Interview: Diving Into the Second Season of ‘Beef’ with Creator, Writer, Executive Producer and Director Lee Sung Jin

In attempting to differentiate the second season of Beef from its first season, creator, writer, executive producer and director Lee Sung Jin tells Awards Radar on Zoom that one of the main things they had to figure out was how the show’s cold open would distinguish itself from the first:

“Season one had the luxury of a more overt beef, in that it’s a road rage, so you get into a road rage really fast. For season two, I wanted to figure out how we do the inverse of that and witness more of a passive-aggressive beef. I don’t know if I’ve shared this before, but originally, the pilot for season one was written so you stayed with Danny’s character for the whole first half, then you did Amy’s character, and it didn’t intersect until the end. However, in our first couple of edits, it wasn’t working. We then blew up the edit, and it wasn’t until we were intercutting between characters the whole episode that it clicked. I knew that season two’s cold open should be juxtaposing these two couples back and forth and create the feeling that these two trains are going to collide. 

You’re just dreading it the whole time, which is why the score has all these arpeggios in it, because this cycle of up and down makes you feel this ominous dread that there’s a crash coming, and you know it’s going to happen. To Netflix’s credit, not a lot of places would be like, “Oh, you want to do a nine-minute cold open, with a wall-to-wall score, sure. However, they trusted us, and it was a balancing act, for sure of trying to set up the characters without over-explaining, having some of the comedy come through, but then, ultimately, in the back half of the cold open, like having it get pretty serious so that it can catapult you into the rest of the episode. That took a very, very long time, and so many people worked on it. It’s also an editing feat by Laura Zempel, our editor, who won an Emmy for her work in season one. She saves so much time because her editor’s cuts are so close to the final. It’s truly a luxury to have an editor like that.”

With the story and setting changing from the first season to the second, Sonny had the privilege of working with a cast of high-profile talents, including Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Cailee Spaeny, Charles Melton, Song Kang-ho, and Academy Award-winner Youn Yuh-jung in shaping complex, richly-layered characters. All actors give incredible performances in this season, which he is still attempting to process how such a stacked and talented cast was mounted for the show:

“I had to pinch myself every day on set. There are so many moments for me and our A.D., Gavin Kleintop, where we were at the monitor with our mouths agape, going, “How are they doing this?” When you have actors of that caliber, I think oftentimes what can happen is that they clock in, clock out, and give incredible performances, but that wasn’t the case here. Every single person gave hours and hours of time and care outside of set, on the phone, on Zooms, over email, over text, where they were like, “Oh, well, this thing happened to me, or this thing happened to my friend! What if we’d try to do this? Is that more honest? I just remembered this thing that I saw when I was in my 20s–”, it was this constant back and forth that, as a writer-director, you have these A-list actors giving you gold textures to put on top of everything. I feel so fortunate, and I’m really proud of the work that we did. I also know that this is very rare. Will we ever see this particular group of actors together like this again? I don’t know, and so there were a lot of moments just trying to be present and cherish these experiences.”

With season two being as thematically and aesthetically complex as it is, there was so much to dive into, and you can listen to our full conversation below:

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]