Jamie Lee Curtis manifested her role on The Bear. She remembers watching the show’s first episode—specifically a scene between Carmen “Carmy” and Natalie, when the chef doesn’t have enough money for his restaurant’s food supply, so his sister brings him his jacket to sell. Before she leaves, she asks him a question. “Have you called mom?” He hasn’t. “You should,” she tells him. At that moment, sitting at home inside what she calls her “witness protection cabin,” Curtis began envisioning what their mother might be like. “Oh, I think I’m going to be her,” she thought.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]It didn’t take long. In “Fishes,” the sixth episode of the second season, she debuted as Donna Berzatto, embodying Carmy and Natalie’s mother whose alcoholism and mania has turned her home—and large family gatherings—into a mental trauma zone. Though very different from her character, Curtis could relate to Donna’s substance abuse issues and mothering challenges, and leaned into her most toxic traits. By the end of the electric and overwhelming episode, for which Curtis won an Emmy, Donna has drunkenly left the Christmas dinner table and crashed a car into her house, effectively fracturing her relationship with her son.
But in Season 4, Donna gets a chance to make amends. About five years after the disastrous holiday, she spends the majority of the ninth episode, “Tonnato,” sharing her regrets with Carmy inside her home. While looking at old family photos together, Donna admits she’s been sober a year and then reads an apology letter, acknowledging the pain she’s caused and explaining the reasons for her poor choices. Carmy eventually reciprocates, sharing his guilt for leaving the family and expressing his love for her. It’s a powerful, emotional exchange that crystallizes the season’s redemptive, healing themes. Then, as an act of reconciliation, Carmy prepares for his mother a chicken dinner that he learned to make while training as a chef at The French Laundry.
Here, Curtis unpacks that emotionally charged sequence as she talks about the experience of playing Donna, and how her own life informed parts of the character.
I’ll be honest, I get anxiety every time your character appears on the show—and I think it’s mostly because we’ve only really seen you through Carmy’s perspective.
What was genius from the beginning was you don’t meet Donna for 16 episodes. The anxiety is built up through hearing about her from other people and the amount of anxiety Carmen carries.
She’s designed to create instability. What I found beautiful is that in episode 10 of Season 2, when they’re opening the restaurant and Donna’s out front chain smoking—I said to [creator Chris Storer], “I think [Donna] is sober four months. She has enough self knowledge now to know that she has an effect on people, particularly when she’s drinking. And so the pacing in front of the restaurant is the “Do I? Don’t I?” push and pull of addiction, which, when you’re newly sober, you’re very fragile.
You show up in a couple episodes this season, specifically for Episode 9’s conversation with Carmen. How does it feel for you to parachute in and out of Donna’s headspace every year?
We shot Season 3 and 4 simultaneously. So the truth is, I did the scene with Sugar in the hospital, which was an entire episode. And two days later, I did my part at the wedding. And then the next day, my scene with Jeremy at the house. So it was a lot of Donna, which was not dissimilar to the Christmas episode where I came in for like a three-day bombardment and then was gone.
I’ve been an actress since I was 19. I’ve done a lot of different work. Some of it good, some of it great, some of it awful—much of it awful. Everybody works differently. I also didn’t know how Chris worked before we met on the Christmas episode. Our entire relationship was a text relationship where he said, “So excited you’re coming!” And I said, “How do you want her hair to look?” And he sent me a picture of Monica Vitti. And then I said, “What about her nails?” And he sent me a picture of the desperate housewives of New York and that was the entirety of the background that I got from him before I walked in the kitchen the day we shot “Fishes.” I got a sense that he understood that I was going to show up fully-loaded ready to shoot. That gave me a lot of confidence and a lot of freedom because I knew, having seen the level of intensity, what the show was like.
What was your initial impression when you read this scene between Donna and Carmy, and how did you want to approach it?
People forget that she hasn’t seen Carmen since Christmas five years earlier. It’s not like there’s a chyron that’s under the screen that reminds the audience at the wedding. And obviously she has seen the rest of the family. She attended the birth of her granddaughter. She goes to family birthdays. She sees Lee. She sees Jimmy. So there’s an indication that she is a part of this interesting melting pot family, but she hasn’t seen Carmen. So that moment when she sees him at the wedding—and the way all his friends come around him and are like, “Hey, they need you in the kitchen right now.” Donna knows what’s going on. She’s very smart so she understands that this is a big moment for both of them. And then she has that lovely scene with Sydney and then she gets the f-ck out, because she understands. In recovery, there’s a phrase, “We suit up and show up.” So Donna is suiting up and showing up. And of course who does she run into? Michelle.
And Michelle says, “Are you good?” And we all know that question is Donna’s fire starter.
Right. That is the fire starter, one of those clicking flame things that we all have in our houses to light matches. It’s that click. And her response, which is, “I’m good.” And then get the f-ck out. I’m not going to play Michelle. I’m going to go. And so we’ve teed it up beautifully.
Yep.
I’m sober. I’ve been sober a long time. I talk to a lot of sober people. Part of being sober is acknowledging the past. There is a process within being a sober alcoholic or sober drug addict that in order to move freely into the future, you have to acknowledge the past. I don’t think Donna wanted to acknowledge it with him for a long time. I think she’s been working on that for the better part of a year. She’s had that little piece of paper in her desk drawer, and when he comes over, I think the intention was to see him and keep it light and polite—another phrase we use in recovery. And I think that was her plan until she started going through the pictures and saw Mikey.
Yeah, I wondering if you wrote that letter yourself.
It was from the script, but of course I did!
