Ayo Edebiri can make a half-swallowed sentence funnier than a punchline. We rate her precision with awkwardness and impatience, and her willingness to let a character be difficult without asking us to forgive them.
Fi1m perspective
In Bottoms (2023), Ayo Edebiri’s Josie seems to reconsider each sentence before she has managed to finish it. Opposite Rachel Sennott’s charging confidence, her apologies keep getting in the way of what she wants to say. We laughed until we had to look away during the dinner at Isabel’s house, because Edebiri makes keeping a lie going look so painfully hard. Emma Seligman’s film has a loose, unsatisfactory plot, but these two are funny enough to make it worth the evening.
That care over speech makes sense in an actor who also writes, with Dickinson (2019) among her credits. Her breakthrough came as Sydney Adamu in The Bear (2022), where Sydney’s ambition matters as much as the pressure of the kitchen. Alongside Jeremy Allen White, she makes the restaurant feel like a workplace containing several separate lives, rather than one troubled man and his supporting cast. She is convincing as a working chef, and Sydney’s determination gives us someone to stay with when the programme’s relentless friction starts to wear us down.
In Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s 2023 drama-camp comedy, she barely seems to exert herself. Her Janet asks the children what they think stage combat is, and Edebiri gets the biggest laughs by doing almost nothing. The film is thin between its jokes, but she knows better than to strain for another one. Her voice gives school reporter April O’Neil a dry, slightly cross manner in Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023), which suits a girl finding journalism easier than adolescence.
Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (2025) asks her to put the warmth aside as Maggie Resnick, and she makes the student watchful and hard to like. In the office scene opposite Julia Roberts, she holds our attention simply by watching Roberts choose her words. We would welcome more parts that allow her to be this severe, but that film keeps cutting away from difficult conversations and is not worth recommending for her performance alone. Start with The Bear for the sustained work, or Bottoms for a properly funny double act.
Biography
Ayo Edebiri, also credited as Funmilayo Edebiri, is an American actress, comedian, writer and director. She was born on 3 October 1995 in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied dramatic writing at New York University.
She gained prominence for her role as Sydney Adamu in the series The Bear (2022–2026), in which she also wrote and directed episodes. For the performance she won a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and received a Directors Guild of America Award nomination for directing the episode "Napkins".
Her film roles include Josie in Bottoms (2023), Janet Walch in Theater Camp (2023), and voice work as April O'Neil in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) and Envy in Inside Out 2 (2024). She made her Broadway debut in Proof (2026).
