ADULTING

Major roles, fashion cred, a nice life in LA—at 30, Ayo Edebiri knows what she's doing. Now if she could just find the trailhead...

- Marley Marius

GROWING SEASON Edebiri stars in Luca Guadagnino's new film After the Hunt. In December she will appear in the James L. Brooks comedy Ella McCay. Maison Margiela Artisanal 2025 dress. Fashion Editor: Alex Harrington.

I've been with Ayo Edebiri for 15 minutes, tops, and already I'm getting her Pacino. “What have I been listening to? I’ve been listening to, honestly, the Sonny Boy audiobook,” she tells me, unprompted, after we’ve ducked into her compact car. “You’re literally like, Wait, how is this a book? The way he delivers lines? It’s really shocking. Every actor should listen to that book. He goes—my impression of him is if RFK was raised in the Trump household. It’s like: ‘I had no idea! My mutha...gave me away...for six months...because my fatha’”—she takes on here the affect of a very sad clown—“‘wasawayinthewar.’ I’m actually going to pull it up.”

The plan for our morning is almost satirically LA: After meeting at 8 a.m. at a matcha place in Highland Park, not far from where Edebiri lives, she’s to drive us to a hiking trail in Angeles National Forest. (She’s an early riser, something that she attributes, in part, to being a former New Yorker: “No matter how early you get up in New York, there’s always somebody who’s either earlier or their day hasn’t finished. But in LA, it’s office hours.”) Dressed in a baseball tee emblazoned with the NBC logo, track pants, a printed headscarf—not unlike the ones she wears as Sydney Adamu, the hyper-competent, superdriven, rather anxious young sous-chef on The Bear, in fact—and Prada sunglasses, she certainly looks the part of a 20-something somebody in the industry, taking the air before she tootles down to Studio City for “meetings,” or whatever actors do. (In reality, Edebiri is due on Hollywood Boulevard later that day for an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.)