both from Chanel—her greatest hope for the film was that people would “meet it with complexity. That it’s not just, like, I really like this. I didn’t like this. I wanted them all to make out.”
The remark reminds me of something Edebiri had said earlier, when we were talking about how fame had changed her relationship to her work. As her audience has grown, the stakes of what she’s doing—whether in stand-up or acting—have changed. “So many artists can become a character to people, or an idea to people,” she’d mused. “And then when something deviates from that idea, then it’s like, Wait, what’s going on? Do we like this?”
That, it would seem, is the space she is sliding into now—one governed, really, by the old improv concept of yes, and…. For example: Yes, Edebiri is developing a movie about Barney, the purple dinosaur (“I think it’s going to be cool and I’m excited for it” is about all she’ll say on the subject at present). She’s also working on a feature with Boyce—her cowriter on “Worms,” one of the standout episodes of The Bear’s fourth season (“I remember, maybe around the pilot or in the first season, having this feeling of, This is a person I would like to work with for the rest of my career,” Boyce tells me of Edebiri)—and she identifies Keke Palmer and Teyana Taylor as people she’d love to do something with at some point.
Yes, this December she’ll appear with Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lowden, Woody Harrelson, Albert Brooks, and others in the political com-dram Ella McCay, the first feature in some 15 years from the great James L. Brooks (whose work “shaped, if not every single sick day of my life, then just, like, my entire brain,” per Edebiri). And, yes, in April she will make her Broadway debut in a Thomas Kail–directed revival of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Proof, with Don Cheadle playing her character Catherine’s brilliant but mentally unstable mathematician father, Robert.
Of course, the drawback to doing all that richly varied work is that she’s been traveling almost constantly. In her time off, she wants nothing more than to stay put. (She is, unsurprisingly to me, a big reader; the second time we speak, she’s working through a stack of books that includes Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love, part of a welcome-to-the-family gift from Chanel’s Blazy.) “If I were to have 10 weeks at home—my dream—I would just be like, Great: I see two friends a week, I work out, and then I clean,” Edebiri says. “I yearn to dump and donate.”
Her distress at the hiking part of our meeting turning into one big loop in her car—albeit with gorgeous mountain views!—dovetails with a conversation about her 30th birthday in early October. It’s something that she is, and has long been, very excited about: “I was one of those tragic children where, literally, an adult would come to me at a party and be like, ‘You’re going to love 32.’ ”
She continues, genuinely: “It’s so beautiful to know yourself more. I’m grateful for that—to just be learning about the depths of my heart, the things that I really care about. It wasn’t very long ago that I felt like I had all the time in the world. And now, I think maybe it’s because I’ve lost people”—a close friend of Edebiri’s died two years ago—“my parents are getting older, the world is in various states of disarray…. Did I pass the entrance? Yeah, I did.”
When I return to this subject much later, over Zoom, I ask if her vision for her 30s includes the trappings of a slightly more settled, domestic existence: starting a family, namely. (I know better than to ask directly if she’s dating anyone; as she put it to an interviewer earlier this year, likely referring to the frantic—and unfounded—romance rumors that long surrounded her and Jeremy Allen White, Edebiri’s costar on The Bear: “I’m not going to show you guys my personal life, because you’re so weird about my work life.”)
She pauses to consider this, and the gears start going. “I think about it quite politically, to be honest. If I have a baby, am I going to have this baby in America, where funding for research for the maternal death rate is being snatched away at every second? And I’m a Black woman, but also I’m in a position of relative privilege. So would I be able to afford a doula or private care that somebody else would not be able to afford? My brain goes there. But in terms of my own personal timeline, I’m not too concerned because I’m not putting that sort of pressure on myself.” Then, hearing what she’s just said: “My grandmother will be like, ‘That’s the wrong answer. You want a male husband and you want a baby tomorrow.’ ” We both laugh.
The moment sends me back to the drive, in which I’m beginning to see a metaphor—much as Edebiri had imagined. No, things did not go to plan that morning. But somehow, in the end, Edebiri returned me to our meeting place right on time.
Just the same, few could have predicted where life and work would take Ayo Edebiri over the last few years. But doesn’t it feel like she’s ended up exactly where she’s meant to be?
In this story: hair, Cyndia Harvey; makeup, Raoúl Alejandre; manicurist, Ama Quashie.
Produced by Holmes Production. Set Design: David White.
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