It seems that ever since the pandemic, time has been flying by more quickly. That’s evident in TV awards season, as current buzz on the internet focuses heavily on “The Bear” Season 2, but somehow, there hasn’t been an Emmys yet that recognized Season 1. The first season of the FX on Hulu comedy-drama — it’s nominated in the comedy category, at least for its first 10-episode installment — dropped in June 2022, right after the last Emmy eligibility window closed. The second season dropped in June and will be eligible for next Emmy season.
That’s good news for the guest actor category — both this year and next year, which will likely again be filled with stars of “The Bear.” For Season 1, Oliver Platt and Jon Bernthal, who appeared in two episodes and one episode, respectively, landed nominations for their roles as significant members of the show’s Berzatto family crew.
For Platt, now a five-time Emmy nominee, it wasn’t difficult to create Uncle Jimmy “Cicero” Kalinowski, thanks to creator Christopher Storer and the team of writers.
Popular on Variety
“Let’s not forget, you and I are only having this conversation because a writer, two or three years ago — a member of the WGA — sat down with their typewriter, and they created this extraordinary world,” Platt told Variety in an interview done one day before SAG-AFTRA went on strike. The WGA has been on strike since May 2.
Platt had been working in Chicago for eight years on NBC’s “Chicago Med,” so in a way, he felt a connection to the character of Jimmy.
“I get picked up and taken home every day by these wonderful Chicagoans, who have become some of my best friends on the crew, who grew up in the same kind of neighborhoods that Jimmy did. Let me be clear — I’m not for a second implying that they’re in any way connected with anything nefarious, but they come from some of those neighborhoods,” says Platt. “I didn’t know, in that sense, the little, tiny, external details of the character — the way that he talks or the way that he dresses — that was much easier to lock into. The real soul of the character was on the page. He’s somebody who you don’t know if he’s going to shake you or give you a hug. Just the complexity of that, that’s like an actor’s dream.”
The character couldn’t be any more different from Dr. Daniel Charles, the head of psychiatry Platt portrays on “Chicago Med.” However, he filmed his two episodes of “The Bear” (and six episodes of Season 2) while he was filming the Dick Wolf procedural. In fact, they’re on the same soundstage.
Filming both shows simultaneously meant that sometimes, Platt resorted to “actor’s juice,” which for him is a sugar-free Red Bull.
“There was not a sugar-free Red Bull in my ‘Bear’ trailer, so I just trotted the 300 yards over to my other trailer to get a sugar-free Red Bull and went back to my ‘Bear’ trailer and everything was great,” he says with a laugh. “I have never had that experience before. It made the whole thing a lot easier logistically.”
Mentally, it’s a bit tougher.
“A couple of days, I had to start the day as Dr. Charles and end the day as Cicero. After eight years, it’s much easier to slip in and out of Dr. Charles. He’s also closer to me, in terms of my own background,” says Platt. Once, people on the set of “Chicago Med” even noticed that Platt’s voice was a bit different after spending hours as Cicero.
“They said, ‘Dr. Charles doesn’t really have a Chicago accent!’ Unconsciously, I was starting to go there. We all laughed but it was a little bit of a warning,” he recalls. “People were looking at me weird! I was like, ‘Oh, sorry.’ But it was funny.”
The 2024 Emmy nominations will likely include multiple Season 2 guest actors — Jamie Lee Curtis, Sarah Paulson, Will Poulter and Bob Odenkirk, among many others, all appear in the “Fishes” episode, along with Platt and Bernthal. But in Season 1, the two nominees never worked with each other.
“He’s a frickin’ joy, so incredibly down-to-earth and hard-working. I’ve always been an admirer of his and he really does marvelous work. I was utterly delighted to see his name on that list,” Platt says of Bernthal. “That [Season 2] episode was insane. As dark as it was, it was all so sad when it was over. I was lucky that I didn’t have to leave summer camp. The only difference is that the first season was packed with extraordinary actors, many of whom we didn’t know about; this episode is packed with extraordinary actors everybody knows about.”
Bernthal’s experience of tapping into Michael, the late brother of Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy, for the flashback episode, “Braciole,” was much different than Platt’s. The first-time Emmy nominee was filming another project at the time and couldn’t make it out to Chicago, but his friend, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who portrays Cousin Richie, knew he’d be perfect for the role.
“I’m really close with Ebon. He reached out, out of the blue last year. He’s one of those guys that I don’t just love as a friend and as a human being; I trust him so much as an artist. My first gig ever was understudying him in an Off Broadway play,” Bernthal told Variety before the actors’ strike. “When he reached out, he told me how important the show was to him. It turned out to be this wonderful thing, and then I got to know Chris [Storer], and I fell in love with the spirit of the show.”“The Bear” team ultimately flew to Los Angeles for Bernthal to film his Season 1 scene, which he jokes was filmed “basically on my lunch break.” (As a reminder, Bernthal led two other shows that aired in 2022, “We Own This City” and “American Gigolo.”)
“They told me, ‘We move so fast.’ I don’t think there was a single day that we were there for more than six hours. [Chris] gets what he wants. He shoots it the right way. The crew is as good as I’ve ever worked with. Everyone is so unbelievably dialed-in. The cameras are always moving.”
In the first season cameo, “Carm was almost looking at him on a pedestal,” says Bernthal. “It was [about] remembering his bravado, how beautiful of a storyteller he was, his charm, how he’s larger than life, how he could come into a room and just have everybody in the palm of his hand. Through the lens of memory, it was this beautiful celebration of this guy.
“But this year,” he continues, “they really showed the other side — his ugliness, his damage, his hurt, his pain, the parts of him that didn’t quite sync up.”