In ‘The Bear,’ Abby Elliott Follows a New Recipe

Abby Elliott knows her way around a comedy. A veteran of the Groundlings and the Upright Citizens Brigade, she joined “Saturday Night Live” at 21 and has since appeared in laugh-track-ready shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Odd Mom Out.” So in the spring of 2021, when FX approached her about a pilot for a new comedy, she was interested.

“I kind of went into it like, Oh, should I do a voice?” Elliott said. “Or I could do a little catchphrase? That could be fun.”

That show was “The Bear,” which returns for its third season on Thursday, on Hulu. Set largely in the fraught kitchen of a Chicago restaurant, it stars Jeremy Allen White as a troubled chef. Elliott appears as his forbearing sister. “The Bear” is a comedy only in the classical sense, in that it emphasizes human foibles and does not end in disaster. (Is a workplace rife with panic, money trouble and suicidal ideation not a disaster? Take it up with Emmys voters, who in January awarded it best comedy.) Otherwise it is dramatic, frenetic, extremely stressful.

“I didn’t really quite understand how high the stakes would be,” she said.

For what it’s worth, Elliott does consider “The Bear” a comedy. “It’s just like real life,” she said. “A lot of people find comedy in the darkness and the stress. It’s so relatable in that way.” But a funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen: “The Bear” made Elliott a dramatic actress. She does not do a voice.

I met Elliott, 37, at an Upper West Side cafe on a summer morning, the sun set to low broil, about a week before the Season 3 premiere. Though she lives in Los Angeles and works in Chicago, she had come to the East Coast for a family wedding and was enjoying a few days in the city afterward.