There are few performers who possess the unique ability to expertly craft believeable, complex characters the way American actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach can.

After learning his trade throughout the 90s whilst juggling studies at Columbia University, Moss-Bachrach is now an ‘actor’s actor’. Throughout his work in theatre, TV, and film, the creative has built a solid reputation thanks to his ability to portray mutlifaceted, somewhat intense, and flawed characters. He’s also gained kudos amongst his peers due to his commitment to taking on roles which are widely different in nature, there’s no typecasting this artist.

Two key well-known roles of Ebon’s are undoubtedly: his manipulative character Desi Halperin from Lena Dunham’s hit show Girls, and now most recently his character Richie Jerimovich, a chaotic restaraunt manager in the buzzy and acclaimed programme, The Bear.

The Bear only dropped earlier this year in America but it’s character driven narrative has proven a hit, so Disney+ recently launched the show on the streaming platform, garnering an international audience. 1883 Magazine sat down with Moss-Bachrach via Zoom call to discuss The Bear, Star Wars: Andor, and the two moments that inspired him to pursue acting.

Ebon! Congratulations on the success of FX’s The Bear in the US and for it being picked up for a second season. The show recently dropped on Disney+ earlier this month. What have you made of your character,  the chaotic Restaurant Manager Richie Jerimovich, now receiving more of an international audience on the streaming service? And with the character being quite a brutally honest and chaotic individual, out of curiosity is this something you subscribe to in your own life – honesty is the best policy?

I was really curious to know how it would translate abroad and internationally. I was with our writers Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo two days ago and the response from the UK, Spain, and Italy has been really enthusiastic.                        

When you’re making something so specific and regional you never know if anyone outside–or even inside–Chicago is going to like it but sometimes I’ve found the more personal and specific something is, as long as it’s authentic and true, it starts to have resonance. When you try to make something that appeals to everyone, you end up making something that’s neither here nor there.

Honest is one way to put it but it’s acerbic, punitive, abusive… It’s honesty with malice, with intent. I believe in honesty but… a friend of mine when I was growing up, their parents had a really idealised, total honesty policy where they were going to be 100% honest with each other, all the time. I found it quite staggering and amazing in a way because sometimes I would walk in and my friend’s dad would be telling her mom ‘Oh, hey, I was just in the middle of telling her I think she’s looking really rough today. In fact, she’s looking quite ugly, I think she needs to take better care of herself’. That doesn’t really seem like honesty to me, taking your own grumpiness out on somebody else. I think Richie maybe has a little bit of that in him. I’m a dad so I try to be honest with my kids, explain things to them, and dash any hopes that they have a perfect father figure.

Speaking of Disney+, another show that is making the rounds at the moment is the Star Wars TV show Andor, a prequel to the gritty Star Wars film Rogue One. Can you tell us about what attracted you to the role of Rebel, Arvel Skeen. It’s a role that is more fantastical than The Bear due to its sci-fi setting but would you like to take on more roles like this as you used to read sci-fi and mysteries novels in your childhood…

I always loved any kind of genre. I think this escapism from genre is probably one of the things that drew me into making movies and plays and TV shows. I was kind of like those kids in Stranger Things, I was at that age in 1984 or whatever and I was in basements playing Dungeons & Dragons and on my bike. I was reading Piers Anthony, Tolkien, CS Lewis, and Douglas Adams, everything fantasy or Sci-Fi. I loved to be in worlds where there were different sets of what was possible.

I was also into Star Wars, I don’t think I ever had the patience to deeply nerd out on it or have an encyclopaedic memory of things but I would go to my friend Matt’s house where we would watch them. He had the long extended play VHS which had the initial trilogy on and was really bad quality, we would work through it over the course of one night. So of course in that way, working on Star Wars satisfies the dream of that little kid. Although the dream had kind of gone away, it wasn’t something I was walking around with so for me what appealed was the more terrestrial side of it and that it was a character-driven piece. Tony Gilroy–who is not a Star Wars fan–was interested in making something that was much more of a character piece.

I think the original Star Wars stuff was taken from the Akira Kurosawa movies and there’s a certain mythic quality. Oftentimes, when you build in such an archetypal way you lose out on the dirt under the fingernails and that’s what this one certainly had a lot of. The opportunity to work with Tony and to be out in some crazy sheep and goat land–AKA Scotland–for a couple of months was great.

You’ve been out in New Mexico for the filming of the psychological horror-thriller Dust opposite Sarah Paulson. How has it been working on the film with Paulson so far? And what can you tell us about your character? 

Well, I can’t really talk about my character, I don’t really want to talk about them. It is just a fantastic story though, it reminds me of a Polanski movie. 

She’s one of our great actors, she’s whatever all of the hyperbole and boring shit that anyone says about anyone who’s a badass is. She’s generous, smart, and so available. I feel like I’ve been lucky, most of the time I do work with pretty great people but Sarah happens to be in her own world of excellence and I really don’t know who else could do what she has to do in this movie better than her. 

Doubling back to talking about genre, I still look at movies as escapism, a place where you can create things that are not yet there and create potential. I think that happens innately in genre because you’re working on something that’s not necessarily a reality, certainly with Sci-Fi or fantasy. I would work in that stuff all the time but the thing with it is most of the time they’re really big budget things–there are some exceptions–but they have huge sets, huge art departments and they cost a lot of money. There’s a big mechanism behind making those things and for me, I’m not so interested in it, I much prefer to be on a smaller set. Less crew, moving quicker, knowing everyone’s name and who everyone is, and developing a little company.

