Every Scene-Stealing The Bear Season 2 Cameo, Ranked
If you looked like that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme for much of the season, well, same.
I don't particularly think any of us expected The Bear, FX's soon-to-be-Emmy-nominated prestige dramedy about the pressure-cooker environment surrounding the staff of a Chicago restaurant, to have a second season filled with more surprise cameos and scene-stealing guest appearances than a run-of-the-mill Marvel movie. But there we all were for the duration of the show's second season, looking just like the famous Leonardo DiCaprio Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood meme that we've all seen so many times. Having so many moments of 'Is that...? Oh my god, it's...!' was not expected, but certainly was appreciated.
Clearly, the surprise phenomenon of The Bear's first season caught the attention of many power players in Hollywood—and got lots of big names interested in coming aboard for the show's second go-around. And every time, we should add, it was delightful. The Bear is a great show, and while some might classify these performances as "stunt casting," we wouldn't go so far—because each appearance, no matter how brief or how lengthy, really pays off and feels true to both the world being built and and the story being told.
It helps with suspension of disbelief that the majority of these special appearances come in the masterful mid-season episode "Fishes," which jumps about 5 years into the past for a highly-chaotic Berzatto family Christmas. And seeing relative after relative depicted as A-lister after A-lister kind of just works—when someone's telling you a story about their one-of-a-kind family dinner, you often hear about characters in stories that have personalities that could only be imagined as some of Hollywood's finest. Of course the Berzatto family's "Uncle who isn't really our Uncle" is played by Bob Odenkirk. OF COURSE their deeply-unwell ticking-time-bomb mother is played by freshly-minted Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis. It just makes sense. Someone's telling this story—we're just listening.
With so many fun and well-executed special appearances, though, it only makes sense that we don't only want to recount and think about them, but also rank, in order, which we really liked the most.
Below, we have that ranking.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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