“Let’s do mild today,” Luke Tennie said.
This was on a recent April morning and the actor, the busy, sweet-hearted star of the Apple TV dramedy “Shrinking,” was deciding how much cayenne to add to a steaming pot.
On “Shrinking,” which just concluded its third season and has been renewed for a fourth, Tennie plays Sean, an ex-soldier who operates a successful food truck called the Cajun Cruiser. “They know I love cooking,” Tennie said of the show’s writers. “They know I love food.”
At home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and two young daughters, Tennie, 31, does most of the cooking. But his personal repertoire doesn’t yet include Creole or Cajun cuisine. Which brought him to Abigail’s Kitchen, a cooking school on the Lower East Side, to learn how to make jambalaya, the one-pot Cajun staple.
“Shrinking” was the first time many viewers noticed Tennie. Lately, they can see him all over TV. He appears on the current season of the ABC comedy “Abbott Elementary” as a former student at the school, now returned as a novice teacher. And he recently joined the hit HBO Max medical procedural “The Pitt,” as a surprisingly mellow night shift resident.
“I feel a little less anxious on that set than I probably would if I had to match the same energy as a lot of the other doctors,” Tennie said.
He seemed relaxed at Abigail’s Kitchen, as the chef and owner, Abigail Hitchcock, outfitted Tennie and Noam Shapiro, his friend and barber, with prep knives. She set them to work chopping essentials of Cajun cooking — onion, bell pepper and garlic.
Tennie, who also played a cook in the 2021 Netflix series “On the Verge,” teared up as he sliced onions; Shapiro joked that he should bring them when he needs to cry on set. Tennie prefers a tear stick, a mentholated under-eye product used by actors who need to mist up on cue.
“When you’re a trained actor with good material, you can get there on your own,” he said. “But there’s no chance you’ll be able to get there 100 percent of the time.”
A graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, Tennie has plenty of training. He turned to acting as a high school football player, needing to satisfy an elective requirement. He saw how his acting teacher looked at him: the same way his football coach looked at players bound for stardom.
At his conservatory, he played all kinds of roles. But once he was out of school and auditioning, he was seen for a narrower spectrum of parts — soldiers, football players. He didn’t mind wearing a letterman jacket, but he felt limited.
“I love playing a football player,” he said. “But I don’t like the idea that because I’m shaped like one, that I wouldn’t be able to play a doctor, as if a doctor couldn’t have played football in the past.”
In 2022, after stints on the Syfy teen assassin series “Deadly Class” and the CBS procedural reboot “CSI: Vegas,” he was asked to audition for “Shrinking,” a tear-streaked comedy created by Bill Lawrence, Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel. He read for Sean, an Army veteran with anger issues. Other actors had leaned into rage. Tennie found a softness to the character, a reluctance that made the violence, when it came, sadder and more surprising.
“Luke’s notion from the start was to play this guy with a quietness and an inherent sweetness,” Lawrence said in a phone interview. That made Sean someone to sympathize with, someone worth following on the switchback path of self-improvement.
In person, Tennie is much more easy in himself — quick to smile, quick to joke, with a bounce to his gait. These are partly his natural attributes and partly techniques he developed, as a 6-foot-3-inch, broad-chested Black man, to move through the world more easily.
“I always spike the joy,” he said. “Because a smile is one of the most disarming things when people have been societally conditioned to view you as a threat.”
He was joyful — and deft with a knife — as he chopped and sliced. Under Hitchcock’s direction, he browned some chicken thighs and then sautéed the vegetables in butter, with a pinch of cayenne. “This smells incredible,” he said.
In “Shrinking,” Tennie dampened some of that jubilance, particularly in the early episodes, because his character was still mistrustful, still angry. He found that he enjoyed playing that anger.
“I am one of the happiest dudes I’ve ever met,” he said. “And the easiest emotion for me to play is anger. I do not know why.” But then he thought about it some more. Growing up, he’d been encouraged to mask his anger. Sean didn’t have to.
“I, as a performer, got to spend some time in an area that had been off limits for me,” Tennie said.
When “Shrinking” began, Tennie had a much lower profile than co-stars like Segel, Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams. He liked it that way.
“I’m an exceptional supporting actor, and I’m extremely cocky about that,” he said. “It’s my favorite thing, because I don’t have to act humble.”
“Shrinking” showcased his charm and actorly confidence, attracting the attention of other showrunners. Tennie described Dominic, the new teacher he plays on “Abbott Elementary,” as a dream role: His mother, who died in 2016, was a music teacher for over 20 years.
“So I get to honor her,” he said. And while he often functions as a straight man on “Shrinking,” on “Abbott” he gets to deliver a few of the punchlines.
He joined “The Pitt” for the last few episodes of its second season, which wraps up on Thursday. While the pace of the series is often frenetic, his character, Dr. Crus Henderson, stays serene.
“His superpower is calm,” Tennie said. “His superpower is customer satisfaction. His superpower is, do you need anything else?” If Crus had a soundtrack, Tennie said, it would be wind-chime yoga music. (“I want that dude as my doctor,” Lawrence said, speaking for many of us.)
The jambalaya had finished cooking. Hitchcock asked if Tennie and Shapiro were ready to try it. “Ready when you are,” Tennie said.
On TV shows, the on-camera food is mostly made with looks, not taste, in mind. This would be different. Hitchcock ladled the stew into bowls and Tennie sighed appreciatively as steam wafted up. He had worked hard to make this, to meld disparate flavors into something distinct and rich. Now he was going to enjoy the mildly spicy fruits of his labors.
“Mmm,” he said, a smile stretching his face wide. “This is so good.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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