Every Member Of The Berzatto Family Explained

It should go without saying that FX and Hulu’s culinary drama series “The Bear” is one of the best television shows in production right now. After a tight but effective first season, it came out of the cage swinging with a remarkable sophomore effort that raised the bar even higher. Though some may find the somewhat disruptive season 3 to be missing a few key ingredients, the series remains provocative and deeply moving, thanks in large part to its stark depiction of the tragically dysfunctional Berzatto family.

The unhealed wounds of family trauma guided the many ghosts that haunted the first season, but the season 2 Christmas episode “Fishes” (one of “The Bear’s” best episodes so far) brought them to life — and to the dinner table. Amidst all the fighting and fork-throwing, this star-studded anxiety attack of an episode introduces audiences to new members of the extended Berzatto family while deepening our understanding of those we’ve already come to love. In other words, its the perfect encapsulation of a messy holiday feast that we’re here to dig our teeth into.

So let’s dig into the Berzatto family tree and breakdown how everyone is related to each other, even if it’s not necessarily by blood. 

To make things as clear as possible, we’ll start with Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), the baby Berzatto who becomes the gifted but dysfunctional executive chef and owner of the restaurant The Bear (formerly The Original Beef of Chicagoland). Family lies at the heart of many of Carmen’s personal and professional issues — his toxic descent into the culinary world came as a result of being iced out of The Beef by his brother, Michael (Jon Bernthal). When Michael dies, Carmen abstains from the funeral but returns from his award-reaping journey cooking around the globe to take over the family business. As a result of this, Carmen has a volatile partnership with his chef and “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a distant relationship with his sister Natalie (Abby Elliot), and a complete, hard-line detachment from his mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis).

White, like much of the A-list ensemble playing the Berzattos, feels the audience learns the most about the family in the season 2 episode “Fishes.” For Carmen specifically, the actor told Deadline that the episode showed “just how responsible he felt for the balance of the household,” especially in dealing with the complicated mental health of both his mother and older brother. Because of this, White suspects his character has been emotionally restricted when it comes to identifying and addressing his own needs:

“I don’t think that Carmen is able to really learn how to soothe himself, take care of himself. He’s always felt responsible for everybody else and then, because of that, became very controlling. It’s probably why he was attracted to a position in the kitchen… I think he grew up in such chaos that the chaos of the kitchen is familiar to him. But as a chef, he’s able to kind of control that chaos.”

Camren’s older brother and eldest sibling is Michael Berzatto, a god-like figure in his life who founded, owned, and operated The Beef until his death by suicide at the age of 43. Though their shared love of cooking is what initially inspired Carmen to pursue his career, his passion is tainted by Michael’s refusal to let him join the restaurant. In season 1, audiences see Michael through Carmen’s eyes as a charismatic, infallible idol, but in season 2, this image is altered significantly to show the elder Berzatto as the complicated man he was. When Carmen expresses his excitement at them potentially opening The Bear together in “Fishes,” Michael suffers from a panic attack — later in the evening, he instigates a physical altercation with Uncle Lee Lane (Bob Odenkirk) while under the influence of drugs.

Speaking to Variety, Jon Bernthal shared that Michael felt he was a toxic person carrying the invisible weight of his failures around wherever he went. “He’s shrouded in hopelessness, and he wants to keep his brother out of it. He wants to keep his brother pure,” he told the outlet. “That might manifest itself sometimes in jealousy and anger.” 

Michael and Carmen both lived with addiction disorders. The latter attends regular meetings to work through his abuse of alcohol; the former is shown to have abused painkillers in the time leading up to his death. At certain points, it seems Carmen truly wants to learn how to take care of himself in a way Michael felt he couldn’t, but his career often gets in the way.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

Between Carmen and Michael in the sibling birth-order is Natalie Berzatto, the middle-child of the Berzatto family played by Abby Elliot. (She earned the subtly derisive nickname “Sugar” from her mother Donna after she accidentally ruined a recipe by adding sugar instead of salt to the mixture.) When The Beef begins undergoing renovations to become The Bear, Carmen asks Natalie to serve as project manager, and she thus begins taking an active hand in the business-side of the restaurant.

When Elliot was first brought on, she was unaware of the family’s complicated history beyond Michael’s death and her semi-estrangement from Carmen. In “Fishes,” however, as well as in the season 3 episode “Ice Chips” (in which she gives birth to her first child), we see how Natalie’s relationship with her mom has emotionally shaped her. Like Carmen, she carries a lot of responsibility for taking care of Donna’s emotional well-being, further exacerbated by her brother’s decision to cut their mother out of his life completely (as well as her mother’s own angry refusal of this kind of attention).

