‘You only get one shot so why not?’: The Bear’s Matty Matheson on cooking, addiction and making the most of life | The Bear

Acting was never an intentional addition to Matty Matheson’s expansive repertoire. At 42, he’s a bona fide, if unconventional, business mogul: chef, restaurateur and food YouTube big-leaguer. He runs 10 successful restaurants across Ontario. One in the US, another coming. Two fashion brands. There’s his farm in Canada. A range of cookware. For years, he was a face of Munchies, Vice’s food vertical. His YouTube channel has 1.5m subscribers. And there are his cookbooks, the third of which – Soups, Salads, Sandwiches – we’re primed to discuss. The last two were New York Times bestsellers. “The first was my life through a culinary lens,” he says. “The second, my ode to the great cookbooks: stock, bread, pickles, preserves.” And this one? “It’s things you make every day.” Maybe chez Matheson: deep-fried waffle-breakfast-sandwich with mascarpone, freezer strawberry jam, fried egg and bacon – not quite standard fare for most of us. He has a full- throttle approach to cooking, as he does to everything. “You only get one shot,” is his motto, “so why not? That’s how I think about things. Whatever I do, I give my all.”

It’s this attitude Matheson took when Christopher Storer – international smash-hit series The Bear’s creator, co-showrunner, writer, and director – called out of the blue. Storer asked: would Matheson consult on his new show? They were prepping for the pilot. Matheson obliged. “I came on as a consultant,” he says, “to share the realities of how people move, how people talk, how people think about food in restaurants. The high intensity moments. Uncompromising lifestyle.”

Then came the offer of a part. Matheson mulled it over. “I definitely didn’t want to act a chef, I knew that. Maybe this funny, sweet handyman…” Neil Fak was born. Three seasons later, he plays one of the show’s most beloved characters. “Fak has an important role in the show. I’m able to cut tension. Add some laughter and lightness. A breath every once in a while in all the high intensity.”

There are notes of Fak in Matheson. Much like the lovably feckless handyman he plays, he is warm, affable, gentle. On-screen and off, all that’s good is a flurry of “sick” and “fire” and “holy cows!” His head fills my screen: moustache, thick-rimmed glasses, baseball cap; heavily tattooed shoulders protruding from a white sleeveless vest. He’s Zooming from a Nashville hotel room, ahead of a day shooting his popular recipe videos. When the motion-sensor lights cut, he jigs around to entice them back on, not altogether successfully: Fak-like in flavour. “I don’t have a computer so I’m talking to you from my phone” he explains, “which is shoved inside of my hat, inside my toilet-bag, to hold it in place.” Mostly, they dress the same: Matheson often wears his own clothes on set. At aesthetics and sweet nature, however, the similarities end.

He arrived in Tennessee direct from two weeks of Emmy engagements in Los Angeles; this year The Bear became the most-nominated comedy series for a single season in the awards’ history. He lives in Ontario. The Bear is filmed in Chicago. Tomorrow, he’s driving to Kentucky. It sounds… a lot? “I don’t know,” he replies. “I do have a lot of different things going on. I’m never anywhere longer than four or five days. It’s hectic.” He pauses. “It’s hard to articulate without making myself sound like a fucking asshole; everyone is busy. Everyone works. It’s just, I am the thing in my work. I’m the brand. So I’m moved about: a goat on a rope, getting dragged around town.”

Shepherding him is a small, tight-knit team, with bonds that go way back. His chief financial officer, Lisa, was a server at his first Toronto restaurant. “We have the sickest little crew. We got fucked up in our 20s. Had a blast. Now we fly around the world and make shit. There’s no fluff. No VC money. No bullshit or board. Me and my friends – my partners, really – run the show. We’re not some Hollywood thing: we’re homegrown.”

Home is back in Fort Erie, on the US/Canada border, a 10-minute drive from the house he was raised in. “Back in my day,” he reminisces, “it was factories, strip clubs, bingo halls, Chinese restaurants. Americans would come to party. I come from a very working-class family. Two brothers, a sister, loving parents.” Both worked in factories. “My mom is a shit-shoveller; nothing was below her. She still works as a diner server, because she wants to, and loves the job. My parents instilled in me to never ask anyone for anything. It’s embedded.”

His was a rural rearing. “All hanging out in the woods and BMX-ing, jumping in the river off train bridges and getting into trouble.” What sort of trouble? “Just stuff,” he suggests, giggling coyly. “You know, small-town stuff: smashing cars into buildings and breaking shit, going to parties, getting into fights and running from cops… sometimes getting caught. Nights in jail cells. In cities, it’s like: why are you on our block? Well, for us, it was: why are you in our woods? Then you’d fight.”

