Ayo Edebiri Is Her Own Canvas

Ayo Edebiri is puttering around her apartment, finishing up her morning skincare routine before the day ahead. She’s currently in rehearsals for the Broadway revival of Proof, the 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning play that will open for previews in a matter of days.

“We’re blowing everything up,” Edebiri says cheerily over Zoom. The people’s princess, who floated into stardom on the hit show The Bear in 2022, has since become a reigning screen star and a generational style icon as Chanel brand ambassador. Now, Edebiri is on her phone, carrying me around with her as she makes a cup of coffee, then cozily settles down. At this stage of the rehearsal process, she says, the precious time they have left is spent dissecting each element of the performance. “I'm mixing metaphors like crazy, but now that we have all the paint on our palette, what are the brushes that we want to paint with?” Edebiri asks. “How do we want to color it?”

Proof, written by David Auburn and directed by Thomas Kail (Hamilton), revolves around Catherine (Edebiri), the 25-year-old daughter of a troubled mathematics genius, Robert, played by Don Cheadle.

The play is set in Chicago, at the family home, as Catherine wheels between taking care of her father, navigating her complicated relationship with her affluent, uptight sister, Claire (Kara Young) and her father’s hot nerd protegee, Hal (Jin Ha). Catherine is as relaxed as a freshly sharpened razor blade, armed with bone dry wit and the ability to say precisely what’s on her mind, at all times. She can be cutting, but she’s also a figure of great pathos, a girl trembling through a very delicate stage in her life. She’s the muscle of every scene, carrying the award-winning story through to its end.

When Edebiri at last takes the stage, it will mark the arrival of her Broadway debut (a distinction she shares with Cheadle, making his Broadway debut alongside her.) Though this will be her first major theater role, Edebiri is no stranger to playing characters on the edge of a nervous breakdown. In The Bear, she plays Syd, a smart chef who knows how to weave her way around a caustic, chaotic kitchen. In films like After the Hunt, helmed by Luca Guadagnino, Edebiri tapped into her dramatic side, playing a talk-y philosophy student who accuses a professor of sexual misconduct. It’s all in her wheelhouse, and she’s finally ready to show it.

Read PAPER's entire conversation with Ayo Edebiri below. This interview has been edited.

Previews begin in a few days. How are you feeling about it all starting?

It’s very surreal. I don't think I'm ever good at being able to articulate that sort of thing while it's still happening. I will know how I feel in a year's time. We were in the rehearsal space for three weeks. It’s all very exciting and terrifying and cool in equal measure.

The whole rehearsal process was three weeks?

Yeah, pretty much.

That feels–

It’s not a lot of time! [Laughs] But it's the time we're given. I think we've done good and very focused work, which has been exciting. With TV, you’re not afforded any rehearsal. It definitely feels like more time than I'm used to. We did a lot of table work. Talking about the play, the things it brought up for us, and the language. Don and I had a day of press where we kept saying the show is deceptively simple, but then we were like, Wait. It's deceptively complicated. It seems simple. The more we kept going over the language, the intentionality was so apparent and beautiful.

And David Auburn, the playwright, was in the room with us, which has been really cool. A lot of great plays are by people who are no longer with us. The estates tell you what you can do and can't do. But David’s with us. And this play wasn't written for a Black family, but it is one now and it's opened up some really cool conversations. Even though it's a play that has won Tonys and the Pulitzer, it's still a living, breathing document to David. He still is curious about it and has questions.

And we’re still tinkering, which is cool. Like yesterday I got line changes. He'll change a word from “amazing” to “astonishing” or from “nothing” to “nothing at all.”

I want to take a step back and talk about your theater background. You studied dramatic writing in undergrad at NYU. Did you go to school with the intention of being a playwright, or was it something that you fell in love with at school?

I always loved theater. My parents are not artistic in the least—I don't think they'd be offended if I said that—but they really valued the arts. They're both immigrants. The legacy of Black art in this country was vital to their comfort and safety, so they made sure it was a priority in my life. As young as I could remember, if there was a live performance, or community theater, or holiday concerts at the first AME church in Boston, we would be there. If my mom had a weekend off, we would take the bus to New York and try to rush Broadway shows.

The friendships I started making in college were with people who also watched YouTube videos of their favorite Tony performances late in their bedrooms alone and had nobody else to talk to about it. Once I went to college, I thought I was going to be a teacher and maybe just do improv at night or something and have creative friends. That was the most that I had imagined for myself. And it wasn't until moving to New York, and especially once I started interning at UCB where I was like, oh, there's Black women who do this, who are doing theater all over the city.

Being in the city made me feel free to change my major to writing. My two concentrations were playwriting and TV writing. That's what I thought I was going to do until life said otherwise.

What Tony performances were you watching on YouTube?

I just saw Ragtime, so Audra [McDonald, performing in 1998] is a seminal text for me. Also, one of my favorites ever is the combo of Michael Jeter’s Grand Hotel performance and then Tony acceptance speech [in 1990]. That one always makes me sob because he was such a beautiful human being. And you get to see young Jane Krakowski.

This one is sometimes hard to find, but it’s actually Julie Andrews turning down her Tony in ‘96 for Victor/Victoria. Everybody was snubbed except for her, so she rejected the nomination [during curtain call]. It was baller. Baller. Also Gavin Creel! The Hair revival with Caissie Levy. They go in the audience.

You really know ball.

Listen, I get out to the court every now and again. I play a game of pickup. Spring Awakening…

Oh my gosh.

That's very important to people around our age.

I developed the cognizance that theater could be a little bit different.

A little bit sexy!

What kind of plays were you writing when you were in college? Did you stage anything?

