In an episode in the third season of "The Bear," Liza Colón-Zayas’ character, Tina Marrero, sticks to her new routine. She wakes up at 6 a.m., showers, prepares a meal in the slow cooker and looks for work after having been laid off from her office job of 15 years.
Set in 2018 — about four years before the events of "The Bear's" first season — “Napkins” (season three, episode six) poignantly details the trials, tribulations and many rejections Tina faced before she finally found her place as the restaurant’s line cook. It also introduces viewers to Tina's family — including her husband, played by her real-life husband, David Zayas.
In an interview, Colón-Zayas said she could relate to her character's early mornings when she was a student at the State University of New York at Albany, working the dining hall's dish line starting at 5 a.m.
But that's where Colón-Zayas' and Tina's similarities end. When it comes to navigating the inner workings of a restaurant, the meticulous Tina handles the kitchen at "The Bear" with much strictness and pride, while Colón-Zayas was a "terrible waitress" and often "spilled drinks on people" when she held a few restaurant stints before she broke into theater and film, she said.
She shares a story about getting “pissed off” with her boss and walking out of work one day.
“I took off my apron, and I was like, ‘¡Para el carajo!’ (‘To hell with it!’), and then I started just hitting up the temp agencies trying to look for whatever it could be,” Colón-Zayas said. “And it helped to just not be utterly insane. Whether it was working in the mail room or [as a] receptionist, it all worked out somehow.”
Colón-Zayas said she believes the key to making great art is to draw from real-life experiences. In her three-decade-plus career, many of her characters have been strong-willed women. There’s her title character in "Sistah Supreme," a semi-autobiographical stage production about Colon-Zayas’ life growing as a Puerto Rican girl in the Bronx. She was also Rita, the AA sponsor of Dr. Brooke Taylor (Uzo Aduba) in the HBO show "In Treatment." Now she's beloved to audiences as Tina, the once-combative and hardheaded line cook who soon becomes the restaurant’s matriarch.
“She is a true craftswoman,” Aduba said of her former co-star. “Whether it’s a single line or a speech, Liza approaches the work with the same discipline, hard work and preparedness while always still allowing room for spontaneity. She loves what she does and treats storytelling with the highest care and respect.”
The subject matter of the “Napkins” episode came as a surprise to both Colón-Zayas and her co-star Ayo Edebiri, who plays the young, talented chef Sydney and also made her directorial debut with the episode. There was no table read for the episode, which made way for Colón-Zayas to go all-in.
"Ayo and I had conversations and met in our office and talked about what [Tina’s] apartment would look like and what I would be cooking in the crock pot, stuff like that," Colón-Zayas said.
Edebiri herself doesn’t appear in the episode, because it takes place before her character arrived at the show’s namesake restaurant. However, on-screen, we have seen Colón-Zayas’ Tina and Edebiri’s Sydney evolve from tense, ornery co-workers to loving peers and chosen kitchen family. For Colón-Zayas, there was no better choice for a director of a Tina-centric episode.
“She’s wildly intelligent,” Colón-Zayas said of Edebiri. “High-energy, curious, kind and meticulous in her work. I already had two seasons with her to see how she works, and it was total trust. So when her name came up, I was like, ‘Yeah, of course. She’s ready.’ And clearly, she was. And to have these two women who were at first so adversarial to have each other’s back in front of the camera and behind the camera is very special.”
Colón-Zayas admits she wasn’t always sure whether the role of Tina was the one for her. She had auditioned at the height of the pandemic via self-tape. She had no script for "The Bear," no description of her scene partner and no idea what the show was about. She acted on impulse, “and then the magic happened,” as she put it.
Edwin Lee Gibson, who plays Ebraheim in the show, said Colón-Zayas is a "staunch advocate for her characters’ life — patient yet kinetic, intentional yet subtle.”
Though she has won various awards for her work in the theater, many consider Tina to be a breakthrough role for Colón-Zayas. It earned her an Imagen Award for best supporting actress-comedy and a Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series with the rest of the show’s main cast.
“The way I look at a role is I don’t judge it,” she said. “I try to look at what in my life can mirror what this character is dealing with and how they present it, as opposed to judging it. I’ll only judge it if there’s no humanity on the written page. I feel like, as an artist as a woman of color, born and raised in the South Bronx, I get the fear. I get the fear of scarcity, of fighting for your life, of being in a male-dominated room and the strength coming from strong women. Tina carried herself in the way her environment dictated — the sexism and ageism and the gentrification — all of these things pounding at the door.”
Behind the restaurant's chaotic scenes
"The Bear's" viewers will be the first to tell you that watching the show gives them anxiety. The close continuous shots, yelling, swearing and tangible pressure to nail timing may trigger panic in anyone watching. While many of those moments appear ad-libbed and improvised — and are praised for accurately reflecting the unpredictability of working in a restaurant — Colón-Zayas said all are carefully planned out.
The hardest part of producing a show like "The Bear" isn’t only perfecting the plates or arranging the tables and restaurant interior perfectly, she said, but also capturing the disastrous moments and making them look so real.
“Everything coming apart at the seams is just as challenging, if not more so, than the serving, cooking and plating that I also want to get right,” Colón-Zayas said. “I didn’t want to get burned. And I didn’t want to do wrong, wrong.”
Often, people ask her how she takes care of herself after filming, to which she says the crew is very tactful when it brings those high-anxiety moments to life on-screen. While filming, Colón-Zayas said, she feels a sense of “pride and adrenaline” in the moment and then a sense of fulfillment once the director yells, “Cut!”
Community is the foundation of "The Bear’s" universe, as we see the restaurant’s employees care for one another in the most harrowing moments. In the season premiere, viewers see a flashback of the restaurant’s crew attending the funeral for the original owner, Mikey Berzatto (Jon Bernthal), whose suicide took place off-screen before the events of the first season. In the third episode, they come together at the funeral for the mother of the restaurant’s pastry chef, Marcus (Lionel Boyce).
In the season finale, the Chicago restaurant community comes together after chef Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman) closes her restaurant, Ever, where "The Bear" executive chef Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) held stints before he took over his late brother's restaurant. Through bad times and good times — as the season closes out with a party at Sydney’s new apartment — this community of people have had one another’s backs.
Similarly, Colón-Zayas said she feels that without that type of camaraderie — particularly within her film and theater community — she wouldn’t have been able to make it through auditions, rejections and creative setbacks.
“I don’t think the level of rejection we face should ever be normalized,” Colon-Zayas said. “And without therapy, it could bring up some real harm, harmful conclusions as to how to handle it. Get together, even if it’s just a couple of friends who are also like-minded with their goals, and support each other and work it out. If the center is the art, the right people will be attracted to it, and it will unfold."
She offered a few more words of advice.
"Be prepared. Show up on time. Know what you have to do. If it goes your way, it goes your way, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Be yourself. Don’t try to imitate anybody else," she said. "You have to be you and love all of the weirdness, because that vibe is what they may not be able to pinpoint but what they’ll remember.”
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