When I tell Liza Colón-Zayas that I cooked asopao de pollo, a traditional Puerto Rican stew, in preparation for our interview, her eyes light up. The dish, similar to one she makes as beleaguered line cook Tina Marrero in “The Bear’s” Emmy-nominated Season 3 episode “Napkins,” brings back deeply comforting memories for the Puerto Rican actress, 53, who was raised in the Bronx. (She tells me she even consulted on which ingredients to use for authenticity.)
“You come home, and it smells like Mom was cooking for you,” Colón-Zayas says of the favorite Latin American meals she grew up with. “It’s like, ‘Ahhh.’ My habits have improved. My knives are better. But I still want my go-tos.”
“Napkins,” which earned Colón-Zayas’ co-star Ayo Edebiri an Emmy nomination for her first-ever directing credit, tells Tina’s story, part of the show’s tradition of spotlighting individual characters. (Sorry, Jeremy Allen White groupies, there’s no Carmy here.) We see Tina before her gig at the Beef, struggling to find a job, to keep her family together and, most of all, to feel seen.
“I did not expect it. When I got it and read it, I was just so emotional. I loved it. I thought it went so above and beyond showing her humanity and life before we got to see this refresh,” Colón-Zayas says.
But “Napkins” is also, in so many ways, Colón-Zayas’ own story. She’s a 30-year veteran of television and the New York theater scene, where she was a mainstay in the 1990s alongside co-star Jon Bernthal and now-husband David Zayas (who in “Napkins” plays Tina’s spouse named, yes, David). Still, few viewers could conjure her name before “The Bear,” for which she made Emmy history last year as the first Latina to win for supporting actress in a comedy series.
Which is to say, Colón-Zayas knows the ups and downs of being talented, hardworking and sometimes straight-out ignored, as Tina is in so much of “Napkins.” This leads up to the pivotal final scene between Tina and Bernthal’s Mikey, who runs the Beef.
Though “Napkins” is front-loaded with montages that show Tina being laid off from a candy company and searching for new employment — “I love a montage,” Edebiri tells me. “Shout out Eisenstein, shout out Sam Raimi” — what makes it great is the climactic sequence between Colón-Zayas and Bernthal. Tina walks into the Beef, gets a sandwich, sits down and tries her best to enjoy the food. But her eyes are ringed with the suggestion of tears and dejection. Mikey checks in on her (as well as the possibly terrible food) and asks about her crying. “But not, like, sobbing,” Tina says, in an ad-lib by Colón-Zayas. “She and I just sort of speak the same language immediately,” Bernthal says of the chemistry between him and Colón-Zayas. That, coupled with Edebiri’s distinctive style, add to the scene’s sense of discovery: At the outset, Tina and Mikey don’t yet know each other, much less know that they need each other.
Edebiri’s road to such confident filmmaking began with a first-time director’s course through the Directors Guild of America and a surrealist music video for Clairo’s “Terrapin,” starring “Weird Al” Yankovic and his floating head.
A certified movie nerd, Edebiri lists inspirations for her and creator Christopher Storer as diverse as “Star Wars,” “Johnny Guitar,” Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” “The Pink Panther” and “The Hudsucker Proxy.”
Which may explain the auteurist quality to “Napkins,” particularly the “slightly strange or unnatural blocking,” or arrangement and movements of performers in a scene, that Edebiri found in Kurosawa’s films. She also has strong feelings about the music in the episode, fighting skeptical producers to use almost the entirety of a Kate Bush deep cut, “The Morning Fog,” even after “Stranger Things” had brought “Running Up That Hill” back to the charts.
“It’s a song that I’ve always really loved, and the more I listened to it, I was like, there’s this woman who’s being shipwrecked and she’s being born again,” Edebiri says. The self-described Bush “freak” Edebiri got her way in the end, though it required a letter-writing campaign with Bush, who approved with one qualification: “You have to use the lyrics.”
For her actors, though, it was Edebiri’s restraint that shone through most vitally in “Napkins.” Bernthal and Colón-Zayas were opposite each other the whole time the cameras rolled, adding an irreplaceable rawness to the interaction.
What they’re able to portray, without ever explicitly addressing it, is the powerful connection between two strangers that can change your life. Or what Colón-Zayas calls “this act of insane kindness.”
“I withdrew, like, ‘We just have to hold this as long as possible, and it has to be as still as possible,’” Edebiri says of her notes as a director. Colón-Zayas confirms: “It’s almost hands-off. She really let us do our thing.”
“That’s the nicest compliment, because I’ve never heard that before in my life,” Edebiri responds. “That’s not, like, a feature of mine.”
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