YES, AYO!

Is Ayo Edebiri the most beloved new face in Hollywood? Alessandra Codinha meets the suddenly everywhere actor, comedian, writer, fashion darling... and soon-to-be director too?

There are worse places that a rising star can find themselves than at loose ends in Europe in July. In the middle of summer 2023, as the Screen Actors Guild joined the writers' strike, every actor who was abroad for a gig suddenly found themselves abroad without one. In this group was the actorwriter-comedian Ayo Edebiri, 28, who, suddenly released from her commitments, decided to take a quick vacation to Berlin with friends Paul Mescal and Fred Hechinger (both fresh from the set of Gladiator II), playwright and actor Jeremy O Harris, and actor Michael Seater. "We're walking around with Mr Normal People and the guy from White Lotus, and the person who got stopped the most was Ayo," Harris says. "People would be like: 'Yes, chef! Yes, chef!' And that's when I knew: it was that moment." Six months later in Los Angeles, over exorbitantly priced omakase at the preferred canteen of young Hollywood, Sushi Park, Edebiri, star of FX/Hulu's runaway hit series The Bear, admits that Berlin "got a little hectic", and then tells me what happened after, in London, when she still believed that she could take a bus.