Breakout of the Year – Jeremy Allen White

The Bear made longtime TV fixture Jeremy Allen White an overnight sensation (and an object of fan thirst). Now, for the first time in his career, he has a menu of coveted roles to choose from-and he's eager to show what else he can do.

- By Cam Wolf. Photographs by Eric Ray Davidson

A few years ago, Jeremy Allen White a was hanging out at a party in Malibu hosted by Julia Roberts. Sean Penn, one of White's idols, was also in attendance. The two actors had never met before. But White and Penn were the only two people smoking at the party, so every time the former would head out for a cigarette, the latter would ask to tag along. For most aspiring young stars, this would be a dream come true: one-on-one face time with a legend whose career you want to model your own after. "He's, like, my hero," White tells me.

But when it came time to actually make small talk, White...blew it. Just completely froze up. "I couldn't think of one word," he admits, curling his fingers to make a zero. There they were "just sitting, smoking in silence." Since then, White, 31, has gotten better at taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves, which these days is happening with more frequency. This is largely thanks to his starring role over the summer as Carmy, a tortured yet gifted chef, in FX's The Bear. The show was a sensation, doing for sweaty restaurant kitchens what Mad Men did for Madison Avenue. "When the show came out, the phones started to ring" says White. Suddenly, the longtime TV actor who spent 11 seasons on the dark Showtime comedy Shameless was one of the hottest things in Hollywood. "It's definitely shifted," he says of his career.

Shifted how? Kathryn Bigelow invited him out to lunch just so she could bounce a few ideas for projects off him. Out of nowhere there were "four A24 scripts on my desk," White says. And he heard from a friend that Dustin Hoffman-another idol of his loved the show so much that he wanted to send White a handwritten letter. Watching him navigate this interstitial phase of his career is like watching a spark fizz along a fuse toward a cartoonishly large pile of dynamite.