How Rage Drives Revenge In Lee Sung Jin’s Netflix Dramedy ‘Beef’

Amy and Danny, the two main characters in the Netflix
NFLX
series Beef, come from completely different backgrounds. Yet the overachieving plant guru, played by Ali Wong, and the desperate contractor, played by Steven Yeun, have a lot in common. They both struggle to reach goals that remain out of reach and it leaves them simmering with unresolved rage. Amy’s fragile life seems carefully orchestrated, but Danny is given to impulsive decisions like his ruthless pursuit in the road rage incident that sparks the start of this revenge dramedy.

Their desire to exact what each perceives to be justice leads to damaged floors, ruined flowerbeds and possibly ruined careers. They focus all their fury on their road rage counterpart.

“I think if they would just let go, they would actually look at each other and say we have a lot in common,” said series creator Lee Sung Jin aka Sonny Lee. “And, as trite as it may sound, I think that’s true of society at large. I think oftentimes, once you let go and the guards come down, a conversation will quickly show that we all have much more in common than we originally thought.”

The show was inspired by a real-life incident in which Lee followed a car after the driver cursed at him. Unlike Danny, Lee cooled down and did not devote his next weeks to exacting revenge disproportionate to the original incident. Instead, for Lee, the incident prompted thoughts about the ways people may project their inner turmoil on to strangers, how subjective and narrow our perceptions of each other can be.

“That was really the extent of the real life road rage influencing the writing,” he said. “It didn’t upset me enough that I ruminated on it for too long. It was a fun story to tell. It was more like me enjoying the reenactment of this thing that I did that was so out of character.”

When the incident sparked an idea for a series, he immediately thought of Yeun for his star. They’ve been friends for years and catch up regularly.

“I was telling him about this road rage incident and some ideas that I’m exploring,” said Lee. “I’ve pitched him so many TV ideas in the past and every time he’s been like, nah. This one, about three or four sentences in, he said that’s the one we have to do together.”

While Wong’s Amy makes the perfect nemesis for Yeun’s Danny, Lee originally considered Stanley Tucci, because the real life driver who cursed him looked like Tucci. However, since Danny is Asian American, casting Tucci as his nemesis would require talking about race.

“There’s so many other shows that tackle race so much better,” said Lee. “I really didn’t want to do that with this show. Then it was actually a conversation with Ali, where I was on the phone with her about something else, and we were just catching up about life, just hearing her talk about some harsher truths in life and some touchier subjects. She does it in such an effortless, engaging, yet funny way, that I just thought, oh, that might be something. What about her?”

Wong, the star of multiple comedy specials, films such as Always Be My Maybe and TV series such as Paper Girls, was drawn to the script for its thriller elements.

“I just haven’t done anything like that before,” said Wong. “And as the show progressed that came out more and more, where it’s so suspenseful and I’m reading every page right away with so much anticipation. I never knew what was gonna happen. Sometimes I knew what was gonna happen because we talked about it, of course, but the ways that it happened always surprised me.

Yeun, star of the TV series The Walking Dead and the Academy-Award-winning film Minari, was also surprised and intrigued by the plot.

“You have an idea of where the plot’s gonna go, but then you read the dialogue and you’re like, wow, this feels so real,” said Yeun with a laugh. “It’s such easy, but difficult vernacular. It’s written in a way where it seemed like, oh, Sonny was there in the room as a fly on the wall and he overheard those conversations and he wrote it that way. And when you get dialogue like that, for me, I was like, oh, this is gonna be so fun.”

The show also stars David Choe as Danny’s unreliable cousin Isaac, Joseph Lee as Amy’s ineffectual husband George, Ashley Park as friend Naomi and Justin H. Min as Edwin. While Beef’s appeal is universal, the majority of its main characters are Asian and Lee admits that it has become much easier to pitch shows with multiple Asian characters.

‘When I started 15 years ago, I would not have been able to set the show up,” he said.

Lee was born in Korea and with his family moved a few times between Korea and various US states. After attending elementary school in Korea, he moved to the US in time for sixth grade, which he describes as “a horrible time to have a name no one can pronounce.”

“You’re an adolescent and you just want to fit in,” said Lee. “One day I was just staring at a piece of homework and the name section and I needed to change things up. So I just wrote Sonny and the next day at school everyone was like, what is this? And I’m like that’s what you’re calling me. It’s funny. And it just kind of stuck since then.”

In a podcast he once described how the recent success of Korean media made him reconsider that choice. If directors with names such as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook were cool, he was going to return to writing his name the traditional Korean way.

“I think with a lot of therapy and a lot of self-reflection, I’ve slowly started to become more comfortable in my own skin,” said Lee. “And I’m not fully yet, to be honest. But, I think in that process, my writing has changed.

Lee, who previously worked on the series Undone, Tuca & Bertie, Dave and Silicon Valley, has explored other cultures in his writing, but it was a different and rewarding experience to portray elements of his own Korean American heritage in Beef. He credits Netflix and production company A24 with allowing him to tell a relevant story.

“It did feel very freeing to just be able to present things without over-explaining,” he said.

In real life, a road rage incident between individuals as highly strung as Beef’s main characters might have ended in tragedy, not comedy. As dark as Beef occasionally gets, it’s still very funny.

“I think comedy helps the medicine go down a lot,” he said with a laugh. “It is sugary. I think when you’re laughing, there’s something disarming happening in the body. Perhaps it helps us look at certain things from a different lens.”

Ultimately he and the show’s writers wanted the series to reflect the complex nature of truth.

“We wanted to mirror life,” said Lee. “And I think in real life, even in my road rage thing, there were moments of fear and there were also moments of hilarity. ”

The idea was not to become boxed in by one genre, although Amy and Danny do take their actions to hilarious, even cringe-worthy extremes.

“I think Steven and Ali also being such great performers, they know the right bullseye,” said Lee. “Oftentimes, something can feel too broad or too silly. You also lose audiences when it becomes too comedic. Having them and the entire cast being able to really nail that bullseye, is where people feel disarmed, but it still feels true and real to life.”

According to Lee, his deepening friendships with Yeun, Wong and Beef’s producing director Jake Schreier is the best thing to come out of the show. The friends dine together almost every other week.

“That’s the best takeaway one could hope for in working on something,” said Lee. “Is that you make lifelong friends and you hopefully are gonna work on a lot of things together. So, yeah, that was the best part.”

Lee already plans to work with Yeun and Schreier again in the upcoming Marvel film Thunderbolts. Beef airs on Netflix on April 6.