‘The Bear’ Almost Had A Different, Also Awesome Actress Play Carmy’s Chaotic Mom

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 2 of The Bear, so look out.

The second season of The Bear was longer than the first, with 10 episodes instead of eight. One of them was even its own little movie, running just over an hour. That one wasn’t just super-sized; it also packed in one famous face after another. Bob Odenkirk! John Mulaney! Gillian Jacobs! Sarah Paulson! For the chaotic mom of the Berzatto siblings, they went with someone huge: recent Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis. But the show almost went with an equally awesome actress.

Vulture spoke with the FX show’s casting director Jeanie Bacharach, who told them (in a bit caught by The AV Club) that before they sought out Curtis, they actually first asked no less than Michelle Pfeiffer. They almost got her, too. Pfeiffer “was a huge fan of the show and really, really considered it,” Bacharach explained. But it was not to be. “We went back and forth and back and forth, and ultimately her schedule didn’t allow for it.”

Apart from her early, pre-fame days, when she appeared on episodes of Fantasy Island, CHiPs, and the short-lived Animal House spinoff Delta House, Pfeiffer hasn’t done a ton of TV. (Although she has done The Simpsons not once but twice.) Her only semi-recent small screen credits have been the Bernie Madoff HBO movie The Wizard of Lies and playing Betty Ford on last year’s The First Lady.

How would Pfeiffer have been as Donna Berzatto, who has a nuclear meltdown over the course of Season 2, Episode 6 Probably amazing! She’s an incredible actress with huge range, able to play Edith Wharton heroines and Catwoman and do both with equal aplomb. Curtis did knock it out of the park, though, so it’s not worth brooding over what could have been.