She tends to the needs of others but rarely to her own, which is what makes the forced inversion of this dynamic in “Ice Chips” so heartbreaking and cathartic. “I have been told so many times by people that they’re the Sugar in their family. And to me, it just means everything,” she said to her on-screen mom Jamie Lee Curtis in Interview Magazine. “I’ve never played a part [that] I’ve felt so deeply connected to.”

Pete (last name unknown) is the plausibly good-guyish husband of Carmen’s sister Natalie, played by Chris Witaski. He has absolutely no involvement with The Beef or The Bear, coming from a radically different culture and upbringing than the Berzattos. “They clearly view him as an outsider or someone who wasn’t grown in the same soil of generational trauma that they were,” Witaski told Vulture in 2023. “I assume that Pete probably grew up in the suburbs and is a business guy, and so it’s easy for them to paint him as this loser.”

This analysis appears to be at least in part informed by Witaski’s own upbringing in the Chicago suburbs. “I really relate to Pete,” he shared, explaining that the character’s anxieties come from a desperate desire to be a part of a family that emphatically rejects him at every turn. “Pete is really bullied, and I was actually bullied pretty bad growing up, and I know what that can do to a person,” he added. “I also think Pete is a bit of an empath. Not to get too deep, but he can see how much pain Sugar is in, and he really feels it.”

The imposing and (perhaps unintentionally) manipulative matriarch of the Berzatto family, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Donna is arguably the centerpiece of “Fishes.” In her debut episode, audiences see first hand the kind of power she wields over her children and how her parenting raised three adults with intense mental health issues — the two surviving siblings electing not to be in contact with her for extended periods of their lives. At the climax of the episode, she drives her car into the living room of her house, endangering everyone in attendance at Christmas dinner. Curtis won her first Emmy Award for guest-starring as the character, which she has described as one of the highlights of her career.

Like the entirety of “Fishes'” star-studded ensemble cast, joining the Berzatto family was a major labor of love for Curtis. She has since expressed gratitude both for the role and for the relationship it gave her with her on-screen daughter Abby Elliot. The pair deliver a vivid birthing experience in “Ice Chips,” in which Natalie unexpectedly calls Donna to the delivery room despite having previously not told her she was even pregnant. (Pete, who is unreachable when she goes into labor, accidentally tells Donna at the end of season 2.) Though it’s at first tense, the reunion does seem to become a step in what could be a new relationship between mother and daughter. “She shows up imperfectly, but she shows up at a moment when [Natalie] couldn’t find anybody and [she] needed her,” Curtis said in Interview Magazine.

Though we don’t know much at all about Donna’s siblings, we do know one of them had a daughter — Michelle Berzatto, Donna’s niece and Carmen’s cousin, played by Sarah Paulson. The “American Horror Story” star had reached out to showrunner Chris Storer on social media after the first season aired, expressed her enthusiastic support for the show, and made it clear that, if he ever had a part for her, she would show up ready to perform. “And then I got an email from my agent months and months later, saying that they wanted me to come do something on ‘The Bear,'” she told IndieWire. “I didn’t read it. I said, yes… and I don’t care whether I’m carrying a glass of water from one corner of the room to the next, I would like to be there.”

Comparatively, “Fishes” doesn’t teach us much about Michelle’s background. She’s clearly close with the rest of the Berzattos, and she has the same familial relationship with “Uncle” Jimmy “Cicero” Kalinowski (Oliver Platt) and “Cousin” Richie that the Berzatto kids do, so one could infer that she grew up with them. At one point, she does insist that Carmen leave Chicago (and, more importantly, his family home) and stay with her in New York City, both to experience her favorite restaurants and to escape the dysfunctional household she fears will hold him back.

Steven (or Steve/Stevie, depending on exactly how sour the mood is) is Michelle’s husband, played by John Mulaney. Like Pete, Chris Storer views Stevie as an “outsider” to the Berzattos. But where Pete is unable to make any meaningful headway in his relationships with Carmen or Michael, Stevie is at least seemingly flexible enough not to be injured by the family’s harsh behavior, nor does he seem to be too shaken by it until the evening’s violent end.

When it comes time to bless the feast in “Fishes,” Michael calls upon a very reluctant Stevie — who, in turn, delivers one of the series’ most beautiful monologues as he tries to remind the family of his love for them and their love for one another. “There was really only one person that could do that, and that was John,” Storer shared with IndieWire, emphasizing that the comic delivered a “three-page monologue” to a room full of the most talented contemporary dramatic actors in the country.

For his part, Mulaney described shooting the episode as “intense,” particularly when his character gets yelled at by Donna for trying to help in the kitchen. At the same time, when the cameras stopped rolling, it was apparently a blast. As he told Variety, “Sitting at that dinner table in between takes was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my career.”

