While filming season three of their award-winning series The Bear, Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, and the rest of their castmates attended a baseball game at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Monday (May 20). While at the game, White and Edebiri were recorded sitting next to each other, and White was caught gently rubbing Edebiri’s back. The video has gone viral, with Carmy (White’s character in The Bear) and Sydney (Edebiri’s character in The Bear) shippers fervently asserting that while they’re “trying so hard to be normal about this”, they quite literally can’t. 

Those online are convinced that White and Edebiri are in a relationship because “friends don’t touch each other like that”. But don’t they? And if they don’t, why have we allowed certain intimacies to only be permissible in romantic, often monogamous relationships? 

White and Edebiri are going through what Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar Jones have been experiencing since the release of Normal People in 2020. After starring in the heartbreaking TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name, those on the internet are convinced that Mescal and Edgar-Jones have at one point been in a relationship because their closeness is something their fans can’t quite understand. Even when Mescal was in a public relationship with musician Phoebe Bridgers, speculation around their secret past relationship continued to grow – so much so that people critiqued Bridgers for even “allowing” Mescal to be as close to another woman as he is. 

When actors in relationships have to be intimate with another actor on TV or in film, it’s common to hear people remark that they don’t know how actors’ real-life romantic partners deal with that. Made in Chelsea’s Sam Thompson famously asked Timothée Chalamet this same question during the press tour for Dune: Part Two, as Chalamet and his romantic interest in the film Zendaya are in relationships. Chalamet, unimpressed by the question, shrugged, commenting that it’s just “the nature of the job”. While many actors do cheat on their partners with their on-screen love interest (see: Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, Dominic West and Lily James), acting is a practice that opens you up to a more expansive and profound way of understanding friendship. 

If you were ever a theatre kid (as I was), think back to when you performed in a play: the months you spent learning lines, rehearsing, and getting to know your fellow cast mates. During that time, I had never felt closer to a group of people, especially those of the opposite gender (to put it plainly), than when we were performing together. As we got to our final show, all we could do was touch each other. As we held hands and hugged each other tightly, we hoped the show and how we felt about each other would never end. This behaviour may raise eyebrows outside of a theatre setting (just as White, Edebiri, Mescal and Edgar Jones’ does). But, within it, we were allowed to display an intimacy typically only seen as appropriate in romantic relationships. Through the theatre, we were shown alternative and enriching ways to be friends.

When speaking about this to fellow theatre kid and actress Vienna Ayla, she wholeheartedly agrees: “The love you experience with those who are part of your ensemble is indescribable. I think it changes you. Theatre has transformed my definition of family, and it’s a feeling actors chase repeatedly throughout their life.” 

To make these relationships socially acceptable, actors describe their cast mates as “family”, as Ayla does above. However, in her book Collapse Feminism, author and video essayist Alice Cappelle believes we should reject describing our friends as family as it reduces the value of friendship. “To diminish its value, deep friendship is either sexualised (‘they must be gay’) or reconnected to kinship (sisterhood, brotherhood, fraternity) to cancel the presumption of homosexuality” or any sexuality, ”and go back to the family.” 

It’s possible to have open, loving, and physical relationships without being polyamorous or non-monogamous. This approach to love is all about challenging one’s beliefs about love, ownership, and autonomy. Friends can and should be deeply intimate with one another. Life is too short for us not to touch, hold, and even kiss our friends as much as we can. To restrict this type of intimacy, and permit it only in monogamous relationships, is to deny our loved ones and ourselves what American philosopher Michael Hardt describes as “red love”. Hardt believes we can only experience a red, revolutionary love when “property love” (a love that suggests you are owned by another individual, and as a result, can’t deeply love or be loved by another) is abolished. 

Abolition is a long and ongoing process, but acting and the theatre are domains where the work to create a red love is already being done. While we don’t know the relationship status of White and Edebiri or the history of Mescal or Edgar-Jones’s relationship, we should take a leaf out of their book to revitalise our friendships and make them as red and revolutionary as possible.