Jon Bernthal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach on 'Gary' and 'bold' 'Bear' sendoff

• "The Bear" surprised fans by releasing a standalone, flashback episode of the series on May 5, 2026.
• The episode, co-written by series stars Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, depicts a day Michael and Richie spent together.
• Bernthal says in the episode that happens not long before Michael's death, they "wanted to dig into the wound of memory.”

Spoiler alert: This story contains details from "Gary," the new standalone episode of "The Bear."

Sometimes at a high-end restaurant – like Carmy’s painstakingly prepared The Bear – chefs greet their guests with a chosen amuse-bouche, a one-bite starter to whet the appetite. On May 5, “The Bear” surprised audiences with a special standalone episode titled "Gary," streaming now on Hulu.

In the 59-minute flashback, Michael (Jon Bernthal), older brother to Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), picks up their close family friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), aka “Cousin,” to deliver a package to Gary, Indiana, for Jimmy (Oliver Platt). The trip was mentioned in June’s Season 4 finale, when Richie joined Carmy and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) in the alley for a tense discussion about Carmy’s plans to leave the restaurant to find himself.

“We were, like, cruising down the lake, outside of town,” with “good tunes,” Richie says in the finale. “For, like, half an hour… it felt, like, perfect, like that was as good as it gets.”

Moss-Bachrach, 49, tells USA TODAY that he and series creator Christopher Storer “had been talking for a while about a day that Michael and Richie spend together, not long before Mike passes away,” but initially, there were no plans to film it. References to the trip with Bernthal (Moss-Bachrach's cowriter for “Gary”) go back to Season 3 of “The Bear."

“But when we shot that scene in Season 4," Moss-Bachrach says, "we knew we were going to shoot this episode, but we hadn't shot it yet."

In the Season 4 finale, Richie revealed to Carmy how much he blames himself for Michael’s suicide, which occurred before Season 1 and brought the fine-dining-trained Carmy back to his family’s casual Chicago restaurant. Carmy then made the space upscale.

“I tried to get him to talk to somebody,” Richie says during the finale. “I thought, maybe if I could stay at The Beef, I could keep an eye on him.”

“Gary” shows just how juxtaposed Richie and Michael were toward the end of his life. In the trip to the past, Richie and Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs) are still married and expecting their daughter any day now. Richie feels that life, like an open road, is full of possibilities, and is so excited for his trip with Michael that he burns a CD just for their voyage about 30 miles outside of Chicago. A high-strung Michael, Richie observes, brings a darker, “glass-half-empty kind of energy.” Michael scoffs at Richie’s notion that this could be “a potentially transformative day.”

When Jimmy says they can’t make the drop-off for a few hours, the boys kill time by playing basketball with some locals and going to a bar where Michael gets to know Sherri (Marin Ireland). In a bathroom stall, between bumps of cocaine, Michael tells Sherri about his rocky childhood. At one time, he felt safe with his mother (Jamie Lee Curtis). She’d go over details of what the next day would bring as she scratched his back. It made Michael “feel so relaxed,” he says, like he could handle anything that came his way.

“And then I remember there was this one time I was like, ‘Hey Ma, will you come in and tell me about my day tomorrow?’” Michael says. “She got angry, and she was like, ‘Mikey, what f------ difference does it make? It’s just a day.’ I just didn’t understand… how that could be the same person?”

Michael revealed to Sherri how weighed down he is by “the meaninglessness of it all.” He went on to detail how he felt "so sad," comparing the heaviness he felt to him "drowning."

In writing the episode, Bernthal, 49, says it was important to revisit those early memories.

“Like always, we wanted to dig into the wound of memory,” he says. “If you've ever lost somebody the way that these folks lost Mikey, you're constantly looking at what you could've done, what you did do, what you didn't do. We really wanted to dig into that with this day. It was very important that this day had to have moments of real, real bliss, but also, we wanted these guys to say things to each other that they could never take back and that would be with them for the rest of their time.”

In an impromptu speech, Michael tells his new friends at the bar how happy Richie is to be so in love and expecting. Then Michael suddenly begins to eviscerate his best friend, predicting his child would “end up abandoned and alone, just like (Richie) was.” Richie is constantly messing things up, Michael says. He suggests that if Richie left, he’d be doing his kid “a favor.”

Richie hits Michael to bring him back to his senses, and Michael spits on him. The two continue fighting as Michael keeps insisting that Richie will mess up his kid.

“Kid’s going to hate you, Rich,” Michael says.

Michael’s hateful words come from a desperate desire not to return home, Moss-Bachrach says.

“He doesn't want to revisit the day-to-day. He doesn't want to return to his house full of demons and ghosts,” Moss-Bachrach says. “And I think Richie becomes a reminder to him of everything that he's trying to avoid and run away from, whether it's through substance or on the road. I think at that moment in Mike's life, he seems like he'd be happy to keep going and never come back… You can't deal with problems that way, but I think that's what he's feeling in the moment.”

In the last minutes of “Gary,” Richie returns to a time after Michael’s death. He stares at the empty seat next to him while driving in the rain, before another vehicle T-bones him on the passenger side and the screen goes black.

Moss-Bachrach answers vaguely when asked about when Richie’s accident takes place, clearly to preserve every detail of the show’s fifth and final season.

“I think he's in a (work) suit in that car, and so I think that sort of gives you an idea of where in his life he is or what time,” he says. “And he looks over at that empty seat, and that seems pretty specific about who he's thinking about.”

“The Bear” reopens for service on June 25 (9 ET/6 PT, FX and Hulu), offering fans an eight-course farewell. The season will stream in its entirety on premiere day. FX will air two episodes on June 25 and then one weekly. According to the debut announcement, the new season resumes the morning after Carmy turns his half of The Bear over to Richie, Sydney and Natalie (Abby Elliott). “With no money, the threat of a sale and a torrential storm in their way, the new partners must band together with the rest of the team to achieve one last service, hoping they’ll finally earn a Michelin star,” the announcement teases. “Ultimately, they learn that what makes a restaurant ‘perfect’ might not be the food, but the people.”

“I found making Season 5 to be a really glorious experience,” Moss-Bachrach says. “It felt like a real kind of magnum opus for the whole show.”

He hasn’t seen any of the episodes but looks forward to watching. “Hopefully, [I’m] not tempting fate, I'm really, really proud of it,” he adds. “It's not easy to end something, and I think we went about it in a bold, bold way.”

If you or someone you know needs mental health resources and support, please call, text, or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit 988lifeline.org for 24/7 access to free and confidential services.