This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon.
There’s something incredibly cool that happens when a new celebrity catapults into another level of fame and also seems… incredibly cool.
Not “cool” in the way that they smoke behind the dumpsters outside the gym doors during lunch. Though maybe you did that, Ayo Edebiri. I don’t know your life. (Is that what kids these days still think is cool?)
But Edebiri’s massive rise in fame and, with it, the opportunity to showcase her personality, represents the return to celebrity fun.
Edebiri has won basically every acting award available to her for her role in The Bear in past weeks, and, in return, has given some of the most charming speeches and red carpet interviews I’ve had the pleasure of covering. She also starred in Bottoms, the most underrated comedy of the year, and appeared in Theater Camp, the movie that inspired me to scream at anyone I encounter, “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THEATER CAMP, IT’S SO GOOD!” There’s an amazing scene between her and child actor Alan Kim—it’s literally just two people chatting—that is so different from anything that she’s doing in The Bear or Bottoms on an acting level, that it makes you realize how brilliant she is as a performer.
Her brand of fun is a delightful embarrassment of dichotomies. She is both gawky and glamorous. Blissfully unscripted and not overly media trained, yet consistently delivering the perfect quote during any interview. An actress who is rising to the A-list thanks to her presence (and continual wins) at award shows, yet who exhibits a relatable presence that pops the balloon of the artifice of those events.
She’s grateful for the wins and the meaningfulness of them, and yet doesn’t appear to, at least, buy into the pretension of the dog-and-pony show. She looks amazing at these shows, while also ushering an individual, non-conformist sense of fashion and identity that bucks against the bland uniformity that floods the red carpet. She clearly works hard and is so incredibly talented, but manages to be humble… and a boss… but gracious… yet assertive. Mostly, she seems cool and, yes, fun—in whatever those descriptors might mean in a new and changing version of Hollywood.
To give a performance like she does in The Bear is one thing. (A bit of nerdy trivia: This last week, she won awards for two different seasons of the show. At the Emmys, she was awarded for her supporting role in the first season. At the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, she won in lead for Season 2.) But to be such an undeniable star is another.
The entirety of my entertainment in these last few weeks of award season have derived from appreciating how grounded and hilarious Edebiri has been while on this star-making journey.
At the Golden Globes, which aired days after her The Bear co-star Jeremy Allen White broke the internet with his Calvin Klein underwear campaign, she and her castmates were obviously asked about their reactions to it. Her response floored me, because it was funny and it was true: This is her colleague, and she is at a work event. Please stop asking about her mostly naked coworker.
Her candor has been the best part of this rise in celebrity. I will forever adore her Globes acceptance speech where she thanked her managers’ and agents’... assistants. Because they are the ones who actually respond to her emails.
And no matter how many times it circulates on my timeline, I will like—or heart, or whatever we call it now on X, formerly Twitter—when the quote she gave to Laverne Cox on the Emmys red carpet circulates. Cox asked her what Edebiri would say to a younger self who dreamed of this moment of becoming an award-winning star. Edebiri’s response: “She didn’t dream of nights like this. She sort of dreamed of just, like, dental insurance. We’ve got dental, we’ve got eye [insurance], we’ve got ear. We can go to the dermatologist.”
I’m not a “Stars, They’re Just Like Us” person. I’ve been doing this job long enough to know that there is not a single celeb who is even in the same stratosphere as us plebeians. Ayo Edebiri, by value of her hard work and, like, winning every single award on TV in the last three weeks, is not like me. But her understanding, even if it’s accidental, of what a new generation craves from a superstar is uncanny.
Who cares if The Bear is a comedy or drama, when Ayo is the moment.
