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I haven’t watched The Bear, nor did I ever get into Shameless, but I’m really enjoying all of the thirst for Jeremy Allen White. White’s whole celebrity persona is “working class dude with secrets” and those are the kinds of characters he plays as well. People are obsessed with The Bear (which is on Hulu) and White’s character, Carmy, who inherits a Chicago sandwich shop from his brother. The screencaps of White have been going around:

I haven’t watched The Bear yet but I’m thrilled that people who’ve never worked in a restaurant are being introduced to an exclusive strain of Sexually Competent Dirtbag™️ that only exists in a restaurant kitchen pic.twitter.com/ZnZJOdM0l8

— Sarah York (@thesarahyork) July 6, 2022

It’s amazing and accurate. Anyway, White has seen the memes and he’s fine with most of it. Mostly, he’s just happy that it means The Bear is being seen and it’s something of a word-of-mouth success. He really wants to do a second season. Some highlights from his GQ profile:

No social media for all of the memes: “I don’t have Twitter or anything like that, but we do have a group text for the show and they are making me aware of it. They know me, and they know how embarrassing it is for me.”

He gets why people are hot for his character: “What I find attractive in people is a determination. If you’re truly good at something, that’s incredibly attractive. I understand people having a crush on Carmy. I think I have a bit of a crush on Carmy… [but] Carmy’s, like, the least sexual person. In playing him, I was aware that he had no room for love.”

He worried about going from Shameless to The Bear, playing similar characters: “I think I was too concerned with what other people might think,” he says. Ultimately, the writing won him over. “I also knew that if I said no to this, that whoever ended up doing it, I would hate them forever. So there was some spiteful stuff going on, too.”

He bought a place in Brooklyn without even seeing it in person: “I’m always on realtor apps. I’m a freak like that. And this house came along that was really inexpensive,” he says. So he and his wife, the actress Addison Timlin White, are currently stationed back East for the summer to be near their families.

Yeah, he’s married: He and his wife initially met in high school, when they were 14. “I was instantly very much into her and she, me too, I think,” he says. “But she had a boyfriend. I was just so clumsy about all that stuff. And then she went to a different school and I was really broken up.” (They have two kids now, aged 3 and 1.)

Moving to LA at 18 for Shameless: “I didn’t have a community outside of the show when I first got there, and I felt super isolated. I would go to Canter’s a lot and read scripts. There was something kind of romantic about that loneliness in the first year, too. I was learning a lot about how to behave as a person outside of an actor. We learned how to be, I think, decent people on that show, too.”

[From GQ]

The GQ piece includes more of his thoughts about Shameless’s decade-long run (he thinks it probably should have ended earlier) and how he prepared for The Bear by taking a crash course at a cooking school and then training under some real chefs. So… he used to be helpless in the kitchen, but now he cooks for his family, all because of this job. Hot. Anyway, he seems like a cool guy who figured out his sh-t. I had no idea he was married with two kids!

jeremy allen white as carmen "carmy" berzatto. that's it. that's the tweet. pic.twitter.com/XMAHCo8HdU

— z (@tomlette_greggs) July 5, 2022

I have moved on from men that look like Jeremy Allen White because I have self esteem, BUT—there really is something about his hands pic.twitter.com/M9DkIsHmm0

— Meech (@MediumSizeMeech) July 11, 2022

Photos courtesy of GQ.