Jeremy Allen White – Something's Cooking

Jeremy Allen White of TV's The Bear a leading man of the throwback variety: grounded, irresistible, and perfectly suited to la vie bohème

- By Marley Marius. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

Consider Hollywood’s everyman. Jimmy Stewart was once the archetype; an actor whose open face and Pennsylvania drawl suggested a deep humility, morality, Presbyterianism. Jump ahead a generation, and the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino pushed that paradigm in a different direction. They didn’t look like matinee idols, nor did they act much like them; instead, they evoked pure id.

Those guys, plus Sam Rockwell, plus Sean Penn—instinctive actors, their talents nearly uncontrolled—are some of Jeremy Allen White’s favorites: “I like watching something and almost feeling nervous,” he tells me.

White has spoken about watching and rewatching Pacino’s “unstillness” in The Panic in Needle Park as he prepared to play Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, the painfully tense young chef at the center of FX’s The Bear. A breakout hit last summer, the series’ tautly paced action begins after Carmy, a James Beard Award–winning phenom, returns home to run his family’s flagging sandwich shop, The Original Beef of Chicagoland (known as “The Beef ”), in the wake of his brother’s suicide. Dropped into a quagmire of unpaid bills, and a kitchen staff that doesn’t really trust (or like) him, Carmy wants to burn the whole place down only slightly less than he wants to save it.