The Bear was welcomed with critical acclaim when its first season premiered to Hulu subscribers last year, as most recently evidenced by its 13 Emmy nominations. Well, Season 2 has certainly kept that positive streak going, with the latest batch of episodes all dropping on June 22. Along with The Bear Season 2 leaving behind plenty of questions on fans’ minds, among the more popular topics of conversation in recent weeks has been Episode 6, titled “Fishes,” which culminates in an intense scene involving actors like Jamie Lee Curtis, Jon Bernthal and Bob Odenkirk. Gillian Jacobs, one of the other guest stars, recalled to CinemaBlend the two things that were running through her head while filming that episode.
After making a vocal cameo in The Bear Season 1 as Tiffany, the ex-wife of Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie, Jacobs made her on-camera debut as the character in “Fishes,” which took place five years before the show’s present-day events, when she and Richie were still together and she was pregnant with their daughter, Eva. The couple was among the bystanders forced to witness the chaos that unfolded at the Berzatto household, and during my conversation with Jacobs, which took place prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike, I asked her what it was like for her watching these actors perform what is one of the most stressful TV scenes I’ve ever seen. She answered:
[laughs] I had two things going on in my head simultaneously. One, which is in the emotional reality of the scene, it’s so painful and uncomfortable, and I could barely even look up. And then another part of my brain that was floating above going, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m in this scene.’ So it’s sort of toggling between the two. It was just so amazing to watch and so tense. You’re both simultaneously sort of in the reality of the scene as the character amongst these people, and then they call cut and you go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m in this episode.’ Yes, both of those things.
We could spend hours talking about the chaos that unfolded in “Fishes,” but regarding what happened at the dinner table towards the end, thing soon got out of hand when Jon Bernthal’s Mikey Berzatto, who was high on drugs, got into a fight with Bob Odenkirk’s Uncle Lee, with the former frequently threatening to throw a fork at the latter, and eventually making good on that. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Donna Berzatto, who’d been showing signs of emotional instability during the night, got upset shortly after arriving at the table, and when her daughter, Abby Elliot’s Natalie, a.k.a. “sugar,” asked her if she was ok, she had an outburst, stormed out of the room and crashed her car into the house mere minutes later. So for Gillian Jacobs, she was simultaneously feeling just as uncomfortable as Tiffany was as this drama unfolded, but at the same time she was feeling overwhelmed, in a good way, about getting to share a scene with all these other big-name actors.
Regarding the shooting of the car crash, after Jacobs explained how this was accomplished practically a sound stage, I mused that even though she knew a car would literally be crashing through a wall, it was unavoidable there would still be some legitimate surprise while acting during that scene. The Community alum confirmed as much, but then brought up a different moment that exemplified this, saying:
Yes, but I have to tell you, the moment where Jon Bernthal flipped the table felt as monumental and consequential in the moment too. Yeah, so I knew the car was coming, and that’s your job as an actor, to not know as a character what you know as the person who’s read the whole script. But just moment to moment, you really didn’t feel like you knew what was going to happen in the scene in general. So yeah, cumulatively, you are on the edge of your seat.
Despite being witnesses to what will go down in history as one of the most uncomfortable Christmas dinners, Tiffany and Richie were able to make it through the event on good terms with one another, one brief disagreement aside. However, as The Bear viewers know, sometime in the five years afterwards, they separate, and in the following episode, “Forks,” Tiffany informs Richie that she’s getting married again. While “Fishes” is the only time we see Uncle Lee this season, and Mikey died prior to The Bear Season 1, Donna did resurface in the Season 2 finale on the night the title restaurant opened, but she stopped short of going inside, with Chris Witaske’s Pete, Natalie’s husband, being the only one who knew she’d stopped by.
There still hasn’t been any word on if The Bear will return for Season 3, but should that renewal be announced, we’ll pass the news along. Until then, take a look through our 2023 TV schedule to see what other current programming is available, and for the Gillian Jacobs fans out there, feel free to break out your Netflix subscription to watch one of her other big projects of 2023, the historical miniseries Transatlantic.
