Ayo Edebiri (/ˈaɪoʊ əˈdɛbəri/ EYE-oh ə-DEB-ər-ee;[1] born October 3, 1995) is an American actress, comedian and television writer. She has played chef Sydney Adamu in the FX on Hulu's comedy-drama series The Bear since 2022, for which she won a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Edebiri has also served as a writer and performed a voice role on Big Mouth since 2020 and has written for the comedy series What We Do In the Shadows in 2022. In 2023, she voiced roles in the animated films Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and had starring roles in the comedy films Theater Camp and Bottoms.
She made her hosting debut on Saturday Night Live on February 3, 2024, the eleventh episode of Season 49, with musical guest Jennifer Lopez, the pop sensation.
In 2014, Edebiri acted in an episode of the series Defectives. Edebiri started her career as a stand-up comedian, and performed a stand-up set on Comedy Central's Up Next. Her scripted digital series Ayo and Rachel Are Single began airing on the network in May 2020, which she co-wrote and co-starred in with her friend and fellow comedian Rachel Sennott. She made her film debut in 2020 comedy-drama Shithouse, in an uncredited role. Edebiri co-hosts a podcast called Iconography with Olivia Craighead that features interviews with guests in conversation about their shared personal icons. The podcast is produced by Forever Dog and the second season was released in 2020.
A television writer, she has written for the sole seasons of The Rundown with Robin Thede and NBC's Sunnyside. Edebiri joined the writing staff of Big Mouth for the show's fourth season. After Jenny Slate stepped down from voicing the character Missy so the role could be played by a black actress, Edebiri auditioned and was selected as the replacement in August 2020. Her voice acting as the character began at the end of the show's fourth season. She was a writer and actress in Dickinson's second season on Apple TV+, where she first worked with Christopher Storer, who went on to create The Bear. She acted in a supporting role in the 2022 film adaptation of the Jennifer E. Smith YA novel Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between.
In 2022, Edebiri gained wider prominence as a main cast member on the FX on Hulu comedy series The Bear. She received a Golden Globe Award and Independent Spirit Award and nominations from the Gotham Awards and the Critics' Choice Awards for her role as Sydney Adamu, an ambitious young sous chef. She also won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. Lucy Mangan of The Guardian praised her performance declaring her as "magnificent" and "still lighting up and punching up every scene she is in".
During this time, she became a writer and consulting producer on the Hulu series What We Do in the Shadows, earning a nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Episodic Comedy for the episode "Private School". Edebiri co-produced and appeared on Mulligan (2023), an animated series for Netflix. She also had voice roles in the Netflix interactive special We Lost Our Human. Also, in 2023 she appeared in an episode of the Mel Brooks Hulu series History of the World, Part II and the Black Mirror episode "Joan Is Awful". She also voiced roles in the Disney Channel series Kiff and the Max series Clone High. Later that year she voiced Glory Grant in the animated superhero sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and April O'Neil in the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Both of the films received critical acclaim and were financially successful.
Also in 2023, she starred in the live mockumentary comedy film Theater Camp alongside Molly Gordon and Ben Platt. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to positive reviews with many comparing it to the films of Christopher Guest. Later that year she starred in the teen sex comedy Bottoms opposite Rachel Sennott. The film premiered at South by Southwest. Katie Walsh of The Los Angeles Times wrote, "Sennott and Edebiri deliver two of the funniest performances of the year". She appeared in the film The Sweet East directed by Sean Price Williams which premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival at the Directors' Fortnight.
On January 26, 2023, she joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in the 2025 film Thunderbolts. She later dropped out of the project due to scheduling conflicts caused by the 2023 Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
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