Yeah, at the PIT Loft. Things that we don't have evidence for anymore, and that's fine. [Laughs] I was actually talking about this with Jeremy O. Harris, because when I was coming up in school, Hamilton had exploded. But also what was going on was Will Arbery and Brandon Jacob Jenkins and Clare Barron and Annie Baker and Aleshea Harris. They were exploding their subconscious guts onto the page and it felt very cool and daring and scary and beautiful. I was probably trying to emulate that sort of thing.

Would you be interested in writing another play in the future?

To be honest, not particularly. I really love theater, [but] I love performing it.

Now you're about to make your Broadway debut. I've read Proof and watched a taping of the Mary Louise Parker run—

Did you go to Lincoln Center?

Yeah!

Wow. I've never seen it. I think I'll watch it when I'm done. I've always wanted to see it. I love me some Mary Louise. And I love seeing shows at Lincoln Center at the library because that's such a fun, amazing resource. It's a miracle that that exists. But I’ve seen the movie [starring Gwyneth Paltrow], in high school.

Speaking of high school, I know you're really passionate about New York high schoolers and young people in general being able to see Proof. Can you talk about how you guys are making it accessible?

Yeah! It’s something I kept talking about and really wanted. Almost two years ago, I was filming something in London and I had seen a production of The Effect starring Taylor Russell and Paapa [Essiedu].

So good.

Taylor was telling me she and Paapa had gotten the most amount of student tickets that have been sold at the National [Theatre, in London]. Obviously their tickets can be a lot more affordable than ours because, even though it's declining, there's still much more significant structural support from the government in terms of giving people access to the arts. But they also were doing a lot of student initiatives and marketing and letting them know, “This is available for you.”

I was also thinking about being able to rush shows for actually affordable prices. You look at certain rush tickets and you're like, $80?! That's a lot! Times are tough for literally everybody, but I was like, why not try? There's a thing on Broadway where there are vanity producers that sign up and don't attach money, but they attach a name. I was like, We’ve got to give money. I’m not Iron Man, but Don and I are coming from a space where we make more money doing TV and film, so we also gave and created this pot [for] student ticket initiatives like the TDF graduate gift program. All you have to be is a New York City public high school senior. You get to pay $22 for a ticket. We also have a student rush in addition to that, so if you're a high school or college student and you have a valid student ID, it's a $45 ticket. And hey, by God's grace if we keep getting more money, it could be even cheaper. But it's $45, which I think is not bad. And the digital lottery, for anybody, is $49.

That is actually accessible.

I'm pretty happy about it. We want people to see the show who might not have interacted with the play. Also, my hope is that this sort of thing encourages other film and TV colleagues when they come through to also make this thing as accessible as possible.

I want to dig back into your character, Catherine. You're joining this class of actresses, like Mary Louise Parker and Gwyneth Paltrow, who have also played her. Now you're going to be doing it in your own way. What spoke to you about her?

She feels all the corners of her heart. She feels very fully. Not necessarily very freely. Very fully. That inhibition really moved me. And she's just—there's a word I'm trying not to say, but whatever, I'll say it: messiness. The messiness of this moment in her life really excited me and scared me.

Do you feel like “messy” is overused?

Yeah, somewhat. The “complicated female character.” We're all messy and complicated, so it feels a bit simplistic.

This play was originally written for white characters and played by an all white cast. Now Catherine's family is played by all Black actors. Hal is played by Jin Ha, an Asian actor. Can you talk about some of the adjustments that have been made by David? The cop scene, for example. [Catherine gets in an argument with her sister Claire after it’s revealed she called 911 to report a fake robbery at her home, then ended up physically fighting the cops.]

The cop scene is one we’re still honestly tinkering with. We talked about it, and how much has changed with the proliferation of videos and evidence; things we know in mass culture about the police and how polarized that’s made all of us. And now, [in Proof] it’s a Black family, it's the '90s in Chicago, post-Rodney King. There's a different feeling and there's maybe added layers to the concern that Claire might have. If she were to be more concerned with presentation or something, that keys us in to who Claire is in a different way. We've been playing with all sides of that and how it fits into the tapestry of this whole thing. I don't necessarily have the answer, but those are the things that we've been talking about.

You're going to be on Broadway at the same time as Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal, your costars in The Bear, who are doing Dog Day Afternoon. Have you seen them on stage yet?

I’ve seen a lot of pals, yeah! Tessa [Thompson] too.

Oh yeah, also making her Broadway debut.

Yes. Crazy, crazy. It's cool. I saw Dog Day the other night with Tessa actually because her and Jon worked together [in the recent Netflix series His and Hers]. We made a coworker trip. We had so much fun. Then we all went backstage and hung out and we're all like, Wow. We're really doing this.

That's amazing to be doing it at the same time.

Yeah. You have to indicate that my eyes were sort of bug-eyed and terrified while I was saying that, but that is how it felt. Like, oh my God. We're all kind of wonderfully insane maybe.

Next season is the last season of The Bear. How was that final day on set?

I really won't know how I feel until next year around this time, because that's usually when I'm in Chicago. So I think partly that will be weird. But also, I’m literally down the street from Ebon. I saw Lionel [Boyce, another costar] the other night because the Project Hail Mary premiered in New York, and I made sure to go. Jeremy [Allen White] is always in New York. All these people are still actively in my life. Liza [Colon-Zayas] is going to come see the show. It weirdly feels like this family that I always was supposed to have. They're now in my life.

Are you and Lionel still also working on a project together?

Yeah. I'm always writing. Always tinkering. That’s my way.

Have you been riding the subway since you've been back?

Yes, I have.

You’re just incognito.

I don’t want people coming up to me! I like riding it. I like having my headphones on, listening to depressing podcasts, reading my books. I miss the MetroCard though.

Say that.

I'll say that. My closing statement: I miss the MetroCard!

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