After working her final shift on The Bear, Liza Colón-Zayas has taken with her a fresh outlook at her onscreen career.

The Emmy winner recently explained that she’s “a lot like” her character Tina Marrero, who finds her calling as a line cook at the eponymous eatery in the FX on Hulu series, which released its fifth and final season last month.

“Going through this journey, [I recognized] there’s no expiration date on realizing my dream as an actor and owning what talents and skills I have and feeling good about it,” Colón-Zayas told People. “I personally have learned a lot about that from playing Tina.”

Colón-Zayas previously spoke to Deadline about bidding farewell to the character of Tina and the inspiration she’s given fans who are embarking on their own new chapters in life, having previously won her first Emmy for the performance at age 52.

“I guess, as a struggling actor for so long, it’s just fresh in me,” she explained. “Even at this point, even having an Emmy, the struggle will always be right in front of me. It’ll always be so fresh. So I think that it was easy for me to tap into and have that empathy for Tina when she’s job searching, and then when she finally lands at The Bear and finds her fit with these guys. When we’re dealing with such traumatic changes — job loss, the grief of losing somebody you love — it could be so overwhelming that it can harden you. I think that that’s where we see Tina at in Season 1. She’s hardened, and these two young people from culinary school, Carmy and Sydney, threaten more loss in this family.

“So I think that, as we struggle, we can feel like, ‘Am I fooling myself? The universe is trying to tell me that this isn’t for me, and that maybe it’s time to get real.’ So I felt that as an actor, and I hope that what people see in Tina is what they see happening to me now in life,” added Colón-Zayas.

Set during one last service, the fifth and final season of The Bear picks up the morning after Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Natalie ‘Sugar’ (Abby Elliott) discover that Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) has quit the food industry, leaving the restaurant to them. With no money, the threat of a sale and a torrential storm in their way, the new partners must band together with the rest of the team to achieve one last service, hoping they’ll finally earn a Michelin star. Ultimately, they learn that what makes a restaurant “perfect” might not be the food, but the people.

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