In case you didn’t already know, Molly Gordon is starring in two of the most delightful (and uniquely toned) productions of the summer: The Bear
When Gordon 27 arrived, she was wearing summer clothes appropriate for the city: a baggy white T-shirt and a simple A short black dress and a baseball cap over his bushy brown hair. We can all agree that this time of year is humbling. “You could be Gigi Hadid and walk down the street and your chest would sweat,” she said. She showed neither the razor-sharp intensity of her Bear
persona, nor her Theater Camp persona The jazzy hand is passionate, but instead exudes a sweet humility. “I feel a little decompressed,” she says of her roller-coaster year.
In Bear, Gordon Claire plays Claire, the knife slicing through Cammy’s muscular exoskeleton, exposing unacknowledged weaknesses and desires. While the first season of the FX show felt almost insular—you only saw the tiniest snippets of the characters’ lives outside the restaurant—the second season broadened the canvas. There are adventures in Copenhagen, but there are also more complex explorations, like what might be going on in the mind of the thick-armed Cammy. When he meets Claire, the girl he grew up with at the supermarket, it’s an intense encounter rather than a cute one. “For a moment, she had a little smile on her face, and then she grew up,” Bear
creator Christopher Storer told me about the shoot The experience of that scene. “Because the scenes we play are usually very chaotic, loud and intense, and all of a sudden we have this very quiet, very beautiful moment where I look over and I can see the whole crew smiling.” Claire brings to mind childhood innocence , a stabilizing force amid the show’s madness, but she — an emergency department resident — is also a woman who gets high touch by resetting broken bones.
In another major project of her summer Drama Camp , Gordon plays Rebecca Diane, who attends The musical director of a children’s summer camp for many years (“AdirondACTS”) was earlier joined by her best friend Amos (played by real-life best friend Ben Platt). The two characters have returned every summer since then—partly because they’re all for the kids, and partly because they’ve been caught in a cycle of arrested development themselves. Their relationship with each other is both pure and somewhat codependent, the thing that sustains them most in life and the thing that holds them back. The film is a love letter to the friendships we form before we figure out the dimensions of adult life, and a meditation on how these relationships can be both defining and limiting.
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