Ayo Edebiri Continues Her Awards Season Dominance with Emmy Win for ‘The Bear’
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1995-present
Latest News: Ayo Edebiri Wins Emmy Award for The Bear
Presenter Christina Applegate spoke like it was a forgone conclusion that Ayo Edebiri would win at the 75th Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. “Ayo, get your ass up here,” she excitedly told the 28-year-old actor January 15, confirming the honor for the 28-year-old star of The Bear.
The Emmy win is the latest accolade for Edebiri, who plays sous chef Sydney Adamu on the FX comedy-drama alongside lead Jeremy Allen White. Edebiri won a Golden Globe Award for her role last week, as well as a Critics’ Choice Award on January 14. “I’m so incredibly grateful for this, for so many reasons,” she said during her acceptance speech, before addressing her parents in the audience. “I love you guys so much. Thank you so much for loving me and letting me feel beautiful and Black and proud of all of that.”
Edebiri had to wait a long time to hear her name called. The Emmy Awards ceremony was originally scheduled for September but delayed because of the months-long actors and writers strikes.
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Who Is Ayo Edebiri?
Actor Ayo Edebiri is best known for her TV role as sous chef Sydney Adamu on the FX series The Bear, for which she won a 2024 Golden Globe Award and Primetime Emmy award. Prior to this breakout role, Edebiri performed as a standup comedian and worked as a writer for multiple television shows, including the Apple TV+ series Dickinson and the Netflix animated comedy Big Mouth. Edebiri received her first major acting opportunity in the latter as the voice of Missy. More recently, she starred in the 2023 teen comedy movie Bottoms with her collegiate friend and comedy collaborator, Rachel Sennott.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Ayo Edebiri
BORN: October 3, 1995
BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra
Early Life and Education
Ayo Edebiri was born October 3, 1995, in Boston and grew up in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood. Both of her parents are immigrants to the United States, with her father originally from Nigeria and her mother from Barbados.
An only child, Ayo was greatly influenced by religion while growing up. She attended a Pentecostal church with her family at least twice a week and told The New Yorker in June 2023 that the Bible helped spark her interest in storytelling. She frequently wrote stories in her journal and, by the time she was around 8 or 9 years old, drafted a fantasy novel about an orphan girl.
She then developed a passion for visual storytelling after watching Westerns with her father, including A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), both starring Clint Eastwood. But in terms of her future, “I didn’t really think of acting as a job that I could do. I wanted a real job that would make me money,” she said. Still, she fulfilled her creative instincts by performing improv during middle and high school.
Edebiri attended predominantly white institutions and received her high school education at Boston Latin School, established in 1635 and now the oldest public school in the United States. Her parents encouraged her to study to become a teacher, and she enrolled at New York University. After two years, she began to reconsider her future. She switched her major to dramatic writing and began to perform stand-up comedy at the encouragement of her friend Rachel Sennott. By the time Edebiri graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017, she was determined to pursue a comedy career.
Early Comedy and TV Writing Career
After graduation, Edebiri remained in New York City and continued to perform stand-up routines. She signed up for open mics and other gigs across Manhattan and Brooklyn, sometimes performing multiple times in one day.
Edebiri told Forbes in 2019 that she gave herself two years—until her undergraduate teaching degree expired—to try to make it in comedy or else she would return to school and study for her master’s degree. “I gave myself a little challenge and it turned out okay,” she said, as that same year she had a set featured on Comedy Central’s Up Next series.
Off the recognition from her stand-up, Edebiri began to attract interest for her writing ability. She soon moved to Los Angeles and began writing for television shows such as the NBC sitcom Sunnyside, the FX comedy What We Do in the Shadows, and the Apple TV+ comedy-drama Dickinson, starring Hailee Steinfeld as a fictional version of Emily Dickinson.
At one of her comedy sets, Edebiri had also drawn the attention of comedian Nick Kroll, co-creator of the Netflix animated series Big Mouth, an adult coming-of-age comedy about teenagers navigating puberty. “She was, like, 24, and already so in control of her voice,” Kroll told The New Yorker, and so he invited Edebiri to interview for a seat in the show’s writing room. Edebiri got the job and began writing for the show’s fifth season when the opportunity for an expanded role opened up.
