Liza Colón-Zayas poses for a portrait. Credit – Emily Assiran
When Liza Colón-Zayas accepted an Emmy in 2024 for her performance as a headstrong line cook on The Bear, she thanked her family and her collaborators on the show. She expressed shock that she’d won amid a field of nominees that included Meryl Streep and Carol Burnett. Then, clutching her trophy, she said: “To all the Latinas who are looking at me, keep believing.”
In a very real sense, as the first Latina to win the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, her victory doubled as a triumph for the women of her community. Colón-Zayas, who had been acting on stage and screen for more than three decades by the time she earned that recognition, wanted Latinas to see in her success proof that their perseverance could pay off. “It’s important to me that people who look like me not give in to feeling discouraged,” she explains, nearly a year later. “I felt that for so long about myself.”
Tenacity is a quality Colón-Zayas, 53, shares with her Bear character, Tina. Standoffish in early episodes about the incursion of two young fine-dining chefs into the kitchen of the Chicago sandwich shop where she worked, Tina has since grown her skillset in tandem with The Beef’s transformation into a destination restaurant, The Bear. Her defining moment—and Colón-Zayas’—came in the Season 3 episode “Napkins,” which flashed back to the day she was hired at The Beef and revealed that cooking was a second career for Tina, who’d struggled to find employment in the wake of her dismissal from an office job she’d held for years. When Colón-Zayas first read the script, “I cried,” she recalls. “Tina represents such a wide swath of people who keep this country running, yet who are invisible.” A guest appearance by her real spouse, the actor David Zayas, as Tina’s caring husband added to the episode’s authenticity.
“Tina started out, to some people, very problematic,” says Colón-Zayas, who received a second Emmy nomination in July. “I don’t mind playing those roles, as long as I know that eventually there will be room to bring humanity.” Which is precisely what “Napkins” allowed her to do, after a couple of seasons during which the source of Tina’s frustration wasn’t always obvious. When The Bear finally let viewers in on the character’s inner life, she says, “so many people were able to feel seen.” For her, this just goes to show that “if your creators are open to a diverse world, those stories will appear.”
Colón-Zayas has certainly done her part to increase their visibility. Born and raised in the Bronx, she is a founding member of the LAByrinth Theater Company (originally known as Latino Actors Base). In 2000, she wrote, produced, and starred in Sistah Supreme, a one-woman show drawn from her experiences growing up Puerto Rican in New York. An original cast member of Between Riverside and Crazy, she helped Stephen Adly Guirgis take his Pulitzer-winning play from its off-Broadway debut in 2014 to Broadway eight years later. While her acting career grew, she worked as a teaching artist in schools, shelters, and rehab programs. And though it was The Bear that put her on many viewers’ radar, her Hollywood resume is rich with memorable roles in series like Law & Order: SVU, whose fans still approach her on the street to let her know that they were “emotionally destroyed” by her arc as a mom seeking justice for her murdered son. Her versatility is sure to be an asset as she balances The Bear, slated to return for a fifth season in 2026, with upcoming projects that range from a Spider-Man movie to a Hulu real-estate drama pilot in which she plays a community leader on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
As Latinos remain underserved by an entertainment industry whose escalating financial woes have led executives to deprioritize diversity, Colón-Zayas is resolved to use her influence to promote the kind of “authentic, empowered, and layered” representation she craves. “As a society and as artists,” she says, “we are at an inflection point where we have to be willing to take those huge risks.”
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