Birth scenes in movies and television shows tend to start out the same: A very pregnant woman is waddling across a room when—swoosh, her water breaks all over the floor. It’s a dramatic way to signal to the audience that a birth is about to happen, but it’s not actually how most labors begin.

In the third season of The Bear, Natalie (played by Abby Elliott) is very pregnant when she volunteers to go to the store to get more paper towels for the restaurant run by her brother Carmy. She’s lifting giant boxes full of paper towels—and, if this had been any other show, we would have seen a stereotypical burst of water to signal that Natalie’s labor was beginning.

But The Bear made a different choice, simply showing her having her first contraction in the parking lot. In the car, she attempts to call her husband, then every member of her restaurant family—but no one answers. As a last resort, she calls her mother, Donna, who joins her at the hospital. The rest of the episode, titled “Ice Chips,” is solely focused on Nat and Donna (returning guest star Jamie Lee Curtis) in the hospital room. Between contractions, they vacillate between being awkward and annoyed to deeply vulnerable with one another.

“When I read the script, I had never read or seen a birth scene like this,” Elliott tells Vanity Fair on the day the episodes were released. “I realized, looking back on birth scenes, there just are a lot of cliches that we fall into, like the water breaking, the screaming in pain. And it’s just not real life at all.”

Elliott would know. The actor was actually pregnant with her second child while she was filming the second season of The Bear, and gave birth to her son on June 9, 2023. With her own birth experience fresh in her mind, she set out to make Natalie’s story ring just as raw and truthful: “I loved that it was the pain of the contractions, and about physically and emotionally needing someone else there.”

“Ice Chips” is a stellar showcase for Elliott, who was previously best known for her comedic work on Saturday Night Live. Here, her dramatic skills are on full display, with the camera often close-up on just her face, Natalie’s emotions—fear, excitement, anxiety—revealed as much through the awkward silences with her estranged mother as through the painful contractions that punctuate their conversation. “It was very empowering. Being someone who has been through it, I felt capable and excited and challenged,” she says. “There’s a lot of beauty in those smaller moments.”

If Elliott had not gotten pregnant as the writers of The Bear were working on the second season, Natalie’s story could have unfolded very differently. She told them the news early on, when she was just 10 or so weeks along. “They seemed thrilled, and like it kind of gave the character something else other than her new role as stepping in as project manager last season,” says Elliott, who was 33 weeks pregnant when they finished filming season two.

When she returned for season three, Elliott had to enter a time warp. “I’m wearing a fake belly to try and match, and getting back into the walk, the waddle, the heartburn, everything being up here in your chest,” she says. “I was burping a lot towards the end of last season, so I was trying to remember that feeling of just my stomach being so far up my esophagus.”

Written by Joanna Calo and directed by Christopher Storer, “Ice Chips” is both raw and authentic. “One of the big things for me was trying to make sure the contractions, the progression of the contractions, felt real and believable,” says Elliott, who rewatched the video of her own labor and birth as well as other birth videos to prepare for the shoot. “I really just wanted to make sure that there were these moments of just severe physical pain and then the calm of, ‘Thank God, the contraction’s over. Okay. Where were we?’”

Between contractions, Natalie is dealing with her erratic mother, who says things that have a tendency to annoy her daughter. Curtis, who first gave a tornado of a performance as Donna during the second season’s “Fishes” flashback episode, is a knock-out scene partner for Elliott, who reveals that they didn’t end up rehearsing together in hopes that it would feel fresh on the day. “When you act with her, everything is completely unexpected, and so much of it is just reacting to these things that she’s doing as myself, as Abby,” she says.

Elliott says the Everything Everywhere All at Once Oscar winner is kind and nurturing in real life, basically the opposite of Donna. At the time of filming, Elliott had a broken ankle thanks to a shuffleboard accident (“I tripped in loafers”), and between takes Curtis was very caring. “She was just on top of me about icing my ankle the entire time, and in the most maternal way,” she says.

But during the scene, Donna and Natalie are struggling with tension caused by their complicated relationship. Donna shares stories of labor with Natalie’s siblings, trying to be tender and sweet—then asks why Natalie didn’t tell her about her pregnancy in the first place. “There was a lot of improvising and moving around,” says Elliott, adding that, at first, she thought she might walk around the hospital room more. In the end, she decided she wanted to be closer to Curtis in the shot. “I so desperately needed her face in mine, and she needed my face in hers. I think that we just kind of felt that in the moment and needed to feel this closeness to each other.”

Toward the end of the scene, Donna tells Natalie about her own experience giving birth to her, and mentions that a song was playing for her in the labor room. She then plays the song—“Baby, I Love You” by The Ronettes—for Natalie. Elliott says she had been listening to that song for months to prepare for a scene that heavily featured improvisation. “In my mind, that was kind of the one thing that I knew was going to happen,” she says. “That was the one true thing that, ‘Okay, well, we have this song. We have this that is going to set a tone.’”

For a birth episode, there’s one major thing missing: the actual birth. The scene ends with Natalie’s husband, Pete (Chris Witaske), arriving, and Donna sitting in the waiting room, ready to become a grandmother. Elliott says there was never a version of the script that showed the actual birth. “I remember asking on the day, ‘So are we going to hear a baby scream?’” she says, with a laugh. “But I really love that it ends on this beautiful, peaceful moment.”