TV Shows
During the fourth season of Big Mouth in 2020, Edebiri began voicing the character Missy in her first major acting role. She took over the part from comedian Jenny Slate, who announced in June 2020 she would no longer voice Missy because the character was biracial yet she is white. “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people,” Slate wrote in an Instagram post. The show’s creators likewise apologized for their initial casting decision.
Show co-creator Andrew Goldberg told Variety that Edebiri, who auditioned and had multiple callbacks with the production team, was ultimately chosen because she brought “so much of herself” to the role and identified with the character. “I was definitely a very uncomfortable child, so I think the show speaks to that and a lot of those feelings, which still resonate with me as an adult,” Edebiri said in August 2020. Unfortunately, according to The New Yorker, the casting decision made the actor and her parents the subject of harassment—leading Edebiri to remove information about her family from the internet.
Despite this, she has voiced Missy through 32 episodes of the show and is expected to reprise the role for Big Mouth’s eighth and final season in 2024. A release date has not been announced,
With the success of Big Mouth, Edebiri began regularly appearing on camera as well. She starred with her friend Rachel Sennott in the Comedy Central sketch miniseries Ayo and Rachel are Single in 2020, playing fictionalized versions of themselves. She also played Hattie on six episodes of Dickinson in 2021 and had appearances in the anthology series The Premise (2021) and the HBO talk show Pause with Sam Jay (2022). Edebiri was clearly on the rise and, by this point, eyed the role that would launch her into stardom.
Emmy and Golden Globe for The Bear
In 2021, Edebiri received an audition notice for The Bear, a new comedy-drama series about a gifted chef (played by Jeremy Allen White) who returns to Chicago to take over a failing sandwich shop previously run by his late brother. Series creator Christopher Storer, who had eaten lunch with Edebiri in 2019 and promised they would work together someday, eventually offered her the role of aspiring sous chef Sydney Adamu.
To prepare, Edebiri drew on her past experience working in New York City restaurants in the early days of her comedy career. According to People, she also trained with White at the Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena, California, and worked in the kitchens of multiple Michelin-star restaurants. “It needs to look real. And if we’re practicing it, you might as well make it taste real,” she told The New York Times.
The Bear was an immediate hit, with critics praising its writing and acting. The show won Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy at the 2024 Golden Globes and received 13 Emmy nominations, including for Outstanding Comedy Series. Edebiri has received plenty of accolades herself, winning Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Musical or Comedy TV Series at the Globes. Days later, she was named Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the 75th Emmy Awards, delayed from 2023 because of writers and actors strikes.
In addition to The Bear, Edebiri appeared on a variety of popular TV shows in 2023, including the Netflix anthology series Black Mirror, the Max animated comedy Clone High, and the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary.
Movies: Bottoms, Ninja Turtles, and Upcoming Projects
Buoyed by her success on TV, Edebiri appeared in a number of major movie releases in 2023, including voice roles in the animated superhero films Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, as well as a part in the mockumentary Theater Camp. She and Rachel Sennott teamed up once again for the 2023 comedy movie Bottoms, in which they play queer high school students who organize a fight club in order to lose their virginity to popular cheerleaders.
In November 2023, Deadline reported that Edebiri will star in a 2024 horror film called Opus, distributed by A24. She also has an undisclosed role in the upcoming Marvel Studios movie Thunderbolts, currently scheduled for a July 2025 release.
Personal Life
Edebiri has shared little detail about her personal life and dating history. She identified as queer in a September 2023 interview with Refinery29.
The actor is more open about her furry companion, a rescued chihuahua mix named Gromit. She explained to People in August 2023 she often brings the dog with her to writers’ rooms and production sets. “I’ve been lucky enough to be on sets where they know Gromit, and they love Gromit, like The Bear,” she said, adding the pooch often hangs out with showrunner Christopher Storer.
Quotes
Humor is a weapon—a powerful one. And it’s also a balm, a salve that you can use to heal and even to start conversations.
I want to try to help in whatever capacity I can to make the future that I want to live in. I don’t know totally what that looks like, but I’m also okay with not knowing as long as I keep pushing, and the people around me are pushing, too.
I like working, because I like my job, so that part is great. And if it means that people are responding to the work, then I have truly, truly, truly zero complaints. It’s, like, a dream come true.
Oh my God—all of my agents’ and managers’ assistants! To the people who answer my emails, y’all are real ones. Thank you for answering my crazy, crazy emails.
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