Every year, television’s cavalcade of familiar faces makes room for a handful of actors who seemingly come out of nowhere to captivate viewers with indelible performances. This season’s breakout characters include a reckless daughter, a witty drug lord and a hunky younger brother. The Envelope checked in with the actors behind those performances to find out what makes them tick.
“Beef” (Netflix)
He’d spent seven years in New York trying to make it as an actor but in 2020, Young Mazino found himself back in Maryland living with his parents. “I was tired, stressed, sick of feeling insane because of this delusion of mine about being an actor,” Mazino recalls. “I decided ‘I’m done.’”
A few weeks later, Mazino changed his mind when he received the breakdown for “Beef.” “Ali Wong, Steven Yeun, A24 — it’s going to kill me if I don’t get this,” Mazino thought. “At the behest of my sisters, I sent in a tape and two chemistry reads later, I was offered the role of Paul.”
Showrunner Lee Sung Jin’s road-rage dramedy casts Mazino as a buff slacker who falls in love with Amy (Wong), the archenemy of his older brother, Danny (Yeun). To wrap his mind and body around the sibling rivalry, Mazino hit the basketball court with Yeun. “We’re bumping into each other in these intense one-on-ones trying to score and one-up each other,” Mazino says. “On the final play, I did a layup and Steven fouled me but I got it in. I landed and we were both like: ‘That’s the energy we need.”
Paul’s ill-fated affair with Amy drew on a skill set that Mazino discovered in New York while taking classes at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. “I found that I have an affinity for texts that have to do with the problems of love,” he says. “In ‘Beef,’ Paul’s naïve. Because he and Amy have had this intimacy, through the sex, he thinks they’re this Romeo and Juliet power couple. When Amy sets her boundaries, it feels like a betrayal.”
“Tiny Beautiful Things” (Hulu)
Young Clare Pierce, mad with grief, has sex with the funeral director after her mother dies, drunkenly relieves herself in a nightclub’s parking lot, fails to graduate from college for refusing to write an essay about a short story she despises, falls in love with a charismatic musician and has their baby. It’s a lot, and Sarah Pidgeon, who plays the 20-something version of Kathryn Hahn’s 49-year-old antihero in “Tiny Beautiful Things,” sometimes wondered if she could deliver angst on command. “I’m such a good actor when I am by myself and no one’s watching,” Pidgeon says, laughing. “But on days when we had intense scenes, I’d get nervous: Is ‘it’ going to be there? Am I going to feel real in the scene?”
As it turned out, Merritt Wever, who portrays Clare’s cancer-doomed mother with “incredible warmth,” inspired Pidgeon to embody sorrow, rage and bitterness with heart-rending conviction. Pidgeon says, “When your mother figure for the past three months — Merritt — has two weeks left to live, a lot of the emotional heavy lifting sort of does itself.”
Pidgeon grew up in Michigan, attended Carnegie Mellon University, studied acting at Drama Centre London and appeared for two seasons on Prime Video’s stranded-on-a-desert island adventure “The Wilds.” Once she secured the “Beautiful” gig, Pidgeon took workshops with showrunner Liz Tigelaar, director Rachel Lee Goldenberg and key cast members. “The workshops were about cultivating the inner world of your character by marrying it with your own individual experiences,” says Pidgeon, who had plenty to draw on. “I lost my father at the same age that Clare lost her mother,” she says quietly. “I miss him very much. Clare’s experience is different from my own because I had a great support system, so I didn’t distract myself in the ways that she did. I’m just grateful that this show gave me another chance to grieve.”
“Mayor of Kingstown” (Paramount+)
“This is the part where it gets really freaky,” says Nigerian British actor Tobi Bamtefa, 20 minutes into his account of the winding path that led to a breakout role opposite Jeremy Renner in “Mayor of Kingstown.” Bamtefa had already recapped why he skipped drama school (too expensive), quit his bank job (too boring) and decided to become an actor after seeing “Julius Caesar” in a West End theater (chills). The freaky part? Bamtefa watched Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” in a movie theater and announced at intermission that he wanted to work with Tim Roth. A couple of weeks later, Bamtefa landed his first TV gig on a series starring… Tim Roth.
Roth’s crime drama “Tin Star” put Bamtefa on the map in England and in 2021, he self-taped his audition for “Mayor of Kingstown” drug kingpin Bunny Washington. “Parts of Bunny are similar to me in that he uses humor to approach tense situations,” Bamtefa says. “I do that too, because it takes the edge off! That’s how I attack life.”
Bamtefa mastered an American accent by studying YouTube videos and watching all five seasons of “The Wire,” then flew to Toronto. There, in character as Bunny, he ruled his turf perched in a lawn chair on the frontyard of a housing project. “There’s something quite regal about it because this is Bunny’s domain,” Bamtefa says. “I’m putting myself out there: ‘Here I am if you wanna come at me, but you’re probably not going to survive.’”
In Season 2, Bunny goes to prison. “It was really nerve-racking,” recalls Bamtefa. “There must have been about 500 background artists, and some had spent time in prison. Some were gang members. I knew if I wasn’t convincing, you’d see it on their faces. The humor in Season 1 was a mask that Bunny uses. In Season 2, the mask has to come off because otherwise, everyone’s going to see him as a chump.”
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