Molly Gordon’s So Much More Than The Bear’s Dream Girl

“I’ve never been in something that people watch,” says Molly Gordon, “which is a very different experience.” She’s talking about her breakout turn in the bittersweet Emmy favorite The Bear and underselling her résumé a little: Gordon has been on Ramy and Animal Kingdom, as well as indie movies like Booksmart. But it’s true that playing the woman trying to get into the locked freezer of Carmy’s heart has put a more intense spotlight on Gordon. Jeremy Allen White’s protagonist “is a character that people feel so protective over, and it’s been kind of controversial to bring a romantic element into the show,” she says. “That’s been at times annoying, fascinating, and interesting—just to be a part of something that people have opinions on.”

She’ll have to get used to it, because it’s going to be a very Molly Gordon summer. The Bear’s fourth season will debut on June 25, and her Sundance road trip movie Oh, Hi! hits theaters on July 25. In Oh, Hi! she plays a woman who goes on a romantic weekend getaway with her boyfriend (Logan Lerman) but soon discovers that he isn’t as serious about the relationship as she is. Instead of moving on from that ego hit, she decides she’s going to hold him captive and convince him that she’s actually the right girl for him.

Gordon worked with writer-director Sophie Brooks on the story for the charmingly odd dark comedy, which takes a long, painful look at the modern dating landscape. “With apps, it’s just such a hard time to date in our modern age, and we’ve had a communication breakdown between sexes,” Gordon says. “We just wanted to make something that is about how hard it is to just be honest about how you feel about someone.”

Gordon says the role of Iris is based on herself if she were just “five percent crazier.” But she also grounds the character enough that the audience can still root for her, even when she’s making some pretty lamentable choices. It was an opportunity to portray the sort of intense character Gordon is always hunting around for. “We don’t really get to be crazy,” she says. “There’s just still not that many great female characters out there—the kind of wild characters usually played by men.”

Before The Bear, Gordon was probably best known for cowriting, codirecting, and starring in Theater Camp, a critically acclaimed 2023 comedy that won a Special Jury Award at Sundance. She wrote the script with her friends Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, and Nick Lieberman (she and Platt have known each other since they were three years old); it’s set at the titular location and inspired by their own experiences as theater nerds.

Gordon surprised even herself when raised her hand to codirect the film with Lieberman. She’d always wanted to direct but wasn’t sure it was in the cards for her. “It was something I had quieted for so many years, because the statistics are so insane for women,” she says. Indeed, it’s bleak: As of 2024, women accounted for just 16 percent of directors working on the US’s 250 highest-grossing domestic releases.

“I just still feel like I struggle with taking up space and just living authentically in that I’m the leader. It’s just still hard for me sometimes to fully own that,” says Gordon. Yet this summer she will start shooting her solo directorial debut, Peaked, an A24 high school reunion comedy she also cowrote and will star in. “I feel lucky that I can create things, because what’s so hard with acting is that you have to wait for someone to go, ‘Here, you can be creative today,’ ” she says. “With writing, every day you can wake up and have agency over your own creativity in your own life.”

A Los Angeles native, Gordon learned about storytelling from her parents, director Bryan Gordon and writer-director Jessie Nelson. “My parents were always breaking story”—i.e., plotting out movies and TV shows—“or trying to turn shitty things that happened to them into a funny idea around the dinner table,” she says. She’s aware that industry outsiders think second-generation writers and actors have an advantage because of their access, and she doesn’t disagree, though she thinks there’s more nuance to it: “It’s access and all these things, but it’s also just realizing how inconsistent and hard it is.”

Gordon decided to move across the country to enroll at NYU but only lasted a few weeks. She made a PowerPoint presentation to convince her parents to let her leave school and stay in New York to pursue an acting career. It worked: “I was really brave when I was 18. I don’t think I’ll ever be as cool as I was then, because I had no friends and took classes with 50-year-olds.” It would take a few years of acting classes and restaurant work for her to gain any momentum, and there were lots of hurdles along the way. At one point, an agent she met with told Gordon to her face that acting wasn’t the right career for her. “Which was totally fair,” she says now. “I wasn’t ready.” When she’d run into acquaintances from home, there’d often be an awkward conversation about what she’d been up to since dropping out of college. “I feel like people looked down on me a bit. I seemed a little lost, which I was. But I kind of needed to be in that moment.”

Finally, the roles started to come. She booked the TNT series Animal Kingdom, then got to work with Melissa McCarthy in the 2018 comedy Life of the Party and Olivia Wilde in Booksmart. She was finally working on projects that aligned with her tastes—and she made friends who were doing the same thing. Gordon’s social circle now includes fellow rising stars Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott. “I actually can’t imagine that I would have a career without those girls,” she says. “I don’t really have any doctor friends—I’m kind of friends with this circus. We’re all insane.”

Gordon met The Bear creator Christopher Storer during her three-episode stint on Ramy, which Storer also directed and executive-produced. She signed onto his new show knowing only that she’d play a doctor; it wasn’t until later that Gordon realized Claire Dunlap, a.k.a. “Claire Bear,” was Carmy’s love interest, his childhood sweetheart who comes back into his life after a chance run-in at the grocery store. “I’m always ‘the friend,’ ” she says. “I’ve never played the romantic person. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is going to be a different experience.’ ”

Her role gets bigger in the fourth season of The Bear, which she says will explore Carmy’s struggle to add some life to his work-life balance. It’s a topic that’s been weighing on her as well. Last fall, Gordon found herself at the center of tabloid speculation when photos emerged of her and White cozying up and kissing off-set. She sidesteps the topic gracefully, saying, “With the internet, I just think—I even see it in myself as a fan of things—we’re just a more judgmental society.”

Gordon’s role on The Bear is much more dramatic than she’s accustomed to; it speaks to her hopes for the future—that she won’t be stuck playing in her comedy ball pit. Yes, she loves projects with “a little bit of cheekiness,” but she’s drawn to darker material too. “It’s funny, women in comedy get kind of put in a box,” she says. “I’d love to do drama—I could do some drugs in a basement. Let’s go.”

Her acting success has only buoyed her directing ambitions. There’s Peaked; she’s also cowriting a new take on the 1987 comedy Outrageous Fortune for Searchlight. “I don’t care about being the lead in something,” she says. “I want to work with people that I admire, and that feels like more of the key to longevity for me in this career than trying to make it a name for myself as an actress.”

HAIR, JUNYA NAKASHIMA; MAKEUP, MAKI RYOKE; MANICURE, ELINA OGAWA; TAILOR, JEN HEBNER; SET DESIGN, COLIN PHELAN. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY PREISS CREATIVE. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.