There was really only one choice for the cover star of our TV issue this year. Ayo Edebiri has been collecting awards and accolades for her performance in The Bear throughout the show’s first two seasons, and with the third dropping this summer, we couldn’t wait to hear about everything she’s doing in and out of the kitchen. Leah Faye Cooper headed to Chicago, where The Bear is shooting two consecutive seasons, to talk to Ayo about her upcoming projects, her adventures on the red carpet (where she’s also on a winning streak), and—among other potent concerns—whether oat milk is really all it’s cracked up to be. Ayo plays a chef on TV, but her professional experience in real life included an early stint behind a coffee counter. “I loved being a barista because I like order,” she told Leah. “There’s something kind of satisfying about getting it right.” Her many satisfied fans would say she’s done so.
At Disney, they’re also thinking about getting it right—it in this case being the succession plan for when CEO Bob Iger vacates his chair at the end of 2026. As Natalie Jarvey and Joy Press report, four in-house executives are emerging as top contenders. The fate of what is fiscally a small nation—chief export: entertainment—hangs in the balance, as does Iger’s legacy, which suffered some tarnishing when his previous pick for successor flamed out in under three years. Natalie and Joy dig into the contenders’ backgrounds, bios, and odds, as well as the effect of this ongoing drama on the mood at the Magic Kingdom, where, as one insider puts it, “People don’t know which horse to bet on. They’re afraid to cross anybody.”
Meanwhile, on location in Colombia, Silvana Paternostro reports on the much-anticipated upcoming Netflix production of One Hundred Years of Solitude. As she writes, Gabriel García Márquez held the rights to his classic novel close, and there’s been no major screen adaptation on his terms—Spanish language, filmed in his home country—until now. Silvana, who has edited an oral history of Márquez, tells a rich tale about trying to do justice to a masterpiece: The streamer is planning a two-part 16-episode series, drawing from local actors for its cast and building the fictional town of Macondo from the ground up.
And in our already-existing city of dreams, a.k.a. Los Angeles, our West Coast editor Britt Hennemuth rides along with Glen Powell for a morning of flea market browsing and brunching, catching up with the Anyone But You star about his next movie, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, and how he’s learned to take fame in stride.