Socially, Matheson thrived in high school. Academically, less so. “I was the class clown,” he says, “the funny guy. I wasn’t into sports, or school, or anything. Just getting fucked up with my friends.” He met his now-wife Trish in 10th grade. They have three children. “She’s a real road-dog,” he says, lovingly. “A beast, a phenomenal mother and an amazing partner. There’ve been really tough patches, but through the crazy times, we always loved each other more than not. She’s my soulmate. My forever.”

Back then, term-times were spent in constant negotiation with teachers. “I just wanted to pass,” he explains, “the least I gotta do to get 50%. Even when in trouble with the principal I’d haggle: you don’t like me, I don’t like you. If I fail, I’ve gotta be here longer. I ain’t gonna be a doctor or a scientist. I’m not going to be anything. So get me out.”

College wasn’t on the cards. “I was good with what my life would be: stay in Erie, work in the factory, get my truck and drive around. Drink beer and smoke smokes.” Still, aged 18, he hankered for a stint in the city. “Cooking school was the only course I had the grades for. I thought I could do it.” His grandfather was a chef, with a restaurant out east on Prince Edward Island. “I loved going there as a kid. It’s a romantic starting point, maybe, for storytelling about me and food, but honestly [cooking school] was just a means to get to Toronto and watch punk shows.”

Still, he thrived at Humber Polytechnic. “I fell in love with cooking. And education, to be honest: I was finally good at something. I got confident.” Kitchens made sense to him. “I was getting good grades – I could make fucking stock, pâté and hollandaise; debone a quail and sharpen a knife. I had a knack, a natural ability. Well, until I stopped going.” He dropped out a few weeks before graduation to go on tour with his friends’ death metal band.

Back in Toronto, he worked his way up through some of the city’s top establishments. He made a name for himself, diploma-less. “Either you can cook a restaurant’s food,” he says, “or you can’t. It’s sink or swim. You can’t fake it. And I swam: I was a very good line cook.”

Through his 20s, he worked and played hard. “All the industry clichés are real,” he says. “Lots of drinking and doing drugs. You finish work at 12.30am, 1am, then all of us go ripping around the city on bikes with backpacks full of beer, wine and vodka, going to our friends’ bars, or last-calls at restaurants.” He could feel his world expanding. “People from every walk of life worked in these restaurants,” he says. “I really opened up to things. Growing up, I was friends with different circles, but it was a small town; variations of white kids. Now, I was going to underground jazz bars and hanging out with 50-year-old gay dudes. Eating Sri Lankan food for the first time. A pho. Vietnam!”

It sounds fun, I suggest. He shrugs. “It was,” he says, “the best times of my life. A group of friends you work hard with, in these pumping places, and every night is the Super Bowl. Professionally, he mostly held things together. “Even at my craziest moments of drinking and drugs,” he’s certain, “I always showed up for work. I could go hard until six, eight in the morning. As long as I got two or three hours sleep, I was good.” He opened his first restaurant, Parts and Labour, aged 26. Critics raved. Punters, too. Work stepped up a gear – as did the partying: alcohol and cocaine, but not exclusively. “Live like that for 10 years? You get kinda burnt.” A heart attack: he was 29 years old.

“It was after long years of going at it,” he explains, “I went to bed Saturday night, and woke up Sunday thinking I was having one. I went to the hospital: I’d had a heart attack in my sleep.” For two months, maybe three, he slowed down. Partied less. Cooled a little. “But after that? I turned it back up. I was spun out by it all, and went even harder for like a year. My friends banned me from their bars – they were looking out for me. All my drug dealers, too – they were my friends, my homies – so they cut me off. I put myself in different, difficult situations. I didn’t want to be seen or embarrassed or anyone to know who I was. I stopped going where I was known, and started disappearing, fading into the sketch zone. Doing things and hanging out with people I wouldn’t otherwise, to use [drugs]. By the end, it was affecting everything. I was a maniac.”

It took an intervention. The weekend of 12 November 2013. Friday lunchtime, Matheson, drunk, walked into his own restaurant and scrapped with his business partners. It got ugly. The next day, one suggested meeting for coffee. Matheson was driven to a house where a group of his nearest and dearest had gathered. “I’m lucky to have friends who cared about me,” he says, “and I was in a place where I could listen. Then the miracle happened: I went to a meeting. I’d never been to one before, never tried to get clean or sober. I found this family of sickos who were trying to get better. I loved it. And I haven’t had a drip drop since.” Deep breath. “And from then it was like: what’s the full potential? We get one life. We’re not living for tomorrow – what can we do today?”

Small steps, first. He made a list of all his debts and hung it in his and Trish’s bedroom. “I was adamant I’d pay back all my friends, and drug dealers, and drug-dealer-friends: to never be dependent on anyone or anything.” Vice’s food output was in its infancy then. The timing was perfect. “My first video was making a cheeseburger, and I got $500. I made in a day what I used to make in a week. I was a chef, then every two, three weeks, I’d do a video. I was good at it.” He cleared all debts within a year. “Then I had to figure out how to become completely independent and make the right decisions for myself. I saved a year’s worth of bills and rent… From there, I quit everything, walked away from all the restaurants I was involved in, and started building this world.”

