Jeremy Allen White

Lip Gallagher was a character who could have eaten Jeremy Allen White's career. He played the screw-up genius brother on Shameless for 11 seasons, and the role fit so well it was genuinely unclear whether he could do anything else. The Bear settled that question. Playing Carmen Berzatto, a fine-dining chef forced to run his dead brother's sandwich shop, he was fully committed: a two-week culinary course at the Institute of Culinary Education and an unpaid stage at a Michelin-starred restaurant before filming started. The Emmy at Season 1's end confirmed what the performance already made obvious.

Three consecutive Golden Globes and two Emmys for The Bear are a specific kind of resume, but the Calvin Klein underwear campaign in January 2024 may have put him in front of more people than all of them combined. The ads generated $12.7 million in media impact value in under 48 hours. The film career that followed has been uneven: Deliver Me From Nowhere, where he played Bruce Springsteen, underperformed in theaters ($44.9M against a $55M budget) but landed No. 1 on Hulu. An A24 crime film with Austin Butler is next. The platform ambitions are clear even if the box office math isn't there yet.

Before acting, he was a trained ballet dancer who attended the Joffrey Ballet's summer program as a kid, switching to acting at 13. He met ex-wife Addison Timlin at 14; they reconnected years later, married in 2019, had two daughters, and she filed for divorce in May 2023. The Gene Wilder grandfather thing is a debunked viral myth he's had to address on talk shows. He has said he's a genuine fan of Wilder's work, which is not the same thing. His per-episode pay for The Bear went from $350,000 in Season 2 to $750,000 in Season 3, which is the industry's way of saying it figured out what it had.