Jeremy Allen White’s bodyguard took some precautionary measures during a fan encounter on the set of “The Bear” Season 4 that left the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor pretty embarrassed.
During a Thursday appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” White revealed how the success of “The Bear,” which is shot in Chicago, has made filming the show more chaotic. “We have a bit more security now because we’re out and we’re shooting on location, and people get a little bit excited,” White said. “We don’t really run into trouble very often. People are always really nice.”
The actor has come to rely on an ex-cop named Moody, whom he met while he was filming “Shameless” in Chicago, to be his bodyguard whenever he is in the Windy City. His relationship with Moody, however, resulted in an embarrassing moment when they were shooting the new season of “The Bear.” “I get out of the van, and there’s a group of maybe, like, 20 19-year-old girls that are barricaded 20, 30 feet away from me,” White explained. “I get out. They start screaming.”
At that exact moment, his bodyguard decided to step in. “Moody picks me up by my hips, lifts me into the air, carries me up these stairs in front of all these young women and places me inside of the house,” White remembered. “I looked at him like, ‘Never do that again.’ Oh, my God. I’ve never felt so emasculated.”
Embarrassing fan encounters are not the only byproduct of a show becoming as successful as “The Bear” has. White has also won three Golden Globes and two Emmys for his performance in the series, but he still finds accepting prizes like that to be an overwhelming experience. “Obviously, you want to win the award because you worked really hard, but there’s also that voice in the back of my head that’s like, ‘You’ll have to go and talk in front of all these people you admire if you win,’” White admitted. “So it’s kind of a battle.”
“I remember the first award I won was for Season 1. It was a Golden Globe, and I do not remember walking up. I do not remember speaking,” the actor added. “You see those videos of people after award shows, and they go, ‘I don’t know what I said. I don’t know who I thanked.’ And I didn’t think it was genuine or honest. I thought it was kind of put on … but it’s real. I blacked out fully for that first one.”
While his appearance on “The Tonight Show” was to promote “The Bear” Season 4’s premiere this week, it also came just a little over a week after the first trailer for “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” in which White plays Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s, was released online. White said he has been blown away by the trailer’s positive reception.
“I had more texts [after that trailer] than when I blacked out and won that Golden Globe,” he revealed with a laugh. “I didn’t realize trailers were that big of a thing.”
You can watch White’s full “Tonight Show” interview yourself in the video above.
