The Bear meme : The Bear fans can thank a bit of organic marketing for their favorite TV series making it to a fourth season.
During Thursday’s episode of The Tonight Show, the star of the FX/Hulu series, Jeremy Allen White, reacted to several viral memes centered on him and the hit TV show, one of which he jokingly credited for getting fans to watch the show.
The X post in question was written by journalist Alex Zaragoza on June 23, 2022, the very day that all eight episodes of The Bear season 1 premiered. “Im too scared to watch The Bear because I’m actively in therapy to stop falling in love with men who look like this,” Zaragoza wrote alongside a still of White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto on the show.
Zaragoza’s post earned over 36,000 likes and 3,500 quotes and reposts. In a follow-up post, she added, “By falling in love i mean wasting my time.”
“Oh man, I think she’s responsible for the success of the show, to be honest,” White told Fallon and the laughing audience. “That one was going around a lot at the beginning. It was really good marketing.”
The internet’s appreciation for White also led to him starring in Calvin Klein’s spring 2024 campaign —with images that also went viral.
“It broke the Internet,” Fallon told a blushing White. When asked how he felt about seeing his ad on a New York City billboard, White noted that as a Brooklyn native, he’s “familiar” with the billboard and seeing it be filled by Calvin Klein models “for decades now.”
“When it was going up, it was like Jan. 3 or something like that. And I went with my best friend from growing up, Gabriel Gomez, and we kind of got there,” he recalled. “It was before it was on Instagram, it was before it was online. It was fresh up for, like, maybe like 30 minutes or an hour. And it was this, like, very beautiful, like, private moment I had with myself.”
And, as Fallon couldn’t resist pointing out, it was “before the whole world got, you know — their private moments with you. Before the world had their private moments with you, you had your own private moment.”
White also briefly touched upon his upcoming project: portraying Bruce Springsteen in the biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere.
The trailer dropped on June 18, giving fans their first look at the film following Springsteen’s efforts to write and produce the 1982 album Nebraska, which emerged in the aftermath of recording Born in the U.S.A. with the E Street Band.
“Getting that out, it was so much pressure,” the actor told Fallon. “You’re playing a real person — nevermind Bruce Springsteen — and I was really touched [when] the trailer came out. I had more texts than when I blacked out and won that Golden Globe [for The Bear].”
“I didn’t realize trailers were that big of a thing,” he added.
The film, which is written and directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass), is based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 novel of the same name. Filming will primarily take place in New Jersey and New York, with additional production happening in Los Angeles.
During April’s CinemaCon, White described the film as, “[a] pivotal moment in Bruce’s life struggling to reconcile the ghosts of his past culminating in his 1982 album.”
While White might still have his nerves, he has the stamp of approval from the Boss himself.
“He sings very well,” Springsteen previously told SiriusXM’s Jim Rotolo. “It’s a tremendous cast of people. They cast the film beautifully, so it’s very exciting. Jeremy is such a terrific actor that you just fall right into it. He’s got an interpretation of me that I think the fans will deeply recognize, and he’s just done a great job, so I’ve had a lot of fun being on the set when I can get there.”
Deliver Me From Nowhere, which hits theaters Oct. 24, also stars Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, a music critic-turned-Springsteen’s producer and manager; Paul Walter Hauser as Mike Batlan, who helped Springsteen set up a low-tech recording setup in his New Jersey bedroom; Marc Maron as Chuck Plotkin, the producer who mastered the singer’s Nebraska recordings; and Stephen Graham (Adolescence) as Springsteen’s father, Douglas.