Actors of tangerine bear series#

“You really only need to take a look into Robert’s eyes and you can feel all of that pain, angst and worry, but also a deep well of love, joy and caring.” “We needed to understand the strength of their familial bond and understand the ache they both feel for each other and the hole that the loss of Sydney’s mother left in both of them,” says Bacharach. During discussions about who to cast, Townsend kept rising to the top of the list because of the combination of qualities he brought to the part. I think there was almost some magic to not seeing them until they were really together - he wanted that to all feel fresh.”įrom the beginning, Townsend - the actor, comedian, writer and director behind the satirical classic Hollywood Shuffle, among other things - was on a short list of actors considered for the role of Sydney’s supportive father. “He just felt really strongly that it was not necessary.

“Chris knows these characters he knows what he’s writing he knows this world,” says Bacharach.

Actors of tangerine bear series#

So they offered her the role, even though she didn’t do a single chemistry read with White, which Bacharach admits made FX, the network that developed the series for Hulu, nervous. Gordon first connected with Storer after meeting his partner, Gillian Jacobs - a guest star in season two of The Bear! - when they worked together on the 2018 comedy Life of the Party.Īs Bacharach puts it, Gordon was “the bar,” and while the showrunners were open to other possibilities, no one else who auditioned managed to clear that bar. While they read many actresses for the role, Storer had someone in mind from the beginning: Gordon, whom he had worked with previously in his capacity as an executive producer and director of the series Ramy. “We needed someone who probably wasn’t going to be a discovery, but we also didn’t want anyone who was going to pull you out of it by being too recognizable,” says Bacharach. Showrunners Joanna Calo and Chris Storer told the casting team they did not want a super-recognizable actor in the role but hoped for someone established enough to hold their own in significant scenes, particularly opposite Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy. During a conversation with Vulture, the four casting directors - Bacharach, who is based in Los Angeles, and the Chicago team of Rudnicke, Mickie Paskal, and AJ Links - discussed the process of building this all-star team of guest actors, ranging from award-winning performers to esteemed Chicago culinary figures, and dropped a couple of notable names who came close to becoming part of the Bear family.Ĭlaire was the first role the team focused on casting in season two, and it was one of the trickier ones because of the mix of qualities it required. Having so many gifted actors attracted to the project was a blessing, but it also meant working through myriad scheduling issues and tough decisions about who made the most sense for each role and who seemed most likely to mesh with the intense, intimate process involved in making The Bear. I literally have never had that many phone calls and emails on a recurring role in my life.” I mean, agents and managers lost their minds. “It was just a new character on The Bear. “No one even knew what the role was, that it was a potential love interest,” says Jeanie Bacharach, a casting director who worked on the show and whose past credits include The Dropout, Station Eleven, and Ally McBeal. In fact, The Bear was such an enticing prospect that attempts to fill one recurring role turned into a bit of a feeding frenzy: When word got out that the casting team was looking for someone to play Claire, Carmy’s former high-school acquaintance, there was immediate and massive interest despite the character’s description being kept deliberately vague. If you’ve watched the second season, you know that numerous A-listers, including Oscar winners Olivia Colman and Jamie Lee Curtis, were just as psyched to let it rip alongside the principal cast. We kept getting submissions like that.”Īmateur chefs weren’t the only ones eager to show up on The Bear. “It was literally just a video in his kitchen of him begging to be on the show. “I had a young man send me a tape of himself making scrambled eggs,” says Jennifer Rudnicke, one of the casting directors who is based in Chicago, where the series is primarily filmed. After The Bear’s first season became a major critical and popular success, its casting directors started to receive a lot of unsolicited auditions, including some from actors looking to show off their special qualifications.