Steven Prusakowski
In the chaotic world of The Bear, usually the chaos takes place in the restaurant kitchen. For Season 3’s “Ice Chips,” Abby Elliott’s Natalie Berzatto, aka “Sugar,” carries that chaos well beyond the walls of The Bear straight to the walls of a delivery room as she goes into labor with no one around to help. Alone and terrified, Sugar turns to the last person she’d choose—her mother, Donna, played by Jamie Lee Curtis.
Elliott’s preparation for the episode was deeply personal. “When I got the scripts, I was just so pleasantly surprised that I was going to have a labor episode. When I was actually in labor with my son, I recorded my contractions so I could go back and watch them. But I was so surprised that it was going to be about her mother – about her and her mom. It wasn’t a labor birthing episode focused on let’s get to the hospital. It was about the connection and the relationship between these two women,” shared Elliott.
Sugar, who is often a pillar of strength in the Berzatto family has her vulnerability, first while having to driver herself to the hospital while in labor, then forced to depend on the woman who shaped her anxieties. The biggest insecurities come when Sugar is left alone to face her own fears. “With Sugar, she used the restaurant as this outlet for her anxiety of like, this is what I’m going to focus on and get my mind off of this other thing that I don’t really want to deal with, which is my own trauma with my mother and my family,” explained Elliott. “What is it going to look like for me to be a mom and to carry that baggage and how do I not fuck it up? I just feel like I’m going to fuck it up.”
The episode is essentially a two woman show, that had Elliott working intimately with Curtis, but also the full The Bear team. Her ability to be vulnerable as an actress was a cornerstone of Elliott’s performance. The trust enabled a fluid, authentic portrayal of Sugar and Donna’s turbulent bond. “I don’t know that I would have felt the same doing that season one as I did season three with just, knowing our crew, knowing Jamie at this point, having full trust in Chris (Storer) and Joanna (Calo) and feeling as comfortable as I was in that moment to have these really small reactions. Knowing the camera guys, knowing that, they would catch it and trusting that process and really Jamie – she’s just so unbelievable. I think we ran it through once before and then jumped right into it,” Elliott recalls. Curtis’s reliability allowed Elliott to take risks, letting subtle reactions and improvised moments shine.
While “Ice Chips” doesn’t resolve Sugar and Donna’s issues but offers fleeting connection amid the chaos. Sugar’s reliance on Donna is as heartbreaking as it is hopeful. Curtis’s Donna, as flawed as she is desperate to be needed, in a moment where Elliott’s Sugar is in desperate need of someone to rely on. Together, they craft an episode that’s less about birth and more about confronting the past, a redemption of a mother-daughter bond that was fractured to say the very least.
Elliott’s work is her best of not only the season but the series. She navigates Sugar’s fears with an all-in performance. What she delivers is full of raw emotion. pulling out all stops to provide a gut-wrenching portrayal of facing your trauma, reaching out for help, and finding inner resiliency.
The episode, as Elliott describes it, was about “these two women who at that moment really need something from each other.” When all is said and done, they and the viewers are better for it.
Watch the full interview with Elliott below and see all of Jamie Lee and her work on The Bear, now streaming on Hulu. Season four will be premieres on June 25th.
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