James' World 2

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I have been with Ayo Edebiri for 15 minutes, tops, and already I’m getting her Pacino.

“What have I been listening to? I’ve been listening to, honestly, the Sonny Boy audiobook,” she tells me, unprompted, after we’ve ducked into her compact car. “You’re literally like, Wait, how is this a book? The way he delivers lines? It’s really shocking. Every actor should listen to that book. He goes—my impression of him is if RFK was raised in the Trump household. It’s like: ‘I had no idea! My mutha…gave me away…for six months…because my fatha’ ”—she takes on here the affect of a very sad clown—“ ‘wasawayinthewar.’ I’m actually going to pull it up.”

The plan for our morning is almost satirically LA: After meeting at 8 a.m. at a matcha place in Highland Park, she’s to drive us to a hiking trail in Angeles National Forest. (She’s an early riser, something that she attributes, in part, to being a former New Yorker: “No matter how early you get up in New York, there’s always somebody who’s either earlier or their day hasn’t finished. But in LA, it’s office hours.”) Dressed in a baseball tee emblazoned with the NBC logo, track pants, a printed headscarf—not unlike the ones she wears as Sydney Adamu, the hyper-competent, superdriven, rather anxious young sous-chef on The Bear, in fact—and Prada sunglasses, she certainly looks the part of a 20-something somebody in the industry, taking the air before she tootles down to Studio City for “meetings,” or whatever actors do. (In reality, Edebiri is due on Hollywood Boulevard later that day for an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.)

She’s been out here for five or six years—moving from Brooklyn, where she put down roots after attending NYU, when she began writing for television. But it took quite some time for Los Angeles to feel like home. “I don’t really think I started to enjoy living here until last year,” Edebiri says, swirling her iced latte. “I liked it, but I don’t think it really meant anything to me. And I missed a lot of my friends on the East Coast.”

What changed things was hanging out with people like Lionel Boyce, one of her costars on The Bear, and his former Odd Future bandmates Tyler, the Creator, and Travis Bennett—native Angelenos all—who helped her find her footing in the city’s sprawl. (Asked what they like to do when they see each other, Tyler makes his and Edebiri’s milieu sound more like suburban teenagers than very famous adults. “We loiter,” he says. “We’ll sit in the parking lot. We’ll go to someone’s house and play Uno. We’ll eat. It’s just the most normal shit you could think of.”)The strangeness of life in LA this year has also done its part to affirm her sense of community: In January, Edebiri was one of the hundreds of thousands evacuated during the wildfires (her home was ultimately unharmed, but she has friends and colleagues who weren’t so lucky), and at the time of our first interview, downtown LA had recently been under curfew due to the anti-ICE and “No Kings” protests of the days prior.

Edebiri had been out marching over the weekend; the sign she carried—now in her car’s backseat next to Gromit, her dozing Chihuahua mix—reads “Don’t tread on us,” a riff on the Gadsden flag from the Revolutionary War. (Very Boston-native of her, really.)

“It was actually amazing,” she says. “We’re in such a weird empathy drought, which it’s hard not to be—you want to save your own skin. But it’s like, If we’re supposed to be evolved people, we extend care to each other.” And then, in the very same breath: “Do you want sunscreen?”

Raised in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Edebiri is the only child of a Nigerian father and a strictly Pentecostal Barbadian mother. She’s said there was a time when her greatest aspiration was to be a pastor’s wife, but then she got into improv and theater at her public school and started recording episodes of 30 Rock and Conan at home. In college, Edebiri veered from majoring in education to studying dramatic writing at Tisch, meeting, along the way, friends and collaborators like Rachel Sennott, her costar in the 2023 film Bottoms (directed by Emma Seligman, another NYU alum); and Tyler Mitchell, who has now photographed her for this magazine twice. (“We met at a Halloween party,” Edebiri recalls of Mitchell. “I was dressed as Solange on the cover of A Seat at the Table, and he was dressed as Young Frankenstein. And we looked at each other and we said, ‘We are friends.’ ”)

Well-placed writing- and production-assistant jobs, paired with a growing profile in New York’s stand-up comedy scene, led eventually to Edebiri’s first writing credits—on series like the short-lived NBC sitcom Sunnyside, Apple TV+’s Dickinson, Netflix’s Big Mouth, and FX’s What We Do in the Shadows—as well as some supporting and voice-acting roles. But it was appearing on The Bear, which premiered in 2022, that made Edebiri suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, a proper star.

Critics have jabbed at The Bear for competing for awards as a comedy series, when really it walks and talks like a lightly comic drama. Whatever it is, an upshot of its tonal ambiguity has been getting to see someone as obviously, instinctively funny as Edebiri play in every kind of key: delivering punch lines and making wry asides, sure, but anchoring surreal dream sequences and executing sobbing monologues too. “She’s very smart but also silly,” says the actor, writer, and director Will Sharpe, with whom Edebiri will soon star in the Apple TV+ show Prodigies. “She has the ability to be a serious, sophisticated, dramatic actor, but also has funny bones.”

The performance as Sydney has won Edebiri an Emmy, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Critics’ Choice Award, among other prizes. So, too, did The Bear—and the deft work of Danielle Goldberg, Edebiri’s stylist and good friend, on all those important red carpets—launch her into the fashion firmament: Suddenly, Edebiri was flitting freely between high-femme silhouettes and looks drawn from menswear, whether in a red satin column from Prada for the 2024 Golden Globes or a floor-length shirtdress and leather tailcoat from Ferragamo for May’s Met Gala. And then, this fall, in a true cool-girl coup, she was named a brand ambassador for Matthieu Blazy’s new Chanel.

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Edebiri wears a Chanel top, necklace, and earring. Fashion Editor: Alex Harrington.Photographed by Tyler Mitchell. Vogue, November 2025.

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