“Cousin” Richard “Richie” Jerimovich is not, in fact, anyone’s biological cousin. His close friendship with Michael won him a spot in the Berzatto’s extended family — in his view, in a way that’s more in line with the Berzatto’s “uncles,” rather than the Faks (it’s unclear if the Berzattos at large agree with this assessment).

Of course, Richie is a core member of the team at The Original Beef and later The Bear, having dedicated himself (in his own way) to the world of fine dining in his season 2 redemption arc. When Michael was alive, his relationship with Carmen was significantly less warm than the relationship he had with his brother, and Carmen’s attempts to change The Beef didn’t make things any better by the time of the events of season 1. Throughout the series, working together on The Bear has brought Carmen and Richie closer in some ways, but that also brought to the surface deep wounds that have yet to be healed (for example, as we learn at the end of season 2, Richie resents how Carmen handled Michael’s passing).

“Fishes” introduces us to Richie’s (now ex) wife Tiffany, who is played by “Community” alum Gillian Jacobs. The couple have an infant daughter named Eva, whom they co-parent, and she loves Taylor Swift.

Like “Cousin” Richie, Lee Lane is a found, non-biological nor legal member of the Berzatto extended family. He is referred to as an “uncle” and played by Bob Odenkirk. Uncle Lee was an old friend of both Carmen’s father and the family’s other non-biological Uncle Jimmy, the “L” in the “KBL” shell company Michael was making payments to in order to pay off his outstanding debts. He also has an intimate relationship with Donna, the parameters of which are not clearly defined.

Lee is a prickly presence at the Berzatto dinner table in “Fishes,” particularly with Michael. Odenkirk chalks this up partially to his character’s self-righteous habit of saying precisely what’s on his mind. “Uncle Lee may be prized in some circles for his bluntness and intensity and steely self-assurance, though I think that kind of bluntness, often celebrated as ‘he doesn’t suffer fools,’ is really just ‘being an a**,'” he told the LA Times.

Throughout the dinner, Lee takes every opportunity he can to paint Michael as a failure and a burden on the family — a skewed portrait which Michael himself likely would have agreed with. Jon Bernthal, who enjoyed the adversarial dynamic his character had with Odenkirk’s (maybe a little too much, leading him to improvise one of the episode’s most jarring moments), has pointed out that while Michael is focused on keeping Donna under control the entire night, its Lee’s constant needling of him that really sends the evening into chaos.

Speaking of the “uncles,” the Berzattos are very close with the suspiciously wealthy businessman Jimmy Kalinowksi, otherwise known as both “Cicero” and “Uncle Jimmy.” It is implied that he has connections to some kind of criminal enterprise from which he earns a portion of his income (realistically, he could be a “legitimate businessman” with ties to the Chicago Outfit) and that he was in business at some point with Lee Lane and Donna’s former husband.

When the series begins, it’s revealed that Jimmy loaned Michael $300,000 for The Beef (which Lee harshly criticizes in “Fishes,” citing Michael’s poor track record as an entrepreneur). This money is discovered after Michael’s death by Carmen, at which point he renegotiates a new deal with Jimmy to help start The Bear — an $800,000 loan with a strict 18-month term, and with the $2 million lot beneath The Beef offered as collateral. At present, The Bear is struggling to meet their end of this agreement.

Oliver Platt clearly enjoys playing a character who is both an imposing, perhaps even threatening professional antagonist and a beloved member of the Berzatto family. “He’s somebody who you don’t know if he’s going to shake you or give you a hug,” he told Variety in 2023. “Just the complexity of that, that’s like an actor’s dream.”

Last and potentially least, we have the unnamed and unaccounted for Berzatto patriarch, Donna’s husband, and the father of Michael, Natalie, and Carmen. He was also a business partner of Uncle Lee and Uncle Jimmy (it’s certainly possible that whatever business they were involved with was on the less than legal side of things). It is unknown whether he is alive or dead by the time the series starts, nor if that’s information anyone in the Berzatto family is even aware of.

Everything we know about Father Bear comes to us in cryptic, off-handed comments — part of the show’s subtle but expansive world-building that exists in the background of the show’s many tiny, intimate moments. As Jon Bernthal said to Variety about the show at large, “I think the stuff that we don’t know is almost as interesting as the stuff that we do.” The general consensus is that Father Bear was every bit the dysfunctional, immature, and emotionally abusive parent Donna was, in addition to being much less engaged with the children. It’s strongly implied he abandoned the family at some point early in Carmen’s life, and the fact that he kept a gun in the house and that his two (presumably best) friends are taking care of his wife in his absence are fascinating details that paint a complex picture of whoever he was.

The same is true for the Berzatto family at large — from what we know and what we don’t know, we can see that this family tree is rooted in deep cycles of trauma. Whether or not Carmen and his siblings can break these cycles is arguably the most compelling dramatic question driving “The Bear.”