Jeremy Allen White Worked in a “Very Stressful” Open Kitchen Restaurant to Gain Experience for The Bear

Jeremy Allen White has been on a roll recently. With The Ironclaw and The Bear as credited works, the actor has earned a reputation for starring in two of the most hard-hitting and critically acclaimed projects of the past year. The 11 Emmys won by the FX series only goes on to show that White has graduated from his wayward Shameless days to now becoming one of the most impressive Hollywood stars.

Out of the 23 Emmy nominations and 11 wins, The Bear has proved itself to be a formidable force of entertainment in the comedy genre. But more often than not, Jeremy Allen White induces a panic attack and raises the blood pressure levels of his audience with each progressing episode of the series. After all, a show that was structurally inspired by Adam Sandler’s Uncut Gems is bound to have an effect of a similar sort.

To then state that White’s award-winning series based on the food service industry is a little too stressful for the viewers’ nerves is a major understatement.

The Bear: A Source of Spiking Anxiety Attacks

The FX series developed by Christopher Storer has been clear about its intentions from the very beginning. The Bear‘s entire premise is rooted in a grim tragedy as it traces the lives of those closely associated with the restaurant.

The 3-season saga of the Jeremy Allen White series can be frustrating, hilarious, and explosive at times but the constant pervading sense of tension and underlying stress behind every packed scene and conversation makes the audience feel suffocated. For a series structured to tell the story in 30-minute episodes, such a feat is not only astounding but nearly impossible to pull off.

Yet, The Bear manages to deliver byte-sized narratives that can raise stress levels and induce severe anxiety in an audience simply by watching the story unfold from the other end of the screens. To convincingly deliver such a performance is not simply the product of good acting and stellar dialogue but also the real-life experiences that filter into the scenes, movements, speech patterns, and overall expression of the actors.

The Bear makes that possible by putting Jeremy Allen White, the effective Commander-in-Chief of the kitchen, through an intense four-week crash course that showed him the stakes and operation of a restaurant in the real world.

Jeremy Allen White Earns His Stripes the Hard Way

The Bear is by far one of the most intense, exhilarating, and entertaining dramedy of this decade. As such, its cast and crew are equally, if not more, prolifically trained to deliver roles worthy of such a groundbreaking show. White ensured to fulfill his end of the bargain by enrolling in a culinary school for a two-week crash course and then trading the student’s uniform for some real-world experience at a restaurant in Santa Monica.

The actor explained in an interview with Uproxx:

I just tried to show up and be respectful because I knew I wasn’t going to be helpful… My last week or two there, they did let me work the line on Thursday nights, which is a pretty busy night. And it’s an open kitchen … all the diners, customers, they can see what’s going on in the kitchen. So, that was very stressful, but it also gave me a lot of confidence that they put me in that position and didn’t immediately take me off.

Although The Bear keeps one-upping itself with every season, making the audience greedily return for second and third servings, the series has also struck a controversial vein among the public for its defining itself as a comedy.

If not for the high-pitched rising tension that underlines every episode of the series before finally combusting in an explosive finale, then White’s own real-world experience should speak volumes as to what the series has actually been trying to convey –– hint: it is not supposed to be backed by laugh tracks.

The Bear Seasons 1-3 are streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.