Liza Colón-Zayas is a born and bred New Yorker — a 5-foot, 51-year-old Puerto Rican from the Bronx with the personality to match. So, when she got cast as Tina in FX’s The Bear, it felt natural to bring that persona with her, even though the show takes place in Chicago with a bunch of Chicagoan characters.
“The only thing I made up about her was that she’s a New Yorker — it didn’t say she wasn’t!” says Colón-Zayas about approaching Tina’s backstory. “I didn’t have a whole lot to go on except that she was a hard-ass, which you can see, and that she’s a single mom. [I had] little, tiny hints [about who I was as Tina], like how long I’ve been [working at the shop], and how much I love them, and how much I love Mikey.”
The Bear — whose full second season premiered on June 22 and broke Hulu’s opening-episode viewership records — is a comedy-drama from Christopher Storer starring Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri as two young chefs, Carmen and Sydney, who come with a lot of baggage and a whole lot of food obsession. At this stage in the story, they’re trying to revamp the Beef, a longstanding neighborhood sandwich shop, into the Bear, a new, dare we say classier restaurant, after Mikey, Carmy’s brother and proprietor of the Original Beef, ran the family sandwich shop into the ground and committed suicide, leaving Carmy Berzatto and his fractured family to pick up the pieces.
As much as the show is about food and the hospitality industry, it’s actually more about people. And one of those people is Tina, a longtime cook at the Original Beef who, though she has no formal culinary training, has cut her teeth in the Beef’s kitchen, learning everything she knows about staying in the heat from her former mentor Mikey. To say Tina is feisty is putting it lightly. She does not take kindly to BS and definitely doesn’t think she needs anyone’s opinion or approval but her own. But some of that armor, as Colón-Zayas calls it, starts to fall away in this season as she’s given more responsibility.
“Our co-producer, Cooper [Wehde], he calls me chef off camera all the time, and he was like, ‘Hey, chef, how do you feel about taking some culinary classes?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah!’” Colón-Zayas says, re-creating the excited scream with which she responded to her character being promoted to sous-chef in the second season. “I watch cooking shows, and my family, we’re not cooking like that, but it’s how we show our love to each other; it’s how I welcome my loved ones. And so, I got really excited by that because Tina was riffraff, and now she’s going to be able to raise her game. As an actor, I felt validated that I was bringing something and showing potential.”
Colón-Zayas began her acting career off-Broadway after getting her bachelor’s in theater from SUNY Albany and has been a part of the LAByrinth Theater Company since its founding in 1992. She wrote, produced, and starred in Sistah Supreme, a semi-autobiographical one-woman show about growing up Latina in NYC in the ’70s and ’80s. Around the same time, she got small roles in film and television and continued to land day-player roles on shows like Law & Order, Sex and the City, Nurse Jackie, and many others. In 2019, she got her first recurring role on the short-lived OWN drama, David Makes Man, and in 2021 she landed another recurring role in HBO’s revival of In Treatment. The following year, Colón-Zayas took on Tina in The Bear, which has been a pinch-me moment ever since it happened, she says.
“It’s so hard to believe,” says Colón-Zayas. “When I say I’ve had a thousand rejections … I mean, I’ve had some great stuff, very spread out, but it’s exciting and wonderful to finally get this affirmation. But man, it’s hard to accept. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully accept it, you know? I don’t think I could ever coast — I’ll never be that person.”
Colón-Zayas grew up during a time when Latinx actors were either not on-screen or onstage at all, or if they were, they were caricatures of themselves, playing into stereotypes and fulfilling white fantasies about who they thought a Latinx person was. When she expressed to her then-boyfriend that she wanted to study theater, he told her, “Nobody wants to see a short, chubby Latina on TV.” While she’s sure he was just being protective, those kinds of moments in her life have stuck with her in her career, creating a sort of limbo existence. But the urge to act, to be onstage in front of a camera, was stronger than her doubts.
“There was always something — I don’t know if it was the ancestors or just something inside me that knew I had something to share, and that kept me going,” she says. “My LAByrinth community kept me going, and I have the best husband, David Zayas, an actor, and he kept me going.”
Playing Tina on The Bear seems to have come very naturally to Colón-Zayas. She describes getting into her character in the first season as happening by the seat of her pants, that she just sort of pushed open a door, and it happened without much thought. Perhaps it’s because Colón-Zayas relates so strongly to Tina.
“I know what it feels like for Tina to be caught up in a world that is male dominated,” she says. “Where you reach a certain age and you’re dispensable. You don’t have the proper accreditation or conservatory or whatever.” But still, Colón-Zayas is never one to judge another’s journey and can recall even the most trained, talented actor friends sinking into career lulls. She hangs on to the fact that nothing happens in a straight line, and is ready for the ups and downs.
In order to get up to speed for the second season and Tina’s arc as a new sous-chef under chef Syd, Colón-Zayas underwent intense training for a week with James Beard Award-winning chef David Waltuck of Chanterelle and Courtney Storer, series creator Christopher Storer’s sister and a culinary producer on the show, who, after culinary training in Paris, held senior roles at Animal and Jon & Vinny’s in Los Angeles.
“We sliced and diced a lot,” says Colón-Zayas of her weeklong training prior to shooting season two. “There was a lot of fish to fillet to prepare for [those scenes]. I just watched a lot of cooking shows, like I did for the first season, but [Tina] wasn’t supposed to be polished at all. I remember after I was cast in the show but before we started filming, there was this little Latina woman in a pizza shop in midtown. Tiny, like me, stone-faced, and every time she came out from the back of the house to the front of the pizza shop, the men just snapped to it.
It was palpable. And I watched that, and I was like, ‘That’s Tina.’”
Another new — and perhaps not all that welcome — facet of Tina this season: that karaoke scene. Early on in production last year, Christopher Storer mentioned she might be singing in an episode. Colón-Zayas tried to put it out of her mind and thought maybe it was a joke or that it would just go away if she didn’t bring it up again. No such luck, though. When she got the script for episode five, “Pop,” there it was in so many words: Tina sings karaoke at a bar.
“I was terrified,” laughs Colón-Zayas. “I don’t sing in public. I don’t like karaoke. The first and last time my friends pushed me up there to sing was many years ago, and somebody threw a lemon at me.”
It was a lemon wedge, thank goodness, and not a whole lemon, but the experience was upsetting enough that she said she almost went “full Tina” on the guy. This time, as a vulnerable Tina stands up in a bar with a group of her culinary school peers, she gives a haunting bilingual rendition of Freddy Fender’s “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” It’s an incredibly sweet moment when you see Tina leaning into sisterhood and work camaraderie a bit more, breaking out of her shell — her armor.
“Chris just reminded me that it’s not about my ability to sing,” she says, recalling her on-set jitters the day of filming. “It’s just another level of pushing past my comfort zone, challenging myself in that way.”
Valentina Valentini is a London-based entertainment, travel, and food writer and is also a senior contributor to Shondaland. Elsewhere, she has written for Vanity Fair, Vulture, Variety, Thrillist, Heated, and The Washington Post. Her personal essays can be read in the Los Angeles Times and Longreads, and her tangents and general complaints can be seen on Instagram at @ByValentinaV.
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