The Bear Season 2 Guest Stars: All The Surprise Cameos

Will Poulter (Chef Luca)

In season two, episode four, Will Poulter (whom fans may recognize from The Chronicles of Narnia films and Midsommar) made a surprise appearance as the pastry extraordinaire, Chef Luca, who welcomes Marcus (Lionel Boyce) into his Copenhagen kitchen. 

“I love Will. Me, him and Ramy hung out for a day and walked around before we started working,” Boyce told The Hollywood Reporter. “It felt naturally like, ‘This dude is cool; I want to hang out with this dude.’ I was already a fan of his work, so when I found out that’s who they got, I was like, ‘That’s so smart.’ He’s the perfect person. What he brought to it was exactly the energy of that character. It’s a person who drives themselves on perfection.”

Jamie Lee Curtis (Donna Berzatto)

Season one of The Bear touched mostly on Carmy’s relationship with his departed brother, Mikey. But in a flashback of a frenzied Christmas Eve dinner, we finally meet the family matriarch, Donna Berzatto. 

Curtis plays the mother of Carmen, Sugar and Mikey Berzatto—portrayed by Jeremy Allen White, Abby Elliot and Jon Bernthal, respectively, and Curtis said it was a role she was destined to play. 

“When I saw the first episode last summer and Sugar asks Carmen if he had spoken to their mother, in that second I knew that I would play her. Don’t ask me how. I just knew,” Curtis shared on Instagram. “A year later, after the wild success of the brilliant first season, Chris Storer offered me the role of a lifetime.”

She continued: “There’s not a person alive who won’t relate to what it feels like to be around someone like Donna Berzatto,” she continued. “I certainly have my own experiences. That’s what makes the show so magnificent. We can relate and commiserate and celebrate all of our communal survival in this thing called … life.”

Olivia Coleman (Chef Terry)

To ensure his new chefs are up to snuff, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is sent off to learn Michelin-star restaurant, which is run by the impressive head Chef Terry, played by Olivia Coleman, who fans would know from The Crown and the Harry Potter franchise, among many others.

Moss-Bachrach told TVInsider: “I like to cook a lot in my own life, so I had to unlearn,” he told us during the interview. “I had to just go back to a time before I could rattle the pots and pans.” 

He admitted to Variety that the A-list guest stars made him apprehensive at the beginning. “I was a little concerned about having these well-known actors in the show because I didn’t want it to distract from the story that we’re telling,” he said. “So much of the virtue of The Bear’s first season was it was these relatively unknown actors — or known actors, but nobody super famous. And you can really get sucked into the world. The last thing I wanted was for people to be taken out of the story because, ‘Oh my God, it’s Sarah Paulson! Bob Odenkirk! Jamie Lee Curtis!’ But they all did such good work and were so committed.”

Bob Odenkirk (Uncle Lee)

You’ll know Bob Odenkirk from the Breaking Bad spinoff series, Better Call Saul. They call him Uncle Lee, but as Carmy puts it: “Oof. That’s not our uncle.” Tensions erupt and Odenkirk’s character ends up getting a fork thrown at him. 

“With Bob, I’m such a huge fan of his. I thought it was just such a perfect choice. He was so down to come at me, and vice versa! When you have an environment like that, everyone is willing to be a little bit dangerous, because there’s so much trust,” Jon Bernthal told Variety. “There’s so much love and everybody’s so dedicated. The goal starts to then be, OK, how can I shock this person? How can I scare this person? How can I do something that they’ll never expect? How can I lose myself within this? When you create an atmosphere that’s that unbelievably creative and that unbelievably safe, danger is not a hard thing to find. It was really fun! It was like great theater work, and it’s really rare.”

Odenkirk’s appearance on The Bear didn’t come as a huge surprise those in the know, however, as the news was announced in late April 2023 via Variety.

Sarah Paulson (Cousin Michelle)

Best known for her work in American Horror Story and the spinoff series Ratched, Sarah Paulson joins The Bear as cousin Michelle during the “Fishes” episode. While she’s not on the screen for long, she serves as quite a pivotal character in Carmy’s story arch, because she offers him to live with her for a few weeks so he can study in New York and “get out of this place.” 

Gillian Jacobs (Tiffany Jerimovich)

Fans of Community will recognize Gillian Jacobs and in The Bear season two, she stars as Richie’s ex-wife, Tiffany, and the mother of his child. We’ve always known Richie had a wife—she’s mentioned throughout Season 1—and finally appears, pregnant, in “Fishes”. 

As TVInsider observed: “Lounging upstairs away from the chaos, she shares a sweet and comforting moment with Richie as they talk about their future. The reality of where they end up makes the scene slightly bittersweet. A through line of the season also happens to be that Richie’s daughter loves Taylor Swift, and considering Tiffany is wearing a T-shirt with the singer, we can only assume it was because of her influence that she does.”

John Mulaney (Steven)

In the same Christmas Eve episode, comedian John Mulaney joins the cast as cousin Michelle Berzatto’s boyfriend, Steven. His only contribution to the entire episode, titled “Fishes”, was to say grace right before a full-blown spat erupted between Uncle Lee and Mikey at the dinner table.

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