Emmy-Nominated Actor Lionel Boyce Talks ‘The Bear’ Final Season with Rich

Lionel Boyce plays Marcus, the dessert chef on FX's "The Bear," and with the fifth and final season out, he sat with Rich to talk about endings, sourdough, and how much of his craft he stole from sports.

Rich led with what he loves about the show: everyone in it is a fully formed human, even when parts of their psyche are not. Putting a restaurant together, he said, is like making a recipe. It has to function as a team while the individuals themselves are potentially broken. Boyce agreed, then revealed how the cast works. They get all the scripts before shooting, fly to Chicago, and digest the whole season before they ever hit set. This year was different. Creator Chris Storer held back the final episode, sprinkling tidbits when the cast pestered him. When the last script finally arrived, Boyce said, it dropped the hammer. It became real. "This is over," he remembered thinking, and he got a little existential about it.

The final season unfolds over the course of a single day, a magnifying lens on Murphy's Law as the restaurant makes one last Hail Mary for a star while the money runs out and the fridge slowly empties. Because the story is so compressed, the cast had what they needed to execute without the full arc spelled out, and the final script arrived not long into the shoot.

Boyce is an Emmy nominee, a fact he keeps forgetting, for the standalone "Honeydew" episode set in Copenhagen. Someone submitted it on his behalf. He sees those bottle episodes as the show's gift, taking a character who is already three-dimensional and making them somehow more so. For Marcus, it was the spark, the moment of confidence that sent him chasing what he could do in a kitchen on his own.

That confidence is rooted in real life. Before season one even existed, Boyce staged for two weeks at Hart Bageri in Copenhagen, the bakery run by Richard Hart, whom he called the godfather of modern sourdough. The staff did not know about any show. They just thought he was a real chef who was very bad at his job. He laughed that he went from zero percent to one percent on one small movement, and Hart seemed proud to have taught someone with no hope in the kitchen.

The sports thread runs through everything. Boyce grew up playing basketball and football and running track, the 400 and the 4-by-4. Acting, he insisted, is easier than running the 400. He played high school football and a little junior college, lining up at outside linebacker at El Camino in Torrance alongside Kenbrell Thompkins, who later played for the Patriots, and Mike Harris, who went to Florida State and the Jaguars. His path into the arts came through a high school drama class at Westchester High, where he met Tyler the Creator. Tyler, along with his friend Domo Genesis of Odd Future, encouraged Boyce to chase the work.

Asked which scenes felt like art, Boyce pointed to season one's seventh episode, a one-take pressure cooker, and to a season-three eulogy for Marcus's mother, a page-and-a-half monologue that terrified him. He marveled most at his castmates, citing a season-four scene with Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

"Well, you're part of it, man," Rich told him. "Don't discount that."