‘The Bear’ Star Marcus Goes on a Spiritual Odyssey. So Did Lionel Boyce

Lionel Boyce, who stars on hit series The Bear as the endearing pastry chef Marcus, had been to Copenhagen before. He actually went out there to train before he began filming the show’s first season, spending two weeks observing the kitchen at bakery Hart Bageri. “That’s my hometown. That’s what I tell people,” he jokes with Vanity Fair.

But his return to the Danish city for The Bear’s second season came under very different circumstances. He would be starring in his own stand-alone episode, “Honeydew”—the fourth episode of the second season, and the show’s first real attempt at a departure episode. The rest of the cast would not appear in most of it, and it would be the first helmed by an outside director, Ramy Youssef.

For a beloved series, an episode like this can be an incredible risk. Because “Honeydew” is visually divergent from the main series, it could alienate viewers. And in it, there’s none of the chaotic energy familiar from The Beef/Bear’s kitchen, with the staff running around and yelling at each other.

But the episode also allows the show to mature and grow, and follow Marcus on a journey that brings him back a changed chef and man. Boyce gets to display his range, working opposite guest star Will Poulter. The experience left him changed as well. “Carrying a whole episode is completely different than showing up, saying a couple lines and walking away,” he says. “It was a lot more things that I had to pay attention to and notice. I think it definitely helped me in a lot of ways, where now I feel more informed. Even going back to playing the part within the larger stories, more thoughts are now on my mind that I didn’t consider before.”

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When Boyce first read the script for the fourth episode, which sees Marcus sent to Copenhagen to live on a boat and train under a prestigious pastry chef (played by Poulter), he was nervous that he wouldn’t have the rest of his cast (Jeremy Allen White, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Ayo Edebiri) to lean on. But then he considered how this sojourn would help Marcus develop as a character. “It was great because it helped form where Marcus is going for the rest of the season, and solidified his arc to me,” he says. “It also made me look at all of the previous things in a different light, because…it allowed me to discover a little bit more of his backstory.”

Boyce had talked to The Bear showrunners Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo about Marcus’s backstory and knew some of it, like the fact that he had worked at McDonald’s for a while. But in this episode, Marcus reveals much more about how he got to where he is, including his past as a college football player and how he ended up at The Beef. “I never really knew,” he says. “You make your own ideas, but then it was just, ‘Oh, okay, this is how he fell into the bread and his relationship with Mikey [Jon Bernthal] and all those things,’” he says.

Marcus starts out shaky in the kitchen in Copenhagen, clumsily trying again and again to assemble fine-dining desserts. Poulter’s character is strict but never cruel. Because of Poulter’s schedule (the actor is known for Dopesick, Midsommar, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, among other projects), Boyce says, they filmed their scenes together in a kitchen in Chicago. “He is like the other side of Carmy. You immediately see the history, and you can play out how their interactions were when they’re younger,” says Boyce of Poulter’s Luca, who knew Carmy as a young chef. He adds that Poulter, who had practiced in kitchens before filming, helped Boyce approach aspects of his own character in a different way when the two have a heart-to-heart in the kitchen.

“He’s like, ‘I think this is the first time Luca’s shared this side of him to somebody.’ I knew Marcus was opening up in a way that he hadn’t to anybody at all inside the kitchen,” says Boyce.