Success — the kind that mints careers, wins you awards, and allows you to meet your heroes — can sometimes be a curse in disguise. Just ask Lee Sung Jin.
Following the release of Beef, the writer-director’s extraordinary Netflix drama about a road-rage incident that spirals into a war between two angry Angelenos, he went from writing-room veteran (Silicon Valley, Tuca & Bertie) to being the showrunner du jour in a blink. The show instantly became one of the streamer’s biggest hits and won a host of Emmys, including Best Limited Series or Anthology, best actor awards for both Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, and two for Lee himself (Best Director and Best Writer). Filmmakers he worshiped were now fanboying out over him. He found himself going overseas on other folks’ dimes and being introduced to power players and politicians. It was, by his own admission, thrilling and more than a little dizzying.
“Sonny,” as Lee is colloquially known, didn’t take any of this good fortune for granted. He’d made the right show at the right time, and his talent was being recognized. Now Lee just had to do it again. And here’s where the “curse in disguise” part comes in. Because he now had the pressure of repeating Beef‘s near-perfect first season, with an all-new story and a completely new cast, and he had no idea how to — or even if he could — make lightning strike twice.
Lee Sung Jin (at the Beef Season Two world premiere in L.A.) chose a country club setting for this news season because “it’s a microcosm for society at large.”
Getty Images for Netflix
“I’d initially pitched it as an anthology series,” Lee says, over a Zoom call. “Netflix, wisely I think, only picked us up for that first limited run, because it was so personal — it was based on a real-road rage incident that happened to me. And they didn’t want to do another season unless it was coming from the same spot.”
So Lee began playing around with a number of possible ideas for a follow-up season. One involved a male doubles tennis team, “and then Challengers came out.” Another was what he describes as “a little more Rear Window-ish,” about two couples who lived next door to each other. There were, Lee admits, a lot of iterations for what a potential Season Two might look like. And none of them felt right. “[Netflix V.P. of Original Series] Jinny Howe kept pushing back,” he says. “I remember her going, ‘I feel like you’re just trying to do another season of TV. It’s OK if we walk away from this. We can develop something else together.’”
Then, one night near Lee’s home in Calabasas, California, a fight broke out — or, as Lee puts it, a “heated debate” — between a couple that reverberated around his neighborhood. “And it was really fascinating to me to hear everyone’s differing reactions, depending on where they were at in their life,” he says. “People I knew who were younger had a very harsh reaction, and were very judgmental. Other people who had been in relationships a long time were sort of like, ‘Yeah, but, you know… ‘ They were making justifications for it. In our youth, we have these expectations and promises we make to ourselves [in relationships]: ‘Oh, we’ll never do that!’ Then, as you enter midlife, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s why everyone does it.’”
Lee began thinking about the ways that love changes over time, and the way that couples seem to go through the same cycles no matter the circumstances. He also remembered a summer he spent housesitting for friends who were members of the Montecito Club. “I was always like, ‘Country clubs? Gross!’” Lee says, laughing. “I would never be able to afford to go there. But then I’m getting to use their membership privileges every day, and I find myself thinking, ‘OK, should I look into a membership?’ It’s hard not to give in to the temptations of luxury and comfort. And I noticed how all of the members were either Silent Generation or boomers, and all of the employees were millennials and Gen Z. It’s this microcosm for society at large.” When he mentioned the idea of contrasting the experiences of younger and older couples, set in the class-conscious world of a club, Netflix jumped on it. Lee had found his Beef 2.0.
Now streaming on Netflix, Beef Season Two follows Joshua Martín (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay Crane-Martín (Carey Mulligan). He’s the general manager of an exclusive country club not unlike Montecito, catering to the wealthy and entitled. She’s an interior designer trying to improve her clientele list. They live in a chic house filled with the trappings of a good life, but they’re still struggling financially and their dream of a running a bed-and-breakfast is fading in the rearview mirror. And their marriage is quietly imploding.
That is, until the union starts not-so-quietly exploding during a vicious screaming match at their home following a fundraising event. At the exact moment that things threaten to boil over, Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) show up at the Martíns’ doorstep. A young, engaged couple who work at the club, they’re still deep in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. But you can already see where the cracks will soon start. He’s trying to get a career as a personal trainer up and running. She’s sick of scraping by on frozen-pizza dinners and not having proper medical insurance. Both of them long for something bigger than simply making sure club members have fresh ice in their Arnold Palmers.
Ashley and Austin have stopped by the household to return their boss’ lost wallet. She happens to capture the older couple’s “heated debate” on her phone through the window. Realizing these twentysomethings have something on them, Joshua and Lindsay then attempt to keep Austin and Ashley from leaking the video by any means necessary: job promotions, networking connections, dangled offers of concierge healthcare. Ashley — ambitious, envious, in over her head — sees this as an opportunity to level up. Austin — sweet, devoted, slightly dim-witted — just wants her to be happy. From there, the beef between the two couples runs the gamut from faux-gentile to downright nasty.
When it came time to cast this completely different spin on the show’s signature cringe-dramedy, Lee wanted to figure out the younger couple first, “because that would be harder to lock down.” He’d recently seen Melton in Todd Haynes’ May December, and he’d been blown away by his performance. Lee had also wanted to continue exploring the complexities of the Asian-American experience that was such a huge part of the first season, and he felt that Melton, who’s half Korean, would be perfect for Austin. It turned out that Gold House, an organization dedicated to Hollywood’s AAPI community, was having a dinner where Lee and Melton were both invited. The showrunner pulled some strings so he could sit next to Melton and pitch the actor during the event.
