'Your happiness depends on if you get something on air”

Abby Elliott made her name on Saturday Night Live’ and sitcoms, then The Bear’ came along and changed her life. She talks to Annabel Nugent as its fourth season arrives

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During the writing of season two of The Bear, Abby Elliott found out she was pregnant with her second child. By then, FX’s kitchen dramedy was already a hit, nabbing a record-breaking 10 Emmys for its first series (a record it would later go on to break).

Elliott, who plays Nat, chef Carmy's even-keeled older sister, was anxious about mentioning her pregnancy. At that point, it wasn't clear how involved she would be in the series as it developed. Maybe, Elliott worried, this would give them reason to write her out entirely: "I have been on shows before where pregnant actresses get written out, so I was nervous about it." Happily, that wasn't the case. "They were so thrilled for me," she says of the show's creator Christopher Storer and writer Joanna Calo - so thrilled, in fact, that they started writing her pregnancy into Nat's season three storyline.

Elliott, 38, calls this development a "gift", but her pregnancy turned out to be a gift for the writers, too. Nat being pregnant, and now a mum in the newly released fourth season, has proved a fruitful avenue for the character - and a brilliant showcase for the actor who plays her. Take "Ice Chips", a standout episode in series three, in which Nat finds herself in labour with the most unlikely of birth partners: her haywire mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Together, the actors are quietly formidable, all bruised vulnerability and exposed nerves.

But then, we've come to expect excellent performances from The Bear. Set in a Chicago sandwich shop, the series bottles the addictive white-knuckle chaos of a professional kitchen. Jeremy Allen White is Carmy, a chef who leaves behind his promising career in fine dining to run his late brother's failing business, and, in the last season, tries to open a Michelin-level restaurant of his own. As Nat, Elliott is the show's calm centre, determined to hold together a family that's hell-bent on falling apart.