In “The Bear,” Abby Elliott follows a new recipe

Abby Elliott knows her way around comedy. A veteran of the Groundlings and the Upright Citizens Brigade, she joined “Saturday Night Live” at age 21 and has since appeared on such laugh-out-loud shows as “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 can I do a little tagline? 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 tolerant sister. “The Bear” is a comedy only in the classic sense of the word, in that it highlights human frailties and does not end in disaster. (Isn’t a workplace full of panic, money problems and suicidal thoughts a disaster? Get started with it Emmy voters(who gave the film the Best Comedy Award in January.) Furthermore, it’s dramatic, hectic and extremely stressful.

“I didn’t really realize 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 doesn’t do voices.

I met Elliott, 37, at an Upper West Side café on a summer morning, the sun had set, 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.

At breakfast, she was smartly dressed and fresh-faced (she admitted to applying a thick layer of self-tanner), despite the heat. She has wide eyes, a sardonic, closed-mouth smile and a gift for instant intimacy, especially when she describes pumping breast milk backstage next to a similarly postpartum Sarah Snook at the 2024 Golden Globes.

If there’s an allele for laughter, Elliott has it. Her father is Chris Elliott, a late-night show fixture who most recently appeared on “Schitt’s Creek” and spent a season on “SNL.” His father is Bob Elliott, one half of the greatest-generation comedy duo Bob and Ray, who also appeared on “SNL.” (Abby’s mother, Paula Niedert Elliott, is a former talent coordinator for David Letterman.)

Elliott doesn’t feel like she was forced to perform. Her father, whom she idolized, showed her that a showbiz life was possible and even desirable. But he never let her watch his appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman,” and he encouraged her to go to college.

“I mean, there were options,” she said. “I just don’t know how to do anything else, and I’ve never really known.”

She dropped out of college after a semester and moved to Los Angeles, where she lived with family and took improv classes. A few years later she was invited to “SNL”. Name recognition, a gentle form of nepotism, probably got her into 30 Rock, but it was a gift for profligate celebrity impressions (Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep) who kept her there.

She left the show after four years and worked steadily for the next decade, albeit mostly in the kind of zany supporting roles that rarely show up on the cultural radar. She’s okay with that.

“I was in such a safe zone of, OK, well, this is just what I do,” she said. “It’s like, OK, I’m not going to get these roles or do dramatic roles.”

Christopher Storer, the creator of “The Bear,” thought differently when he was looking for an actress to play a loving, no-nonsense sister. He had never worked with Elliott, but he remembered her from “SNL” — especially her impersonations.

“There was something very authentic about it,” he said. “You could feel the affection for the people she was impersonating.”

He wanted that affection for Natalie Berzatto, nicknamed Sugar, the older sister of White’s Carmy and clearly the only member of their family ever to have been to therapy. And Storer suspected that Elliott, a trained improvisational comedian, was adept at working very, very quickly, a necessity for a show that values ​​grittiness and budgets for few takes. She auditioned remotely; Storer was bowled over. “She felt very human,” he said.

Natalie has a single scene in the pilot, a moment where she talks to Carmy about their older brother, Mikey, who committed suicide. Although short, it communicates the love and trauma between the siblings. She and White didn’t discuss the scene before shooting it — or before reshooting it months later. But White remembers feeling an immediate kinship.

“No matter what our imaginations had done, we were telling ourselves the same story,” White said in a telephone interview. He described the scenes between Carmy and Natalie as a relief from the chaos in the kitchen. Other cast members felt the same way.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays cousin Richie, said Elliott is “in some ways the straight man — practically, surrounded by this wildly erratic extended family.” If he hadn’t known better, he never would have guessed that Elliott had spent time on “SNL.”

“Not because she’s not funny, just because she’s grounded,” he said. “She’s not a showboat. She really has so much integrity and accuracy.”

In the first season, Natalie is locked out of the restaurant, but in season 2 she comes in, first as a project manager during a major renovation and then as general manager. That wasn’t necessarily what Storer and Joanna Calo, the two showrunners, had planned. But Elliott’s performance convinced them to bring her in.

“I was like, oh, thank you,” Elliott said when he finally entered the kitchen. “I had so much FOMO.”

While season 2 was being written, Elliott discovered she was pregnant with her second child. (Her husband is the screenwriter Bill Kennedy.) She told Storer and Calo, and they decided to write a pregnancy for Natalie, too.

Still, Elliott’s pregnancy was obvious. She was energetic while Natalie was exhausted. And in a comforting scene in which Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney makes Natalie an omelet, Elliott needed a spit bucket; the pregnancy had given her an aversion to eggs. By the time filming began on Season 3, which explores the idea of ​​inheritance – genetic and otherwise – she had already given birth. She had to wear a prosthetic abdomen and simulate heartburn.

Natalie is the most nuanced character Elliott has ever played. Her scenes have subtext, a professional first. “My career has been all text,” she said. “I’ve done things where I explain exactly how I feel, like so many times.”

Filming Season 3 while simultaneously caring for a baby and a toddler hasn’t made Elliott’s schedule any easier. (Her mother accompanies her to Chicago, as does a nanny.) But it has made her a more centered, focused actor. Her time on set, she said, is “adult time.” Then she goes home, and childhood begins.

“I’m so lucky to have these beautiful, wonderful children,” she said. “I don’t go home and have a bottle of wine and obsess over that one weird shot, like I did in my 20s.”

If “The Bear” has made Elliott a better actor, it hasn’t made her a better cook, although the food on the show, prepared by Storer’s sister, Courtney Storer, is apparently excellent. (The piccata Natalie makes in the show’s second episode? Elliott wrapped it in a plastic bag and ate it on the bus on the way home.)

“I would love to cook,” Elliott said. “But I barely shower every day. It’s all Air Fryer and Target orders.”