On set in Chicago, Matheson was tasked with bringing The Bear to life, initially, as an operation on the brink. “When I showed up,” he says, “there was a lot of food in the walk-in. Too many pans. Yo, I said, we gotta get rid. They wouldn’t have the money. I worked with the set dec and prop team to pull things back: a couple of spoons. A few pots. Just enough jardinière to get by.” He advised on movement. “The way people navigate through the kitchen; how a chef would look at things; where your hands are; walking with purpose. How experienced chefs would know this, others wouldn’t.” As seasons – and menus – developed, precision felt no less pertinent: unrelenting, explosive, electric; a chorus of “Yes chef’s” and “Hands!”

“The kitchen is always set up so we could actually make everything on the menu, however briefly – if at all – it’s caught on camera. The walk-ins stocked. The kit there. All the mise en place they’d need for service. Just so anyone watching – anyone acting – felt it was real. Not just a bunch of carrots for show. Still, he’s keen to make clear, “I’ve never worked in a kitchen like that one, so in trouble and divided. In fact, The Bear makes me even prouder of how we run our restaurants.”

It took a while to find his acting feet. “I’m unscripted, usually; I’m not scared of standing in front of a camera riffing. Acting isn’t like that. On the first season especially, everyone gave me so much support. Jeremy [Allen White] would run lines with me. Ayo [Edebri] would work through timings…” The advice flowed. “Ebon [Moss Bachrach] would tell me to have more dignity with a scene: stop acting, and be yourself. Find the character.” Matheson offered up nuances to the cast of the restaurant world in return. “It was a really sweet reciprocal.”

Certainly, that’s how Jeremy Allen White sees it. First with plot. “So much of what happens in the kitchen,” Allen White tells me, “comes from Matty. Things that may seem ludicrous are real things that have happened in his storied career. He shaped the bigger picture.” Matheson’s guidance is also central to Allen White’s Emmy-winning performance. “My physicality, the pressure and high-stakes, camaraderie, Matty guided me. Early on, I asked him to interrupt me in a scene if anything I did looked strange or goofy. He did frequently, which was invaluable. When I felt uncomfortable, sometimes, being as emotional, or as physical, as the script called for, he could explain the reality.” Fak’s role has expanded through the seasons, as has Matheson’s confidence. “Matty oozes charisma,” Allen White continues. “You want to be around him. To watch and laugh with him. He’s grown so much in these last couple of years. It’s clear why the writers have given him more. Plus, he’s the greatest guy who’ll do anything he can to promote success in others: in this industry, that’s rare.”

Few episodes of television are as perfect as “Fishes”, The Bear’s exhausting, exhilarating season-two flashback episode, which guest-starred a host of Hollywood heavyweights. At this year’s Emmys, it alone gained nine nominations, winning four, including gongs for Jon Bernthal and Jamie Lee Curtis. “We were all pinching ourselves,” Matheson says, of filming it. “We’d shoot a scene, then be like, woah: this is happening. We could feel it – once in a lifetime. During the fight scene at the end, I had to keep holding Bernthal back. Him flipping the table was nuts – he wasn’t supposed to do that the way he did. It was filled with real glass and everything.” It was shot over just four days on location. Two houses were rented: one for filming, another, where the cast relaxed between scenes. In season three, he and Lee Curtis are reunited in a particularly tender scene. She remembers shooting it fondly. “We spent five hours waiting for darkness,” she tells me, “and really got to know each other… a magic time that I will never forget.”

Matheson is enjoying the acting, for now. There’ll be more Fak, definitely. “Making The Bear is like, the greatest,” he says. “Four years in, we love each other like siblings. I’m still not sure I’m great at acting, but I like doing it with these guys… And well, that’s fire. I’m doing a couple of auditions, because why not? Honestly, that’s how I feel: I’m self-sufficient. I’m not doing it for fame, or money, it would be to do something cool that makes sense.”

“Listen,” he adds, “all of this is also addiction. I’ve an addictive personality – I’m a drug addict and alcoholic. It’s all void-filling and wanting and adding to the nothingness of our souls.” It’s why, Matheson believes, he does so much. “This ain’t nothing compared to the fears and the anxieties I used to have, even if I still have lots of them. I have a beautiful family, and I can provide for them. That’s the greatest thing in the world.”

Soups, Salads, Sandwiches: a Cookbook by Matty Matheson is published by Murdoch Books at £25

Styling by Chloe Badawy; grooming by Bryan Ramirez using Shiseido and By Terry; photographer’s assistant Michael Preman; shot on location at Helms Daylight Studio, LA