LOS ANGELES, April 15 (UPI) — Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan and Charles Melton said they had enough input into their characters on Beef Season 2, premiering Thursday on Netflix, to influence the scripts. The actors joined Beef creator Lee Sung Jin at a Los Angeles press conference.
Season 2 tells a new story about country club owner Josh (Isaac), his wife Lindsay (Mulligan), and their employees Austin (Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny). Austin and Ashley record a fight between Josh and Lindsay, and blackmail them with the evidence.
Isaac said he already related to Lee via Season 1, which starred Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as drivers involved in a vehicular incident who escalate their feud. In the third episode, Yeun’s character visits a church and cries.
“It’s both hilarious and also deeply unsettling and emotional,” Isaac said. “I felt like, does this guy know my life? As an immigrant and being part of the evangelical community, and then the song, the Incubus song at the end, I was like this guy kind of knows me.”
Lee and Isaac got to know each other further via Zoom. Lee had prepared detailed backstories for all the characters, but replaced much of them with material inspired by the actors.
“As conversations would evolve, he could let a lot of that stuff go away,” Isaac said. “We found our ways into that and found a way to make the mask of what I would wear for Josh be more transparent.”
Lindsay also became British based on conversations with Mulligan. Lindsay resents that Josh has spent all their money and has not completed his plans.
“She’s sort of got by a lot in her life by just being either in the right circle of friends, dating the right person or popular,” Mulligan said. “That’s kind of fallen away, and really what she has is a sort of fairly difficult marriage, no career and no friends.”
The actor who steals the show, and already stole the trailer, is Jones, the dog who plays Lindsay’s pet Burberry. Mulligan joked that Jones got more feedback from Lee than the human cast.
“We spent the whole day second-guessing ourselves,” Mulligan said. “The dog was on set, like, two days later, and he was like. ‘Jones, he’s a good boy. Jones is so good.'”
Lee insisted he felt the same way about Isaac and Mulligan.
“That’s what was going on in my head about you,” Lee said. “It’d be so patronizing for me to tell the great Oscar Isaac and Carrie Mulligan, ‘So good.'”
Austin and Ashley are struggling to get by on their salaries from the country club. They leverage the video for a full-time job for Ashley, which will give both health insurance when they marry.
The season involves a trip to Korea, which Melton said awakened his sense of heritage as a Korean-American.
“We see Austin navigating,” Melton said. “He talks about how he’s never been around this many Koreans before. Ashley refers to him as Arizonian, as opposed to Korean American.”
Lee said that subplot was inspired by his own return to South Korea to film an RM video for “Come back to me.”
“I became the character of Austin, was being wined and dined by this upper echelon of Korean society that I’ve never experienced before,” Lee said. “My epigenetics are getting triggered.”
In addition to the wealthy and the struggling, Beef Season 2 also deals with the conflict between Josh and Lindsay’s generation and Ashley and Austin’s. Isaac said he related to that too.
“We can look back with judgment to them now that we know so much more about life, and yet they’re totally blind to the way that they’re behaving in the moment,” Isaac said. “Our future selves are going to look back at our younger selves and be like, ‘[Expletive], if they only realized where things were going.'”
Lee said Season 2 represented the Buddhist and Hindu concept of samsara. Each of the main characters are at different points in the cycle of love, death and suffering.
Melton said he hopes the characters’ questionable behavior provides the audience with a cautionary tale.
“There’s a crossroads, I think, in life, many of times where you can either choose the right thing or the good thing for you,” Melton said. “Sometimes it’s both the right thing and the good thing for you, and sometimes it’s not.”
Isaac also hopes viewers empathize with some of the worst decisions the characters make.
“Being able to watch it and recognize some behavior in these people, as awful as that might feel, and to have some kind of compassion for how humans behave in these kinds of situations,” Isaac said.