Was that a cathartic experience—thinking about what that symbolizes generally for a mother to a son, but then also specifically for Donna to Carmy?
Very much cathartic. We both knew what we’re doing. The script is beautiful. I learned that having a kid who you don’t know how to help is one of the most powerless experiences as a parent. I personally have a child with special needs. I have a child who has a learning difference. And the powerlessness you feel when you can’t actually help them—you can find people who can help them, but you can’t. So the part of that scene that gets me every time is when she talks about Mike. Because clearly Mike had that problem since he was a little boy. And being a parent and not being able to help your kid and not knowing what to do to help them—and finding that alcohol just made it all more palatable and easy—to play a woman who has struggled with that, and then to have the beautiful writing that articulates that exact powerlessness and turmoil, and resulting shame and self-hatred, and then the addiction on top of it—I just thought it was a beautifully constructed.
The line that hits me the hardest throughout your interplay is when you tell Carmy, “I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, and I did that.” Was there a line or a moment in this conversation that impacted you the most?
Oh yeah—what I just said about Mike. I did that as a statement of fact. I have to live with that. She also says it to Sugar in the hospital when Sugar says, “You scared me and I don’t want my baby to feel scared.” I said, “I scared you?” Hearing that you have that effect on a human being’s life is powerful. And so I can totally accept that we’re operating as strangers in this family. That is when she really is showing the pain and suffering of her own childhood, her marriage, her being a mother to three. That is when Carmen really softens and says, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t there for you.” What does Leonard Cohen say? “There has to be cracks because that’s where the light comes in.” That’s the moment when you understand that Carmen is now understanding the multitude of Donna and what she has struggled with.
What was it like working with Jeremy that day?
I feel very motherly toward all three of these kids. I’ve stayed a little in contact with them in the most cursory way. I’m not pretending we’re buddies, but I also reach out occasionally. So he and I have that. Again, not with any supposition that it’s more than it is. He’s just a beautiful performer. We use the term scene partner a lot in actor talk, but he’s a scene partner. We don’t rehearse it. We don’t talk about it. We stay away from each other until it begins, and then it begins. And he has beautiful eyes, and they are expressive and soulful and sorrowful and very alive at times and very emotional at times. And I think you see all of that in this whole season, but in that scene in particular. And then the coup de grace, which is him cooking for her.
I really love that he goes back to his time at French Laundry where he learned to make roast chicken. Do you feel like a meal is one of the kindest gifts you can give somebody?
For sure. I’m not a foodie. I was raised by a very skinny woman. Food was not a friend in a generation of women in her industry who starved themselves under the tutelage of the studio system. My mother was incredibly beautiful and she held it all the way through her life. While many of her other friends succumbed to middle age, she starved it away. So I was raised around cereal and a grilled cheese sandwich, which would be like gold for me. But apparently I make really good penne with butter, garlic salt and a little parmesan cheese and my elder daughter, Annie, was talking with her friends about memories in their high school years of having me make that penne. Hearing that that is a memory for my daughter is something comforting.
I’m kind of embarrassed by it because it’s not a French Laundry chicken. And yet the act of making it and the act of receiving it as something special is very moving to me. Of course Carmy is going to truss and baste and bake and broil a beautiful chicken for his mother. It’s a wordless moment and, needless to say, very moving. It’s very clear that there’s a path forward through that act that is him basically saying, “I’m sorry that I didn’t kind of meet you, that I stayed away from you and that I didn’t face this.” It’s pretty powerful to end a series on a full-circle moment.
He also tells you not to wash chicken in the sink.
Yeah, because, of course! What he’s saying is that the salmonella goes all over the place. You think it’s just going down the drain, but in fact, you’re polluting your sink.
This season felt very redemptive and healing in a lot of ways. What it was like to have a moment of reconciliation with Donna, as opposed to playing such a vicious antagonist?
I’m the child of alcoholics. I’m a sober drug addict and alcoholic. I have lost so many friends to alcoholism and drug addiction. My baby brother died at 21 of an accidental heroin overdose. We’re also living in a world that doesn’t feel redemptive. When you talk about an antagonist, it feels like there are antagonists running the world right now. So from a spiritual place, if we’re not healing, we’re dying. And I didn’t know if Donna was going to heal or get a chance to. I saw it in Season 3, but as I said to you, I already knew that Season 4 was coming. I don’t know the origin stories necessarily, but if we’re not healing, what are we doing? And so I’m beyond grateful that Chris gave everybody a moment of grace—every single person’s story!
The end of Season 3, Carmen says that in his vision for the restaurant, “to make it good, you have to filter out the bad.” And I think this whole season was in line with that mission statement.
It’s just gorgeous work. The grace note at the end—you know those sandwich shops are going to be successful. We know what the numbers are going to be. They’re going to blow the place up. But Carmen also knows he has to step away from this and let these people do it. And the fact that that’s the gift that he’s giving everybody, and that he’ll now go figure out who Carmen is.
And he’ll be able to do it with a mother in his life now.
Yeah, and Donna is sober now. Can Donna stay sober? I hope so. I’ve stayed sober. What was wack to me—the same day that this season of the show dropped, I woke up in the morning and a friend of mine in Los Angeles sent me a picture of a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. It’s the Foundation for a Better Life, a program they run called “Pass It On.” Inspirational people and ideas. And there’s a billboard with my picture that says, “My Bravest Thing? Getting Sober. Recovery. Pass it On.” And for Jamie and Donna, who had different stories but the same disease, to have that happen simultaneously was kind of another grace note.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity
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