Abby Elliott follows a virgin recipe in ‘The Bear’

Abby Elliott knows her approach to comedy. A veteran of the Groundlings and the Upright Voters Brigade, she joined “Saturday Night Live” at age 21 and has since made her mark in laugh-out-loud shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Odd Mom Out.” Left. So in the spring of 2021, when FX approached her about a few pilots for a period comedy, she was there.

“I kind of got into it like, oh, should I chime in?” Elliot said. “Or can I do a little catchphrase? “This could be fun.”

That show was “The Bear,” which returns for its third season Thursday on Hulu. Set primarily in the busy kitchen of a Chicago restaurant, it stars Jeremy Allen White as a tormented chef. Elliot seems to be his long-suffering sister. “The Bear” is a comedy only in the classical sense, in that it emphasizes human weaknesses and does not lead to emergency. (Isn’t workplace panic, cash crunch and suicidal tendencies an emergency? Ask that of the Emmys voters, who gave it the best comedy award in January.) In another way it’s dramatic, frantic, extremely tense.

“I didn’t really understand how big the stakes would be,” he said.

Because of its importance, Eliot considers “The Bear” to be a comedy. “It’s just like real life,” she said. “Many people find comedy in darkness and tension. “In that way it is very relevant.” But a funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen: “The Bear” made Elliott a dramatic actress. She doesn’t tone anymore.

I met 37-year-old Elliot at a Higher West Side café one summer morning, when the sun was eager for a slow burn, about a year before the Season 3 premiere. Even though she lives in Los Angeles and works in Chicago, she came to the East Coast for a mass wedding ceremony and was playing in the city for a few days afterward.

At breakfast, despite the heat, she looked cleanly dressed and refreshed (she admitted that she wore a thick coat of self-tanner). She has obese gaze, a sarcastic, closed-mouth smile and a capacity for rapid intimacy, especially when describing how she shared breast milk with the 2024 Blonde Globes backstage in the same way postpartum Sarah Snook Spent pumping.

If there could be an allele for laughter, Elliot has it. His father is Chris Elliott, an established performer who most recently appeared on “Schitt’s Creek” and spent a season on “SNL.” His father is Bob Elliott, part of the Greatest Generation comedy duo Bob and Ray. Which additionally created an “SNL” look. (Abby’s mother, Paula Neidert Elliott, is David Letterman’s former talent coordinator.)

Elliot doesn’t really feel like he was driven to efficiency. Her father, whom she idolized, showed her that showbiz was beyond imagination, even interesting. However he never let her attend his appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman” and encouraged her to pursue university.

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

She left school after one semester and relocated to Los Angeles, living with relatives and taking improv classes. He would be invited to “SNL” within the next few years. The recognition of popularity, a softer style of nepotism, probably got him in the door at 30 Rock, but it was a gift for riotous celebrity impressions (Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep) that kept him there.

He took four years off the screen and worked steadily over the course of the next decade, though usually in a variety of odd supporting roles that rarely pinged the culture radar. He entertained her.

“I was in this safe zone of like, OK, OK, this is just what I do,” she said. “It’s like, OK, I won’t be able to get these roles or play dramatic roles.”

Christopher Storer, author of “The Bear”, took a different approach when he was looking for an actress to play the game for a sweet, no-nonsense sister. He had never worked with Elliott before, but he remembered him from “SNL” – especially his impressions.

“There was something very real there,” he said. “You could feel the affection for the people she was impersonating.”

He sought out that affection for Natalie Barzato, nicknamed Sugar, the used sister of White’s Carmi and apparently a member in his crowd who once went to treatment. And Storer was skeptical that Elliott, an educated improv comedian, was adept at working out, in a very short time, a performance that valued rawness and took little of the budget. She auditioned remotely; Storer used to get beaten up. “She felt very human,” he said.

Natalie has her only scene in the pilot, a period in which she talks to Carmy about her used brother Mickey, who has died by suicide. Despite that moment, it conveys affection and shock between the siblings. She and White did not talk about it before shooting the scene or reshooting it in the coming months. White, however, remembers a feeling of palpable kinship.

“Whatever our imaginations did, we were telling ourselves the same story,” White said in a telephone interview. He described the scenes between Carmi and Natalie as a respite from the kitchen chaos. Alternative concrete contributors felt similarly.

Ebon Moss-Barrach, who plays Cousin Richie, said that Elliot is “in many ways the straight man – practical, surrounded by this wildly irregular extended family.” If she didn’t know better, she never would have guessed Elliott had made a living on “SNL.”

“Not because she’s not funny, but just because she’s down to earth,” he said. “He’s no showboat. “He really has a lot of integrity and toughness.”

In the first season, Natalie is kicked out of the restaurant, but in Season 2 she comes in, first as a mission supervisor for a gut renovation and then moving up to general supervisor. This was not necessarily what Storer and Joanna Callow, the two showrunners, had planned. However Elliot’s efficiency convinced them to bring him in.

“I said, ‘Oh, thanks,'” Elliott said as he finally entered the kitchen. “I had a lot of FOMO.”

As season 2 was being written, Elliot learned that she was pregnant with their second child. (Her husband is screenwriter Bill Kennedy.) She told Storer and Callow, and they decided to write the pregnancy in for Natalie as well.

However, Elliot’s pregnancy was different. She lived a week full of life, leaving Natalie exhausted. And in a consoling scene in which Ayo Adebiri’s Sydney makes Natalie an omelette, Elliot needed a bucket of spit – having developed an egg aversion to it while pregnant. Filming began on Season 3 of Life, which explores the speculation about the inheritance – genetic and individual – she had already begun. He needed an artificial stomach and simulated heartburn.

Natalie is essentially the most nuanced character Elliott has ever played. Her scenes contain subtext, attested to previously. “My career has been entirely based on text,” he said. “I’ve done many things where I can clearly communicate how I’m feeling.”

Shooting weeks of Season 3 as well as taking care of a baby and a toddler doesn’t make Elliot’s agenda any easier. (His mother travels with him to Chicago, as does a sophomore.) But it’s made him a more grounded, more focused actor. Her life is “adult time,” she said, curiously. The closest she gets is going home and child life begins.

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

If “The Bear” has made Elliott a better actor, it hasn’t made him a better cook, although the food on the show, prepared by Storer’s sister Courtney Storer, tastes best. (In the second episode of the show, Natalie makes piccata? Elliot wraps it in a plastic bag and eats it in the van on the way home.)

“I would love to cook,” Elliot said. “But I am barely able to take a bath every day. These are all air fryers and Target orders.