Lionel Boyce

“Oh, you’re there,” he says. I can picture him nodding and pressing his temples, the depth of the greenness he signed up to spend a day with only now sinking in. He tells me to go through the metal detectors and then look for him at the turnstiles “all the way on the right. I’m wearing a burgundy hat.” Despite the thousands of people milling about the asphalt, he adds, assuredly, “You can’t miss me.” Hat and stature aside – he stands 6-foot-3 – modern connoisseurs of zeitgeist-driven comedy-drama cannot miss Lionel. He plays the pastry chef Marcus Brooks on the much-lauded FX series ‘The Bear’, an ode to the restaurant industry’s big dreamers and hard scrabblers. Lionel’s character is both – even as tragedy hits home and his workplace descends into chaos, Marcus remains committed to elevating his craft, coming up with ever more inventive desserts to impress his colleagues, the restaurant’s customers and himself.

Lionel is the type of guy who wants to make sure you’re comfortable. “I’ve been mentally mapping out the rides,” he says, once we’re through the turnstiles. “What I was thinking was, we start with the Harry Potter ride. I haven’t done the tram ride in years. We’re gonna have to do the Mummy. Maybe we’ll do it twice.” In case it’s not clear, Lionel likes amusement parks. Like, really likes amusement parks. Growing up in Inglewood, to the southwest of Los Angeles proper, he spent many a summer afternoon at Universal Studios, Disneyland and Six Flags Magic Mountain. “El Toro is the best,” he says, referring to a ride at Magic Mountain’s sister park in New Jersey that, per its online description, features “an amazing nine opportunities” to experience zero gravity.

We pass a turret. Up ahead, a mechanical dragon roars. “Are you a ‘Harry Potter’ fan?” Lionel asks. I confess that I’m among the uninitiated. “I read the first book,” he says. “Then I lied and said I read the second one, but I really only watched the movie. The books are too long. I was kind of jealous as a kid. The idea of going to boarding school was always interesting to me, and then the buffet at the cafeteria: it sounds like so much food on the table. It’s funny, the things that, like, catch your eye as a kid. That and the cake from ‘Matilda’. That stuff sticks with you forever.”

Food made an impression on Lionel, but so did the worlds that these franchises built, universes unto themselves with different parameters than the terrestrial one we know too well. He brings up one of the best that ever did it: “Disneyland really knows how to create a universe,” he says, as we snake through the stanchions of the Harry Potter ride. “When you’re there, you can’t see beyond where you’re at. You’re in Orange County, but you have no idea. The peripheral plays a big part in that. I think that’s the key to world-building, in general, the peripheral.”

“When you’re making a movie or show, people focus so much on the main characters,” he adds, “but what makes something rewatchable, I think, is the world around them. The secondary characters, the place where they hang out. If you can make it a place that people watching want to move into, if you can attach feeling to it,” he trails off. “It’s like the difference between rewatching an entire movie versus fast forwarding to this one funny scene and then turning it off.” Some worlds hit harder. “During the pandemic, I watched ‘Six Feet Under’,” the HBO series about the family behind a Los Angeles funeral home, says Lionel. “I loved it so much that after the finale, I looked up where the house in the show was. I drove there just to, like, see it. Then I realised I probably looked weird. I was in my truck in broad daylight, sitting and staring at this house.” It’s easy to imagine Lionel cataloguing what works and what doesn’t, figuring out how, one day, he might build such a resonant world of his own.

We’ve reached the moving walkway that leads to the ride. Lionel only stops talking when the attendants push down our harness and the machinery swoops us down into the world of wizardry swiftly enough that I scream. Surprise and delight. The ride is as immersive as Lionel promised. You couldn’t take out your phone and scroll even if you wanted to.

Afterwards, a restroom break. I emerge to find him on the phone. “Alright, well, I’m gonna go ride the next ride,” he says to the person on the other end. “That was Ayo [Edebiri],” he says, who plays Sydney, the sous-chef on ‘The Bear’. “She was, like, ‘Where are you?’ I could hear the jealousy in her tone. I thought I’d beat her to the punch.” In the run-up to the release of season three, Lionel has been in close contact with all of the show’s cast members, though he doubts they’re approaching interviews the same way. “I think everyone treats this as, like, a responsible thing,” he says, “and I treat it like I’m a child.”

Lionel has leaned into child-like joy his entire life. He grew up playing basketball, baseball and football and was thinking about pursuing the latter until he met musician Tyler, the Creator in drama class during their senior year of high school.

