If you are not yet aware, Molly Gordon is starring in two of the most delightful (and tonally distinct) offerings of the summer: the rich and hectic second season of The Bear and the effervescent and utterly delightful indie film Theater Camp, which she also co-wrote and co-directed. If The Bear is a hearty beef bourguignon—complex, with many different notes and dark tensions roiling underneath—the movie is more of a trifle, ethereal and fruity, but not without layers and meaningful sentiments of its own. Together, they make the case that Gordon is one of the most exciting young performers around. They are so different, however, that they don’t give you much of a sense of what Gordon, the person, will be like if you find yourself waiting for her at Cafe Cluny in New York’s West Village on a humid Thursday in late June.
When Gordon, 27, arrives, she is dressed for summer in the city: loose white T-shirt and short, no-fuss black skirt, wearing a baseball hat over her thick brown hair. This time of year is humbling, we both agree. “You could be Gigi Hadid, walking down the street, and you’re going to have boob sweat,” she says. She channels neither the edgy intensity of her Bear character, nor the jazz-hands enthusiasm of her Theater Camp persona, instead exuding a sweet humility. “I’m feeling a little unzipped,” she says about her roller-coaster year.
In The Bear, Gordon plays Claire, the knife that slices through Carmy’s muscular exoskeleton, exposing vulnerabilities and desires he has not yet acknowledged. While the first season of the FX show felt almost hermetically cloistered—you only saw the tiniest slivers of the characters’ lives outside the restaurant—the second season has broadened the canvas. There are adventures in Copenhagen, but there are also more intricate explorations, such as what might be going on in burly-armed Carmy’s heart. When he runs into Claire, a girl he grew up with, at the supermarket, it’s not so much a meet-cute as a meet-intense. “There was a moment where she beams a little and it slowly grows,” Christopher Storer, The Bear’s creator, told me of filming that scene. “Because the scenes of our show are usually so chaotic and loud and intense, all of a sudden we had this very still, very beautiful moment and I looked over and could see the entire crew smiling.” Claire is evocative of childhood innocence, a stabilizing force amid the madness of the show, but she—an emergency medicine resident—is also a woman who gets a contact high from resetting broken bones.
In her other major project of the summer, Theater Camp, Gordon stars as Rebecca-Diane, the musical director at a children’s summer camp (“AdirondACTS”) she attended years earlier with her best friend, Amos, played by real-life best friend Ben Platt. The two characters have returned every summer since—partly because they are dedicated to the children, and partly because they are themselves caught in a cycle of arrested development. Their relationship with one another is both pure and a little co-dependent, the most sustaining thing in their lives and also something that holds them back. The film is a love letter to the friendships we form before we’ve figured out the dimensions of our adult lives, and a meditation on how those relationships can be both defining and confining.
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