On ‘The Bear,’ Ramy Youssef Found Stillness in Copenhagen

“I always say guest-directing on television is like being a surrogate, you know?” says Ramy Youssef, the cocreator and star of the popular series Ramy, on which he also writes and directs.

It’s true: Most of the time, when an outside director steps into a show to helm one episode, it’s not their baby. They have to seamlessly match the project’s existing style and vibe, then be on their way. “[The parents] are like, ‘Eat this, do this, but now, the second you give birth, give me the baby back.’ It can not be really that singularly creative,” says Youssef.

But he had a very different experience when he stepped in to direct The Bear’s season two episode “Honeydew,” an installment centered on Lionel Boyce’s Marcus as he heads to Copenhagen in search of training and inspiration for the Chicago eatery’s dessert menu. The episode sheds the series’ signature frenetic energy and replaces it with a more pensive, moodier pace that matches Marcus’s personality. It gave Youssef an opportunity to embed himself and create something that felt totally unique in comparison to the rest of the series.

“The food scene is really cool—I learned so much about how people kind of go out there and find their voice,” he tells Vanity Fair. “You have this character who had really never been on a plane, and he’s trying to find himself outside of the context of taking care of his mother, outside of his family. And I do think there’s a certain quiet in Copenhagen that allows you to have that empty palette.”

It was also a quieter experience for Youssef, who is usually juggling many hats as Ramy’s cocreator, writer, director, and star. For the first time, Youssef—now nominated for the best-director Emmy for his work on The Bear—shares some of the photos he took while spending two weeks in Copenhagen to prepare for the shoot, and reveals how the experience left a lasting impression on him.

Vanity Fair: How would you describe the mood and the aesthetic of Copenhagen and how that influenced Marcus’s story?

Ramy Youssef: A lot of what we talked about was that the colors of where he’s walking, those are also really influencing the colors of the dishes. It’s just kind of how inspiration is. If you are able to be in an open mind, and in an open place, you’re constantly being inspired. So he’s walking through these trees, this park, these plants. He’s at Noma; he’s looking at these vegetables, he’s looking at all these things, and then those things all kind of find themselves in the color of these desserts. I had a fun time getting to really focus on these nuances from a directing point of view.

Tell me about finding the houseboat that Marcus stays on during his visit.

That came out of a conversation that I had with Tyson Bidner, the line producer, who also is our line producer on Ramy. When we shot in Cairo for Ramy, we shot on a houseboat, and then we were kind of joking that we got to extend our international houseboat motif.

We had these scenes in an apartment, and then we’re kind of walking in Copenhagen and realizing, Oh wait, these are really cool places to be and to live. And again, it creates that privacy, that intimacy, that sometimes that can look like loneliness but actually isn’t.

This episode is a real fine line between loneliness and quiet. And I think that the houseboat felt so quiet in this really cool way. There’s even the element of floating—being untethered can either be scary or it can be freeing.

What did you learn at the restaurant Poulette, because Lionel also mentioned Poulette when I interviewed him?