“He was in the middle of telling me about the second season,” Melton remembers, in a separate call. “And then he pulls out his phone and shows me a shot of the writers room, and there’s a picture of me on the wall, like a mood-board thing. I asked him, ‘Oh, so does the character have my same type of hair?’ And he just goes, ‘No, we’re writing it for you. We can’t do this without you.’ I said yes before the second appetizer.”
With Melton signed on, Lee began looking for Austin’s counterpart. He’d been a big fan of the FX show Devs, in which Cailee Spaeny had played a young software developer; when asked on a red carpet in 2023 what her favorite movie of the year had been, she replied that the best thing she saw all year, in any medium, was Beef. The two had what Lee says was a series of three-to-four-hour lunches, “just to catch a vibe with her,” and soon enough, the Priscilla star was on board as well.
Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny play the striving younger couple in Beef Season Two.
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Now the showrunner had to figure out who would work as the older couple. “In my head, I was trying to target actors who have an inherent history between them,” Lee says, “because we meet the older couple on such a bad foot forward that I was nervous we’d lose the audience if we don’t believe that there’s a lot already there. So, you know: Oscar and Carey.” It turned out that Isaac and Lee shared the same agency, so the two set up a meeting. He helped put Lee in touch with Mulligan, with whom Isaac had briefly worked in both Drive and Inside Llewyn Davis. Since he was between offices at the time, Lee had to take his introductory Zoom with Mulligan in, ironically, the conference room of a country club. “There were waiters walking by in the background with platters of calamari for an event while I’m trying to explain the story,” he recalls. Soon enough, the show had their central quartet.
“I remember watching the third episode of Beef a little while after that first season dropped,” Isaac says, sitting next to Mulligan on a couch in Los Angeles a few days after Lee and I speak. “It’s the one where Steven [Yuen] is singing the Incubus song in the church, and it’s both so funny and at the same time, you’re going, ‘Why do I think this is so funny?’ I’m kind of laughing at these people, but also for me, it felt very personal as an immigrant, you know, who grew up in a tight-knit community, an evangelical community… . I related to it so deeply. And it made me cringe as well.
“So when Sonny and I first met, I just kept asking him about that scene,” he continues. “And he kept talking about how much of his life and Steven’s life was embedded in that first season, and how with this new thing, he wanted my life in there as well. For me, it’s not about who the director is or even the script. It’s more about: Is there space for me to add something to this? And it was clear that Carey and I would have the space to add things in…”
“An open door to really participate,” Mulligan adds.
“…While still working in the tone of Beef,” Isaac says. He turns to Mulligan. “How long have we known each other? 57 years, right?”
“Give or take,” she replies, deadpan.
“We’ve worked together before, during some very some very formative years,” Isaac notes. “But we’ve never had the chance to build and chart a relationship from beginning to end — the secrets, the histories, the matching tattoos. We really tried to fill out all the love underneath it all…”
“…So that you see that there’s a real cost to this vicious fight they have,” Mulligan finishes.
Melton and Spaeny also ended up spending a lot of time together; when the Los Angeles fires happened in early 2025 right before filming started, they and their families ended up getting a house outside of the city together until the disaster died down. (“She’s my homie!” Melton proudly exclaims.) And Lee, a longtime fan of Korean cinema, managed to “throw a Hail Mary” and cast two of his idols: the Oscar-winning Youn Yuh-jung, best known here for her work in Minari and the TV show Pachinko; and Song Kang-ho, the star of Parasite, The Host, and a number of other classics. They play the country club’s new owner and her husband, a disgraced doctor, and an entire section of the series involving their subplot was shot in Seoul. “I desperately wanted this season to be a bridge between a kind of American culture and Korean culture, not just Korean-American culture,” Lee explains.
What connects those two cultures is capitalism — which, maybe you’ve heard, is currently deep in its late stage. And while Season 2 mines laughs from the differences between the two worlds (when Lindsay rattles off her resumé and namedrops awards to the club’s corporate overlord, the interpreter says, “They are currently not saying anything worth translating”) and the gaps between generations X and Z, there is still an underlying sense that nothing is ever enough for anyone. Every couple is unhappy in their own unique way, but they’re still unhappy. Every exclusive circle has an even more exclusive circle just beyond your reach. Wellness culture gets massively raked over the coals. What the show relinquishes in the regional and diaspora-related specificity of Season 1, it more than makes up for in a bigger look in the ways that obsessing over elusive brass rings ultimately becomes a zero-sum game.
At its core, Beef is still about a certain type of universal tension between the haves and the have-nots — how those who seem to have everything they want are still left lacking, and how those perpetually scrambling to get ahead, get more, or simply get by find themselves resorting to more and more desperate measures. “Comparison is the thief of joy,” Mulligan states. “And a big part of this season, I’d argue, is the way that not only my character, but a lot of folks in general seem to be facing the wrong way in terms of what might really matter.”
“It’s easy to go doom-and-gloom when we look at it,” Lee says, in terms of how the show is reflecting a rather mercenary world outside of viewers’ living rooms. “But I’m hoping the finale doesn’t leave viewers in a doom-and-gloom state. I was trying to leave us in, hopefully, a reflective state about this eternal cycle of life and suffering that we’re trapped in, you know — to find some sort of acceptance or enlightenment through it all. And so I tried to give this season a little glimmer of hope at the end, I guess.”
“There’s hope,” Isaac notes. “And there’s also that thing that I think the show does so well, which is giving us a God’s-eye view of people that feels both sympathetic and a little mischievous. There’s kind of an open awareness with a smile, and maybe some devil horns, that lets you look at these situations, these desires, these conflicts, and recognize them while also going” — he shakes his head and adopts the voice of a bemused, melancholy deity — “‘Oh, you humans. You silly, silly humans.’”
