Ramy Youssef (‘The Bear’ director): ‘All of the best things that ever happened to me were because someone else was too busy’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

The fact that Ramy Youssef would find himself working on an episode of “The Bear” isn’t all that big a surprise. After all, he had worked for years with the show’s co-creator and showrunner Christopher Storer on his own Hulu comedy “Ramy.” He recalls, “Chris and I had always talked about my being involved in some capacity, but I actually think it was about me playing an acting role on the show. Then it grew into this opportunity to go do this one episode. And it was outside the country. ” Yes, that episode turned out to be “Honeydew,” the much-praised fourth episode of “The Bear’s” second season in which pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) is sent to Copenhagen to train under the renowned Chef Luca (Will Poulter). Youssef directed it and earned his second directing nomination for his trouble. Watch the exclusive video interview above.

“It turned out the episode was outside of the show’s schedule,” Youssef says, “and Chris called me and he was like, ‘Hey man, I’m not going to be able to go (to Denmark), do you want to go?’ So I like to say it was really mainly born out of scheduling difficulties that gave me this gift of an opportunity to get to kind of play in Chris’s world, which was really fun for me.” When it’s pointed out that a free working trip to Copenhagen is the kind of scheduling snafu you dream of being handed to you, Youssef admits, “All the best things that ever happened to me were because someone else was too busy, and I’ll take that every time. Pop me in.”

Once Youssef assured Storer he was in, he asked to see scripts or raw footage from the first three episodes of the season to gauge the tonal difference between Season 1 and what was shaping up for Season 2 of “The Bear.” And Storer said no. “He was cool about it,” Youssef explains, but he said, ‘No. Just go do your thing.’ So, I did.” There, he met with both Boyce and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, who had also worked on the “Bear” pilot in he first season. “I was supposed to go scout in Copenhagen for two days,” he says, “but once you’re over there and you’re walking around, you want to stay longer. So I found this Airbnb and hung out for a couple of weeks, touring around with my film camera snapping random photos with shared with with both Adam and with our location manager. And then we started to build the look of (the episode) and Chris gave us free reign to just do whatever we wanted.”

The hangout time wound up being immensely helpful in crafting how the very unusual, highly touted episode would play. “When two weeks of just running around and eating pastries amounts to something, it’s incredibly rare,” Youssef sums up. Of course, his making the rounds involved far more than that. The tranquility of life in the biggest city in Denmark finds a similar tone in “Honeydew,” which stands in marked contrast to the frantic and intense vibe that defines most other “Bear” installments.

“There’s an amazing bike-riding culture and a totally different pace over there,” Youssef emphasizes. “It’s a completely different way of living. We definitely captured some of that in my director cut. Chris made pretty clear that he wanted something more meditative that was a little bit different than the grind of what they were doing in the Chicago kitchen – an episode that sits outside the tension of that. It was so cool to just kind of come in and be a line cook for Chef Storer.”

The weeks of scouting also afforded Youssef an opportunity to closely bond with the star of the episode, Boyce. “It was awesome,” he reports. “We got to walk around Copenhagen a lot and just talk about where the character was at, talk a little bit about how he wanted to shoot it and what we wanted to find. We had a really nice process of him just figuring things out, moving words in certain ways, but really trying to capture the energy of the walks and looking at Marcus, who had never traveled before and what that meant for him.”

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