Just two good friends hitting the road on a mysterious errand — what could go wrong?
Leave it to The Bear to turn the mundane into a deeply thoughtful, poignant meditation on loss, grief, and friendship in the recent surprise drop of a standalone episode titled “Gary.” Written by series stars Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Richie) and Jon Bernthal (Mikey), the hourlong installment — set before the events of Season 1 — follows the two on a road trip to Gary. Richie’s wife is about to give birth, and implores to be home before 5:15 p.m., but the two of course get derailed with a stop at a bar, where the deeply troubled Mikey opens up to a woman he meets, played by Marin Ireland.
Here, the two actors and writers — who are currently co-starring on Broadway in Dog Day Afternoon — open up to Gold Derby about what inspired the road trip episode, how to interpret the ending, and why they left Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) at home.
Gold Derby: Thanks for bringing us along on the road trip from hell.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach: No, it wasn’t that bad. There were snacks! And good music.
Definitely some good music. So how did you come up with the idea? What did you want to explore?
Moss-Bachrach: We wanted to make something that could just hold a lot of behavior and a lot of intimacy of these two men, these two great friends, who are at really different points in their life, and this very tenuous trip that keeps the two of them together. Mikey’s shutting down, he’s retreating inside, he’s shutting out the world. Richie’s having a bit of an awakening, he’s deeply in love, he’s having a baby, he’s starting to create a world that he never had for himself, he’s making a family. And given these two fraught and full inner lives that are happening, we thought it could be really, rich fertile ground to explore what a day would be like with these guys. Also for so much of The Bear, Richie’s journey is just a man who’s been haunted by the death of his brother, his great friend, and it explores so much of his grief and grieving and loss and regret, and I’d always wanted to see what he was grieving. What was this thing that he can’t shake? What was this relationship for all of its complications, and for its highs and its lows? And so a day in the car gave us a really nice framework for that.
And Jon, what about for you?
Jon Bernthal: I think it’s enormously important to always remember with this piece that it’s a memory piece, and this is Richie’s memory. Having lost a really good friend of mine — you remember the bliss, you remember the joy, but you also remember those things that you can never take back, and those things that you really regret, and those times where they were ugly, and those times that they were hurtful. When you lose people in this way, you’re [plagued by] the questions of what could have I done, what did I shy away from? What did I miss? What did I see? What did I not see? These are the questions. I think it’s been part of the profound beauty of this show from the beginning that you get these wounds, and then you dig into them, and you explore every nook and cranny of them in so many different ways, and the offshoots of trauma.
This show for me has been such an enormous gift. I’m a guest. I get to come in for this joyous week once a year. It’s always such a beautiful respite from whatever I’m working on at the time. It is always such a personal show, such a beautifully crafted show, and Chris Storer is such an unbelievable artist who’s at the center of this thing. It’s always so alive and fluid and collaborative, and it always floors me. It’s always remarkable to see how welcoming he is of other people’s ideas.
Ebon and I really wanted to explore this relationship a little further, and we reached out to Chris and pitched him a bit of an idea, and he doubled down and said, well, how about you guys just write an entire episode. The mark of a truly great creator and artist is somebody with that kind of confidence, that he believes in the people that he has around him, for him to say, hey, you take this thing that is so successful, so beautiful, so personal, and hey, you guys go and run with it, and I trust you. It’s a true dream come true.
How much of this is going to play out into Season 5, or is this just a standalone moment in time?
Moss-Bachrach: Like any memory and any tragedy, this is woven in. It plays out in Season 1. This is part of the fabric of who this man is, of who Richie is, and who Carmy is. The absence of Mike is the event that starts the entire show, and gets everything going. So it’s all over Season 5 the same way it’s all over all of the other seasons.
Could things have gone anything differently if Carmy had been in the car with you guys?
Moss-Bachrach: Oh, that’s a fun question. God Almighty. I see that car pulling over on the side of the highway and Carmy getting left on the side of the road really quickly. I don’t see him making it to Gary. No way.
Talk about Marin Ireland. What did her character represent for these two guys and their relationship?
Bernthal: Marin’s somebody that we’ve known for a long time. I’m completely obsessed with her. We worked together on a series last year, and I came up in New York watching her on stage, and I’m just kind of blown away by her. She and I did a play together in Ojai when we asked her to do this. I think she’s singular.
The place where Mikey’s at, I really believe that there’s so much about the hopelessness that plagues him, and the depth of how unhealthy he is, I think he knows exactly where he’s headed. I think we saw that in the “Fishes” episode. I think we definitely see it here. We really wanted to hit on this phenomenon of you’re there with your best friend, and your best friend totally knows there’s something up. But you can’t talk to him. For some reason, it takes this complete stranger to really express and to really delve into the depths of what it is that plagues you. For me, it’s always been this beautiful exercise with Mikey of why he left such an indelible mark on all these people. And for him to be able to so acutely and cogently articulate exactly what his ailment is. He tells her exactly what’s going on with him, and how his mind works. He knows it, and then he goes into the bar, and he does it, and he unleashes on probably the person who means the most to him.
We always wanted to explore and play with this idea of fantasy, because it is through the lens of memory. There was also this idea of, is the bar actually there? Is it real? It just appeared. It’s a sign. I think the same is true for that character. If you watch the episode, she doesn’t really interact with anyone else. Does she just exist in Mikey’s mind, or does she just exist in Richie’s mind? I love that, and I think there’s an element to the entire show that does that in a really elegant, subtle way that never pushes any kind of narrative on the audience, and that’s what we tried to do with that. And it couldn’t have been possibly played better by a better artist.
Moss-Bachrach: Structurally, we really wanted this to be a bit like a western and this bar to operate as a Brigadoon sort of world, like an oasis. Something that we see, and we go in and was it there? Wasn’t it there? And how much of it is in Richie’s mind? Just to have a slightly poetic, impressionistic feel.
That brings me to the ending. How should we interpret the ending? Because when he looks over at the empty seat, it makes us wonder if it all did just happen.
Moss-Bachrach: I think you have a responsibility as the audience, you gotta make up your own mind, you gotta show up a little bit. I’m not gonna tell you what to make of it.
Thanks for helping us out there. Talk about the music. What tone did you want to set with the music that you chose?
Moss-Bachrach: Chicago’s got such a rich musical tradition, there’s a lot of soul music and R&B in this episode, and musically, it’s quite different than the rest of The Bear, which has a lot of more contemporary stuff. I was interested in having a different kind of soundtrack. But there’s an ebullience and a buoyancy to most of the songs. It was really important to us that there be a lot of joy in this episode. I know people talk about the final scene a lot, but I don’t want that to eclipse the good times these guys are having.
And are we ever going to find out what plastic pump impellers do?
Both: They rotate.