“We had the same sensibilities,” Lionel says, post-Harry Potter. “He said, ‘If I ever do a show, I want to do it with you.’” That opportunity came a few years later, when Lionel was attending community college, after Tyler, the Creator and his music group, Odd Future, had taken off. “I had a choice: transfer to another college or try to do this sketch comedy show with Ty,” he says. He “dove head first” into the show. “I do sometimes wonder, if I hadn’t made that decision, would I have found my way into this type of work?” Lionel says. “You think about why people like me don’t do what they wanted to do – is it because they never found it? Or does it come back again and find you in a different way? Is it inevitable?” The show, ‘Loiter Squad’, premiered on Adult Swim in 2012 and ran for three seasons. A direct descendant of ‘Jackass’, it features Lionel in bizarro bits, using a fish as a gun and wearing an increasingly ridiculous series of wigs. “I learnt a lot about how to make a show and comedy in general,” he says. “I learnt what the borders are, but not really. I learnt what I thought the borders were.” Tyler and Lionel also collaborated on ‘The Jellies!’, an animated series that you could call their riff on ‘Family Guy’. Auditioning for Marcus in ‘The Bear’ was a departure, and once Lionel got the role, he set about making sure he had the culinary knowledge of a short-order cook turned burgeoning pastry chef.

“Research wasn’t called for, but I took it upon myself to research doughnuts,” a focal point of his character’s arc in the show’s first season. “I made a list of the best doughnut shops around Los Angeles and went to all of them, which was, like, a dream scenario for me.” He drove to shops in parts as far as Glendora (26 miles east of LA) and Carlsbad (87 miles south). “Randy’s is still my favourite,” he says, referencing an iconic LA chain with a cartoonish logo. “A simple chocolate-iced donut from Randy’s – that gets me every time.”

As Marcus’s storyline expanded, so did Lionel’s palate. “I wasn’t an adventurous eater before ‘The Bear’ at all,” he says. “But the show and going to places where they appreciate culinary art and eating with people who are extremely enthusiastic about it opened my mind.” He travelled to Copenhagen and dined at noma ahead of filming ‘Honeydew’, the season-­two episode that finds Marcus staging at an outré restaurant inspired by René Redzepi’s Danish haven of haute cuisine. Marcus comes into full bloom in ‘Honeydew’. Anyone who has ever felt like a stranger in a strange land will see themselves reflected in his weary glance up at the Copenhagen Metro map, the gears of his mind turning, trying to figure out how he got here and where he’s going.

“Talking about experience – the way they bring you into this… It’s so cool,” Lionel says. “That’s the best thing about this place. The walk in. It’s so incredible.” We’ve emerged from a dim tunnel into a three-dimensional version of the Super Mario Bros. video game. “There’s this idea of expansion and retraction,” Lionel says. “I did a tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Barnsdall Park,” south of the Los Feliz neighbourhood of LA, “and you see the way he made low ceilings for the hallways to lead to high ceilings in the living room to give you that feeling, that big reveal.”

It is soon revealed to us that the Toadstool Cafe is fully booked and taking no more diners. We move on to the Mummy, which offers arguably the most bang for your Universal Studios buck. “It’s a metaphor,” says Lionel, afterwards. “It’s unexpected. It’s found a way to do so much with so little. That ride is, like, 30 seconds, in a little dark room, with that reverse switch up in the middle. It’s just, like, bam.”

It’s Cinnabon or bust. He orders a quartet of mini Cinnabons (I, heeding his advice, get the last “centre cut”) and we sit down on a shaded bench to attend to our containers of pastry, which he eats with a fork and knife. Lionel being a jack of many trades, I ask whether he feels like he has to pick a speciality now, given the success of ‘The Bear’. He shrugs. “People will look at the last thing that you’ve done that meant something to them and put you in that box,” he says. “But there’s really no box that I see myself in. The people that I’ve looked up to and been inspired by have always just kind of done whatever they wanted.”

Take, for example, Larry David, the blueprint of the writer-producer turned star. Lionel had a turn with David in the last season of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ playing a lawn-jockey salesman immune to David’s charms. “The more you can lean into that childlike desire to do what you want to do,” Lionel says, “that’s where it always starts. It’s not like I don’t get worried or doubtful. But I try to remind myself to zoom out when I’ve zoomed in too far. Some of the most successful people fail miserably and still turn out successful in the long run.”

“You’re still you,” he says, closing his Cinnabon box. “You have your mind. It’s not like the superpower bestowed upon you is fleeting.” The superpower could, perhaps, create a world unto its own. On that note: has he thought about what kind of theme-park ride he would want, should he ever get to build one? He breaks into a grin. “I haven’t thought about that at all. But, definitely a roller coaster. High and fast.”