The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach is this year’s big Thing

It’s a speciality of Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s to take a limited part and to play it richly, bringing his characters front and centre. In 2014, Lena Dunham brought the New York-born actor, then in his mid-30s, into her hit dramedy Girls, for what was supposed to be a brief arc as a short-term love interest, the excruciatingly pretentious actor and musician Desi. Typically, Moss-Bachrach found Desi’s depth as well as his absurdities, and it wasn’t long before he was upped to a regular character. 

“From the day Ebon stepped on set it was clear we were unprepared for the magical take he was bringing to this role,” says Dunham, “and for just how bold it would be and how funny and at times heartbreaking.”

Then came The Bear. The frantic Disney+ comedy-drama, about a Chicago chef (played by Jeremy Allen White) and his troubled extended family, first aired in 2022 to instantaneous acclaim, sparking a series of thought pieces and memes on its food, its white-T-shirt-and-selvedge-denim style and its stars, including Moss-Bachrach. He plays Cousin Richie, a representative of the old guard facing a rapidly changing world who waves an angry fist at the sky as everything he knows starts to move on. In the first three seasons, he has been stabbed in the backside by Ayo Edebiri, schooled in fine dining by Olivia Colman and belted Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” – in a car while thinking of his young daughter, somehow managing to cram 20 years’ worth of pathos into barely 20 seconds of music. 

“Richie is someone who is calcified by toxic masculinity, in really tragicomic ways,” says journalist and author Sophie Gilbert, who writes about television for The Atlantic. “But then over seasons two and three you see his growth, his radical awakening to the idea of his own potential. The scene where he aces a test and then drives triumphantly home blasting ‘Love Story’ is one of the best in television.”

“It felt quite unique and special and completely surprising,” says the actor today of the show’s reception. In 2024, it won him two Emmys for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.

“I thought The Bear was good. Strong. But I wasn’t sure”

Dressed in a pale-grey windbreaker and navy cable-knit jumper, his beard flecked with grey, Moss-Bachrach blends into a quiet corner of the tea room of the Wallace Collection, the venerable fine arts museum in central London where we meet. (It was his idea: according to Dunham, he loves “touring a niche museum of antiquities”.) The actor has been based in London for the past five months, finishing filming for his next big role. It should be the real test of how much he can do with limited means: his face is barely in it. At 48, he is entering the world of blockbusters in a Marvel superhero film. In The Fantastic Four: First Steps he will play Ben Grimm, also known as The Thing, a man turned to rock by a cosmic radiation accident in outer space.

“I would say maybe he just has a sort of rock exterior, but he’s a very human person,” says Moss-Bachrach gamely. For the majority of the movie his character is almost entirely motion-capture, created in VFX, and it’s only through his voice that you can tell it’s him at all. That invisibility suits him perfectly. “That was definitely one of the attractive things about this job, that I am obscured, in a way,” he smiles. 

Fame is an uncomfortable idea for the actor. At one point, he flattens himself down, as if trying to merge his body with the museum café’s table, and shoots a stern look at a stranger trying to sneak a photograph of him. He seems both mortified and irritated by the attention. “I don’t anticipate ever being famous on some sort of crazy celebrity [level],” he says. “I don’t think that’s on the cards for me.” 

“My next few months are very busy. Am I ready? Probably not”

The first series of The Bear was shot quickly and intensely in February 2022. “We’d been all cut off from each other, and it just felt like something that I needed in my life,” he says of the job. “I’m playing a man at maximum volume in a small space with other people. I had been starved of that kind of energy.”

He was on holiday on a remote Greek island with his wife, artist and photographer Yelena Yemchuk, and their two daughters when it came out that summer. Having seen the finished episodes, “I thought it was good. Strong.” He pauses. “I wasn’t sure.” He only realised the show had become a sensation when he started getting messages from the cast and from his family back home. “Stuff like, wow, this show really seems to be connecting,” he says. “This thing was happening.” Across his three decades as an actor, he had never experienced anything like it, even after Girls. 

Big hits

2008 John Adams

2014 to 2017 Girls

2022 to present The Bear

2025 The Fantastic Four: First Steps

He has fallen “super-hard” for Cousin Richie, who is a character that you can’t help but root for: you’re desperate for him to get it right. “I’ll always have deep love for the guy,” he admits. “I mean, problematic, for sure, but I’m grateful that people stick with him.” Could he see the good in Richie, even at the start? “Yeah, I fully related… I mean he’s brusque, rough around the edges. Not polite, but I think that’s overrated.” He also thinks the show provokes a feeling about a world in flux. “I walk around New York every day and there’s stuff that’s closed down and it’s now a fucking bank or a pharmacy, and it sucks. And it’s annoying. He made sense to me.”

