When Beef creator Lee Sung Jin finally settled on the premise for season two of the hit anthology series, he had one actor in mind — Charles Melton.
Lee decided to take matters into his own hands, calling up Gold House founder Bing Chen to cash in a favor. The writer-director asked to be seated next to Melton at a dinner they’d both be attending to honor the actor, so he could pitch him the second season. “I remember just being immensely flattered because I didn’t know he went to the extent that he went to sit next to me,” Melton tells The Hollywood Reporter during the show’s season two junket.
“It was amazing to have Lee Sung Jin, Sonny, the creator, show me a picture of my face and say, ‘This is in the writer’s room and we’re writing it for you,’” Melton continues. “I was completely astonished.”
Beef’s second season leaves behind the parking lot feuds, instead focusing on two couples, one millennial (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan) and one Gen Z (Melton and Cailee Spaeny), working at a California country club. The new season follows “a Gen Z couple [who] witnesses an alarming fight between their millennial boss and his wife,” according to the synopsis.
“Newly-engaged Ashley Miller (Spaeny) and Austin Davis (Melton), both lower-level staff at a country club, become entangled in the unraveling marriage of their general manager, Joshua Martín (Isaac), and his wife, Lindsay Crane-Martín (Mulligan),” the synopsis continues.
Charles Melton as Austin Davis, Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller, Carey Mulligan as Lindsay Crane-Martin, Oscar Isaac as Josh Martin in episode 202 of ‘Beef.’
Courtesy of Netflix
Melton says he and Lee “really got to know each other” over the course of season two. “One of the many great things about Sonny as a collaborator, as a filmmaker, he creates so much space. There’s this vulnerability of just trust,” Melton says. “Sometimes we would speak on the phone, I promise you, 60 plus hours, just in a week.”
Isaac and Mulligan also say they’d spend several hours a week speaking with Lee about the show. “My Oura rang legit says I’ve averaged four hours of sleep for the last two years,” Lee jokes. “So, it comes at a cost.”
Similar to the genesis of season one, Lee took inspiration from a real-life event for the central beef of season two, which came after cycling through several ideas of what the latest installment’s premise could be. “It just goes to show that real life is so much more interesting than anything my writer brain can come up with,” says Lee.
The writer says he overheard a real-life “heated debate” coming from a couple’s home in his neighborhood. When he relayed what he’d overheard, he realized one key difference in how the generations reacted to the tale. “I found that my younger peers were a lot like Ashley and Austin [asking], ‘did you call the police?’” he recounts. “My similarly aged or older peers were just kind of like, ‘yeah, big deal.”
He adds, “I just thought, ‘oh, that’s a show.’” Lee says he hadn’t seen anything juxtaposing younger love versus older love since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and that he felt like TV and film tended to examine just one couple.
“Then as you dig in, we find that the passage of time became such a bigger theme, and you have actually four Russian nesting dolls of couples showing the four seasons of life,” the creator explains. “I think at the end, it became a meditation of [the idea that] the stages of life come for everybody, and what are you going to do at the end of it?”
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