Fans of The Bear may be rooting for sous-chef Sydney and head chef Carmy to become more than colleagues, but Ayo Edebiri insists that a romance between the two isn’t in the cards.

The Golden Globe-winning actor, who plays Syd opposite Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy, told Vanity Fair that the duo’s charged dynamic comes from their shared ambition — not romantic chemistry. “I feel like we’ve been saying since [Season] 1, but I don’t know if people are starting to believe us now,” she explained. “I do think that like there’s something about seeing people where they’re really passionate or where they’re excelling at something, it can feel exciting and charged. It’s a hard thing to talk about because we never get it right. I don’t know, my job is to do the thing, and then how you interpret it is how you interpret it.”

Edebiri stressed that the relationship should remain strictly professional: “But I do think it’s professional, and I do think if anything were to happen, it would not be the show that we’re making. And I also think it would be so crazy. That man is crazy and that girl is a bad communicator! The restaurant would blow up in like three seconds if anything ever happened.”

In the series, Carmy has already navigated a romantic arc with Claire (Molly Gordon), a childhood friend whose relationship with him unraveled in Season 2. Claire returned in the recently released fourth season, where lingering feelings between the two complicate Carmy’s journey.

Created by Christopher Storer, The Bear follows Carmy, a young fine-dining chef who returns to Chicago after his brother Mikey’s (Jon Bernthal) death to take over the family sandwich shop, with Syd becoming his right hand in the transformation of the eatery into a high-end restaurant. FX renewed The Bear for a fifth season in July, just weeks after Season 4 premiered in June.