As soon as Lee Sung Jin won his Emmys for “Beef,” whispers about what a potential second installment could be circled around, but, internally, Lee was full of nerves without an official Season 2 pickup from Netflix.
“I was sort of pitching wildly to Netflix all sorts of directions, and they kept saying ‘no,’” Lee recalled to TheWrap, noting that Netflix drama exec Jinny Howe, who has since been elevated to head of UCAN scripted series, pulled him aside and reminded him, “We don’t have to do a Season 2 — you ended it perfectly. You don’t need to … carry that on — we can do another show if you want, but only do a second season of ‘Beef’ if you feel passionate about it.”
Lee sat with that possibility until another real-world moment like the road rage incident that he centered the first installment of “Beef” around “slapped [him] in the face from the universe,” this time in the form of a “heated debate” from a couple sparring in their house. But what was even more fascinating to Lee than the fight itself were the reactions of those he told, with younger folks responding “more viscerally and ideologically” with alarm while those around the age of the 44-year-old TV writer more or less shrugged the incident off.
“I found the juxtaposition of that really funny, but also very poignant about how our views of love and marriage change over time,” Lee said. “I think in our youth, there’s this little bit of hubris of how things should be or are supposed to be, and then as life’s hurdles come barreling towards you, you start to compromise, and then become the very thing that you … used to judge the older generations about.”
The incident got Lee’s wheels turning about an intergenerational story surrounding several couples, an angle into love and marriage that Lee notes hasn’t been covered too thoroughly, saying “other than ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ I hadn’t really seen a good young love versus older love dichotomy in quite some time.”
And thus, “Beef” Season 2 started to take form, following a Gen Z couple in Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton), who witness an intense altercation between their millennial boss, Josh (Oscar Isaac), and his wife, Lindsay (Carey Mulligan). The drama all goes down at a country club, with lower level employees Ashley and Austin reaching for what Josh and Lindsay have while the latter make themselves miserable aiming for the level of wealth of those who frequent the club, weaving in the theme of class found in “Beef” Season 1.
“The theme of class, I think, is really hard to avoid in 2026,” Lee said. “If you’re trying to write anything true, you eventually have to face that theme, because it’s just the world we live in, and until our leaders put some sort of brakes on unhinged capitalism running amok, then as a writer, you just … have to keep tackling it.”
Lee found the country club stood in as a microcosm for a society, noting “it felt very appropriate that no matter how hard those employees work, they’re never going to get to be members, and I think that’s how a lot of people feel about society today.”
Another theme from Season 1 Lee hoped to dive into further was Korean identity, which remained top of mind for the creator after traveling to Korea more frequently following the success of Season 1, which features nearly an all-Asian cast. Lee found himself particularly intrigued by a “Korean global conglomerate and Korean chaebol type environment,” making way for another couple to feature in Season 2, with Youn Yuh-jung starring as chairwoman Park and Song Kang-ho starring as her husband, Dr. Kim.
“I was trying to think on … what kind of character should have had that tug of war be pulling at his identity or her identity?” And because Season 1 covered so much … [of the] full Korean American diaspora, that one thing I didn’t get to cover was the experience of being half-Korean,” Lee said, adding that his daughter is half-Korean and several of his writers are half-Korean or half-Asian. “It felt like very ripe, fertile ground.”
While Lee had initially considered “pull[ing] a Ryan Murphy” and working with much of the same cast again, he realized “only Ryan Murphy can pull Ryan Murphy” and ultimately decided to start with a clean slate, this time centered around Charles Melton, whose performance in “May December” — specifically the roof scene — blew Lee away. “That is such a hard thing to pull off because it’s emotional, but also funny and heartbreaking … you go through every spectrum of human emotion in that one scene,” Lee said. “And because … so many ‘Beef’ scenes cover a lot of different tones, I knew that it had to be him.”
Lee took the first opportunity he had to pitch Melton for Season 2 during a Gold House celebration of Melton’s performance in “May December,” asking Gold House head Bing Chen to seat him next to Melton day of. “In my head, I want to think he moved someone important, like Lulu Wang or Chloé Zhao or something, and … lo and behold, I got seated next to him, and I had my PowerPoint slides on my phone, and I kind of showed him his picture photoshopped into storyboards,” Lee said. “I want to say by, maybe the main course, he said, ‘Yes.’”
Once Melton was on board, Lee paired him with Spaeny, whom he had reached out for a general meeting after hearing she was a fan of “Beef,” which ended up lasting several hours, with Lee recalling, “We just dug in and got existential.”
Next came casting the millennial couple, roles which Lee hoped to fill with two actors that had a history “so that we can kind of believe that history just subconsciously.” Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal were initially reported to be eyed by Lee, but Mulligan and Isaac, who previously starred in “Drive” and “Inside Llewyn Davis,” became the duo that brought Lindsay and Josh to life. There was kismet in the air from the start, with Lee revealing Isaac had a dog named Bugsy who recently passed while Lee has a dog named Bugsy who is holding on at age 16.
“I had asked him, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about Carey,’ and his face lit up, and he was just like, ‘We literally have been trying to work together on every project. We pitch each other all the time,’” Lee recalled. “It all came together quickly with the four, and then … it was just so many Zooms to get these characters to feel bespoke to them.”
Despite the disparate elements of the two seasons’ plots, Lee sees the installments as “spiritual siblings,” with Lee explaining Season 1 is “very much meditation on two people who are very isolated and lonely, who don’t even want to participate in life.”
“I think I was examining my younger self when I felt that way, and then at the very end of the season they you get a glimmer of hope that maybe they want to participate,” Lee continued. “Season 2 is sort of the spiritual sibling to that, where … if you found the person you want to participate with … there’s a whole next level of the video game, a slew of gauntlets that you still have to go through.”
In aesthetics, however, Lee wanted the season to be wholly different, turning away from the grunge of the road-rage that fueled Season 1’s visuals and music and opting for a more painterly aesthetic to match the country club, bringing on “Moonlight” cinematographer James Laxton and “Hereditary” costume designer Olga Mill.
“When your favorite band just repeats the debut album you start to like them a little bit less,” Lee said. “I feel like the G.O.A.T.s for me, the biggest album jump — the best one of all time is ‘The Bends’ to ‘OK Computer’ … I [am] in no way comparing us to Radiohead — never would — but that was the goal that was on my vision board — if we can somehow make Season 2 feel like that jump, then we would have succeeded.”
“Beef” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
