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Jon Bernthal’s character name in The Amateur is the Bear.
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Director James Hawes tells Entertainment Weekly that there’s no connection to Bernthal’s TV show The Bear.
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The director explains why Bernthal only appears in two scenes in The Amateur.
Jon Bernthal can’t escape The Bear.
Not that he would want to, since he won an Emmy for his role on the fan-favorite FX restaurant series. But when Entertainment Weekly learned that his character name in his new spy thriller The Amateur is literally “the Bear,” we had to find out if the film was making a not-so-subtle nod to the show.
Believe it or not, the film’s director James Hawes insists Bernthal’s secret agent code name was not an intentional call-out to his current run as the late, troubled, elder Berzatto brother Mikey on TV.
“It’s totally a coincidence,” Hawes says. “The character was called ‘the Bear’ before Jon Bernthal came along. And whether or not that was something that sign-posted the part as a role he had to play, you’ll have to ask him. I should ask him. But it was great to have an actor of that stature and brilliance to just parachute into the cast on those two occasions.”
Bernthal isn’t in much of The Amateur, which is a subversive take on the espionage thriller genre starring Rami Malek as CIA decoder Charlie Heller, who embarks on a mission of revenge against the terrorists who killed his wife (Rachel Brosnahan). Bernthal’s grizzled spy only shows up in two scenes with Charlie, but the director reveals that was always the plan and that no additional scenes were filmed and cut.
“It was always just as he appears in the film,” Hawes explains. “And what he does for us, you see at the beginning of the film, I really love the way that he comes in as the rugged, macho, world-beating secret agent. And you can see what Charlie aspires to and probably grew up dreaming he would be when he got the job at Langley. But the Bear goes up, and [Charlie] goes down and down [into headquarters]. When they meet in the canteen, he thinks finally he’s going to have lunch with a secret agent, and that gets ripped away from him too.”
20th Century Studios
Rami Malek in ‘The Amateur’
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Hawes can’t spoil the way in which the Bear shows up in the film next, but teases that it’s “a critical moment in the story” and Charlie’s mission. “It’s got real danger about it,” he adds.
Bernthal has appeared in all three seasons of The Bear as Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) older brother Mikey, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series in 2024 for his work in season 2. He was also nominated for the same role in the same category for season 1.
The Amateur also stars Laurence Fishburne, Caitríona Balfe, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Adrian Martinez, and Danny Sapani, and is based on the novel by Robert Littell. The movie hits theaters April 11.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly