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AYO EDEBIRI HAS BEAR-LY STARTED

There is such a thing as a meteoric rise, and then there is Ayo Edebiri’s 2023, which feels carefully designed as a scientific experiment to test the possibility of omnipresence.

This year alone, the 28-year-old actor starred in Season 2 of Hulu’s smash hit The Bear, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s Sundance charmer Theater Camp, and Emma Seligman’s teen comedy Bottoms. Couple those with guest appearances on Abbott Elementary, Black Mirror and I Think You Should Leave, and voice work on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and you could scarcely avoid Edebiri on screen this year.

For such a prolific actor, Edebiri’s interest in performing is a surprisingly recent development. She first joined an improv club in high school but eventually decided to study teaching at New York University. There, she met creative partner Rachel Sennott, who not only introduced her to New York’s stand-up comedy scene but secretly signed Edebiri up for her first gig. Sennott’s insistence worked and, in 2020, the two friends landed the Comedy Central scripted series Ayo and Rachel Are Single.

Over the next couple of years, Edebiri continued to carve her space in the industry, penning an episode of What We Do in the Shadows and landing acting and writing work on Apple TV+’s Dickinson. Christopher Storer, who directed a few episodes of the latter, would come to be responsible for the actor’s big break with the multi-Emmynominated show The Bear, in which Edebiri plays ambitious sous-chef Sydney.

Edebiri is set to follow up a career-making 2023 with a slate of projects that includes her first Marvel outing with Thunderbolts, Bernardo Britto’s time-travel indie Omni Loop, and Mark Anthony Green’s Opus, starring Juliette Lewis and John Malkovich. The comedian is also adding another trick to her ever-growing repertoire as she prepares to direct ‘multiple episodes’ of The Bear’s third season. For an actor who once said, ‘I think there’s always that bit of me where I’m like, “I need homework,”’ Edebiri is certainly heading to the top of the class.

THE BEAR S3, OMNI LOOP AND OPUS ARE TBC. THUNDERBOLTS RELEASES ON 25 JULY 2025.