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How Ebon Moss-Bachrach Gave The Bear Some Teeth

This year he won an Emmy for playing Cousin Richie, the cranky loose cannon in The Beef’s kitchen. Next year he’ll be Ben Grimm in Marvel’s Fantastic Four. Some actors wait their whole lives for a moment like this. Moss-Bachrach isn’t one of them. “I was never asking,” he says, “when it was going to be my turn.”

And maybe because Moss-Bachrach’s done such a great job playing a charming dirtbag underdog on the show, one of the first things I say to him is how I can’t help but feel a little strange and out-of-place being back in this same park decades later, in what’s now a posh pocket of Brooklyn, because 20 years ago I accompanied somebody to the same spot on a drug buy, just a few feet from where I’m now watching a group of kids probably named Kale and Sufjan draw smiley faces on the red brick walkway with pastel-colored chalk. Despite his connections to the Marvel Cinematic Universe—he played Frank Castle’s sometime ally David Lieberman on Netflix’s The Punisher, and next summer he’ll be Ben Grimm, The Thing, in The Fantastic Four, a project so early days he can’t say another word about it—Moss-Bachrach wasn’t a comics kid growing up. But it wasn’t a solitary action the way drawing is, and Moss-Bachrach quickly began to understand how he could stretch out and make a scene that had been acted out a million times by countless other people into something different, the same way Glenn Gould found a way to add something to Bach’s music 200 years after the composer’s death.

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