Moss-Bachrach was born in New York, to idealistic public-school-teacher parents who left for the country when he was four. They moved to the bucolic town of Amherst in Massachusetts. “I think they’d become really disenchanted – assuming that they were ever even enchanted – with the New York City public school system,” he says. “And like many New Yorkers, they probably just wanted some peace and quiet.” 

He had a rural, roaming childhood. “It’s a lot less rural [now] than it was when I was there. But my neighbours were farmers and I grew up with the woods behind my house.” He walked a lot and cycled everywhere, as he still does. (It wasn’t until he was in his late 20s, and his wife was pregnant with their first daughter, that he finally got a car.)

He returned to New York to study at Columbia, took an epiphany-inducing acting class there, moved to Williamsburg in 1999, and became a jobbing actor. His early ambitions – “to do plays around the country, regional theatre work, off Broadway” – soon led to bigger parts, supplementing his theatre work with regular TV and film gigs. (Go back and you can find him as a bellboy in The Royal Tenenbaums.) Girls came along in 2014. For Dunham, casting him was a long-held goal. “I’d seen him around in off-Broadway theatre since he was a recent college grad and I was a nerdy high-schooler,” she recalls. “He had a kind of downtown legend that made him seem really intimidating – he and his wife are just inherently cool – so when we started talking and he was an absolute goof I was delighted.” (Moss-Bachrach is diffident and fond in response: “Lena is hyperbolic. I love her, but she’s not known for her nuance. She goes big.”) 

The show wrapped in 2017, but it continues to find new audiences in young generations, and is endlessly dissected on social media. “That show is fully not going anywhere,” says Moss-Bachrach. “In a way, I feel like young people are more like that now than they were. Those characters felt a little bit extreme.” He pauses. “This is ‘said Grandpa’, you know what I’m saying? I’m the least credible person to say these kinds of things. But I think that young people have moved more in that direction of that level of narcissism, which was fodder for really funny, character-driven comedy.”

“I think your 30s are often defined by ambition. It can be very ‘me, me, me’”

Moss-Bachrach has previously expressed his disdain for the “late bloomer” narrative. “I feel very fortunate that I could always pay the bills and never had to take a second job,” he says. That said, he thinks getting more recognition at a later age has probably been good for his ego. “I think your 30s are often defined by ambition. It can be very ‘me, me, me’. But I was a dad, and very quickly my career was not the most interesting thing in my life. So that was a balm for the ego feed of that decade.” He’s never been in it for fame, anyway. “It can be annoying when people project that desire, that you’re seeking some sort of fame or celebrity.”

The actor is a family man, most at ease when talking about his wife and kids (he missed the Fantastic Four wrap party to spend Thanksgiving with family and friends). He met Yemchuk at a party in New York: they have two daughters, Sasha, who is in her first year of university, and Mirabelle, who recently turned 14. He was the first of his friends to have kids. “The thought was, I was in love with this woman. I wanted to spend my life with her, and we talked about having kids, and she brought it up, and I said sure. It was one of those things I just didn’t think about very much.”

Work is now hitting a new crescendo. “My next few months are very busy. Am I ready? Probably not.” The Bear and Fantastic Four are, as he says, “different worlds, it’s barely the same job”. He knows Cousin Richie inside out, having played him for three years, and returning to Chicago to shoot season four of The Bear felt comfortable. When it’s back on our screens, we’ll discover if Richie’s redemption arc can hold. “I just don’t think it’s as black and white as that,” he says. “Like, oh, he was flawed, and now he’s risen phoenix-like out of the flames of some Michelin kitchen. There’s so much pain and disappointment baked into this character.” 

Buzz for The Fantastic Four is already building. “I was excited to see the trailer. People come up to me on the street or at the airports, and tell me they’re excited to see the movie.” Of all the Marvel franchises, it has proved particularly difficult to turn into a successful film, but with this cast (including Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Pedro Pascal), and its retro sci-fi aesthetic, First Steps might be the one to break the mould. “Potentially, it could be a really good movie,” he says. “It could be a great summer family-tentpole film.”

When at home in New York, “I hang out with my cat, I hang out with my daughter, my wife,” he says. In that order of preference? “They would completely understand. Maybe your readers would take issue with it, but they would fully get that.” Soon he heads back to London to start work on the new Avengers film, Doomsday, to reprise his role as The Thing. But more to the point: is he prepared for people to start shouting “Cousin!” at him in the street again? He gives a dry laugh. “They never stopped.”

Grooming, Alfie Sackett at LGA. Set design, Olivia Elias. Photographer’s assistant, Benjamin Coppola. Lighting, Tomo Inenaga. Digital operator, Nina Close. Stylist’s assistants, Aylin Bayhan, Ady Huq and Nicolò Pablo Venerdì. Grooming assistant, Rachel Thomas. Set design assistant, Tommie Casani. Production, Maria Domican at North Six