In terms of a theatre company–that’s what The Bear was like–it was a tiny crew and we worked very quickly. Everyone was collaborating together and we felt like we were making this thing that we didn’t know if anyone would see so I think just the nature or machine of Sci-Fi stops me from doing more of it, maybe. 

You don’t always have to have a huge budget or have a story based in a fantastical world for it to feel impactful. The Bear is a smaller-scale production which is obviously more grounded than let’s say Star Wars or Dust but it’s just as gripping as a big-budget production…

You have to appreciate that your heart can be in your throat. Watching the order of chits come out on that chit machine can be as harrowing as watching tie fighters coming down. Physiologically you can have the exact same stressful reaction. It’s kind of amazing that these two things, one where small potatoes are low stakes in some ways versus the other one where the fate of the galaxy is on the line, elicit the same if not more of a stressful situation because it’s more relatable when you watch something like The Bear.

Alongside television and film, the theatre has always been a passion of yours and you first got yourself in the theatre scene whilst you were studying at Columbia University in the 90s. Can you please tell us about the moment you thought: “Okay, I’d like to pursue this as a career” and what do you get from theatre work that you don’t get from acting in TV & film?

Well, to answer your second question first, it’s just more time acting. When you work on a play, it’s four, five, six weeks of rehearsal and being in a room with that and just working with writers, dramaturges, designers, figuring out what this thing is. It’s an incredible luxury to get any time for rehearsal on a movie or TV show, so that just feels really luxurious. To me, it is to just be in a room everyday mining, digging and trying to go deeper and deeper with the same people. You also know exactly why everyone’s there, nobody is making any money so you know exactly why they’re all in that room and it’s for the same reason, to realise this story.

In terms of moments, I guess there are two. I took an acting class on a lark in college but until that point, I guess the common thought about acting is showing off and doing an accent or maybe a funny voice or something. I had this wonderful teacher–I think the class was called ‘America Naturalism’–who taught me about all of the classic canon of 20th-century acting and I just realised that there was actually a great, difficult craft there that I was terrible at and could work on to maybe get incrementally better until the day I can’t do it anymore. It was like ‘Wow, there’s some real hard work to be done here’, and that was interesting to me.

That summer I worked at a summer Theatre Festival back home in Massachusetts and found it incredibly exciting to be around lots of people actually making a play. The audience came in and I got high from the experience and was kind of seduced by it so I thought if I could just be around the theatre, making these plays for the rest of my life, I’d be happy. That’s pretty much it, I was nineteen that summer.

There must be a real buzz performing in front of live audiences in theatre as anything can happen as you have that live audience aspect but it must be nice being able to switch it up by also doing TV and film acting.

It’s nice, I like to switch it up all the time. I guess I maybe get bored easily and want to do jobs that are dissimilar to the ones I’ve done before. 

Doubling back to what you were initially saying about Richie and chaos, I think a similarity between him and I is I do really enjoy chaos. I love the element of danger and the unknowability and bizarro aspect of doing a play where anything can happen. I’ve done plays where people have had heart attacks, ones where the fire department has come in, ones where people have been doing drugs in the audience and obviously something different happens every night. Sometimes I’ve forgotten my line, I still have nightmares about that kind of stuff all the time but it’s really exciting and really fun. There are still stakes when you work on a movie but they’re different.

Hypothetically if The Punisher series were to return in the MCU, would you be interested in revisiting David Lieberman/‘Micro’? It would be great to see you and Jon in it…

That sounds unlikely to me but never say never, i suppose.   Jon and I always have a good time.

We need to acknowledge that this year marks your 23rd year of professional acting, according to IMDB that is [laughs]. What do you think have been the biggest lessons you’ve learnt so far over your career? This is a bit of a mean question as it’s so broad….

Fuck off man that is a ridiculous question [Laughs]. It is a broad question but to just fall into the pit and sound like the most pretentious asshole I can be, I would just say for me, in life and in acting it is really just being present. Being in the moment you’re in, the place with the person, I find that to have been essential in acting and in life.

Thanks for sharing, also there’s no instance where you ever come across as pretentious, I know you cringe at the thought of speaking about acting but you always seem completely genuine and authentic, so when you talk about acting from past interviews etc, it doesn’t come across as pretentious.

Thanks, man! Listen, it’s a weird profession and the craft of it is weird. I think it was John Herman who said “Acting is easy to do but really hard to talk about” and I think he’s on to something there. I also like the mystery in myself and other people so never want anyone to demystify anything, you know? Don’t draw back the curtain; keep the panties on.

You’ve been able to hone a skill for creating characters that are somewhat intense, multifaceted and complex. Take Desi Halperin From Girls or Richie from The Bear for example. Simply how did you prepare for a complex role like Richie…

Richie is a dinosaur in a way, the last of his kind. He’s a dying breed and he’s fighting for survival. How did I prepare for it? I hung out with a lot of older guys in Chicago who sort of have an older code, a different way of thinking about things about what’s happening now. I spent a lot of time in dive bars, in these great neighbourhoods in Chicago, where I talked to a lot of people walking the streets and just hung out with them.

Finally, if you could star in a film adaptation of one of your favourite books, what would that be and why?

What I would love to do is an audiobook of The Wizard Of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. Initially, it was two books that then became a trilogy and now it’s something like six books, a couple of them are short stories and then four bigger books. It’s a story that is really dear to me and very poetic, filled with the natural world, wind, birth, magic, and the sea. I read it when I was young and then again a couple of years ago, it’s a very powerful story and I would love to be part of it in some small way, to grab on to her coattails a bit.

The Bear is out now on Disney+. Follow Ebon Moss-Bachrach @ebonmossbachrach

Interview by Cameron Poole

Photography by Mirabelle Moss