Yes, Ayo!

Is Ayo Edebiri the most beloved new face in Hollywood? Alessandra Codinha meets the suddenly everywhere actor, comedia, writer, fashion darling... and soon-to-be director too?

- Photographed by Angelo Pennetta

There are worse places that a rising star can find themselves than at loose ends in Europe in July. In the middle of the summer of 2023, as the Screen Actors Guild joined the writers strike, every actor who was abroad for a gig suddenly found themselves abroad without one. In this group was the actor-writer-comedian Ayo Edebiri, 28, who, suddenly released from her commitments, decided to take a quick vacation to Berlin with friends: Paul Mescal and Fred Hechinger (both f resh f rom the set of Gladiator II ), playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris, and the actor Michael Seater. “We’re walking around with Mr. Normal People and the guy from White Lotus, and the person who got stopped the most was Ayo,” Harris says. “People would be like: ‘Yes, Chef! Yes, Chef!’ And that’s when I knew: It was that moment.” Six months later in Los Angeles, over exorbitantly priced omakase at the preferred canteen of young Hollywood, Sushi Park, Edebiri, star of FX/Hulu’s runaway hit series The Bear, admits that Berlin “got a little hectic,” and then tells me what happened after, in London, when she still believed that she could take a bus.

“It’s my favorite thing to do,” she explains. “My friends always make fun of me, but I’m like, It’s the city where I can take the bus and just be unbothered.” And then it happened. She reenacts the wide-eyed tap on the shoulder, the wincing intake of breath, the “Excuse me, sorry, do you mind?” of the selfie-seeker. “You just hear the cadence,” she says.