In ‘Beef,’ Road Rage Is Only The Beginning

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong star in this comedy about a traffic incident that triggers a bitter feud. “It really is about how hard it is to be alive,” said Lee Sung Jin, the creator.

In the Netflix series Beef, Steven Yeun plays Danny Cho, a struggling handyman in Los Angeles who becomes embroiled in a road rage incident with Amy Lau, a wealthy entrepreneur played by Ali Wong.

Over 10 episodes, their simmering hatred fuels an escalating series of poor decisions, setting off a bizarre chain of retribution including but not limited to robbery, vandalism, catfishing and bad Yelp reviews.

The show was created by writer Lee Sung Jin (Dave, Two Broke Girls), who first worked with Yeun and Wong on the animated series Tuca & Bertie. (Yeun and Wong played a robin and a song thrush who are lovers.) Around the same time, Lee was involved in a road rage confrontation in Los Angeles that would inspire his new series.

Beef is Lee’s first outing as a series creator and showrunner. It also features Yeun’s first regular role on live-action TV since his character, Glenn, was killed off The Walking Dead in 2016. Glenn’s gruesome murder sparked viewer outrage, but things worked out great for Yeun, who has since appeared in acclaimed films like Minari, which brought him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, and Burning.

Lee and Yeun are set to work together again on Marvel’s Thunderbolts movie, their first forays into the MCU — Lee as a writer, Yeun in a yet-to-be-revealed role.

On an afternoon in March, Yeun and Lee got together at the Apple Pan, a beloved hole-in-the-wall burger joint on Los Angeles’ west side. Over hickory burgers, fries and slices of pie, they talked about how they met, the inspiration for Beef and their Korean church connections. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Tell me about the “incident.”

LEE: I was getting on the 10. The light turned green, and I didn’t go right away, and a white BMW X3 starts honking like crazy, pulls up next to me, and [the driver] says a bunch of [expletive] at me. I was like, that’s not OK; I’m going to follow him home.

I thought there was something interesting there, how we’re all locked in our subjective world views, and we go around projecting a lot on the other person and not really seeing things for what they are.

How did you two first meet?

LEE: We actually met through Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I was doing their pilot Singularity for FX, and I had really wanted to work with Steven. Seth and Evan are huge fans of his. [To Yeun:] I don’t know how they knew you.

YEUN: I don’t either. I guess maybe comic book worlds? Just me being in Walking Dead and them being fans of that world. And being gracious people, too, they invited me over to their house one time and properly smoked me out.

LEE: So Seth and Evan [introduced Lee and Yeun]. And after that first meeting, we had you and your wife over at our place. I was with my now-wife, and I remember feeling like we were going to know each other for a while. There was just something very comforting and familiar. We have very similar backgrounds.

YEUN: We’re not from the coasts. And we’re Korean. And we’re working in this business.

LEE: And we both came up in the Korean church.

How did you come up with the character of Danny?

YEUN: Danny was an interesting thought experiment; it was almost therapeutic. How do we see the world when you’re living in this space of, like, “This place is designed to crush me”? I’m pretty sure all of us feel that way to some degree.

What was that like to play for 10 episodes?

YEUN: I was pretty exhausted most days; you’re kind of living in a hypervigilant state. But I also relate to that life. I never dreamed I would be in this position in this business, and I think that makes you learn how to avoid things that could potentially harm you. For me, that seems like a very immigrant lens.

Have you had road rage?

YEUN: Oh, for sure. I think anybody who tells you that they haven’t is a liar. But my road rage is usually contained in my car.

The series revolves around this relationship between Danny and Amy, but you aren’t together physically for much of it. What was that like?

YEUN: It was exciting, because you would hear the rumblings of how shooting was going on the other side. And I’m sure she was also hearing the other side. But then every time we would get together, it was very electric.

I could see you and Ali getting into it, just as people.

YEUN: There’s good electricity between Ali and I.

LEE: They’re very similar, but opposite in a lot of ways; I mean that in the best way. We’re all close friends, but I think when you have that, it does cause electricity.

Much of the series takes place in parts of Los Angeles you rarely see on TV, including a Korean church in the Valley, complete with a praise team.

LEE: I’ve actually known Justin Min [who plays the praise team leader] since he was a kid, because his older brother, Jason, was my best friend in college. When Jason moved out to LA, Steven, before The Walking Dead, went to the same church as him and was in the praise team.

Jason actually arranged all the praise team songs in the show, and we prerecorded the music with this amazing producer, Ariel Rechtshaid, who does, like, Beyoncé and Adele. Jason is a pastor now, and he pulled his actual praise team from his church, and there were extras from that church who knew you, remember? There were these little kids going, “Uncle Steven!”

YEUN: That week was really fun, because we shot at an actual Korean church in Chatsworth. There was something very nostalgic about that week.

LA has always had plenty of road rage, but the problem got even worse during the pandemic. To what extent is this a Covid series?

LEE: We wrote it during Covid, and we were seeing headlines like “Because of Covid, road rage up.”

So yeah, it was in the air. But even aside from the rage, the thing that gets exacerbated with Covid is this sense of isolation and loneliness. When Amy talks to George in the intimacy exercise scene about this feeling she’s had forever, that came from me telling the writers’ room about my own low points.

I was talking about my goddaughter, Lily — she was 4 at the time — and how I just hope she never has this feeling, and I started crying because it was very sad to think that she’s going to have to deal with it. I think that the show is really getting at the core of this feeling that a lot of us can’t escape.

Do you ever wonder why you got so mad during the encounter that inspired this show? Or is it a common thing for you?

LEE: Um, yeah, I think I should probably reflect on it more.

YEUN: I think you’ve done quite a lot of reflecting!

LEE: Well, I’ve definitely thought a lot about not just that incident but why I am the way I am. And why any of us are. It’s easy, in writing, to point to one thing and be like, “Oh, it was this trauma in my past,” like, A leads to B leads to C.

But that’s just not how we work. The lines aren’t straight; it’s very wiggly, and there’s a lot of stuff. I think that’s what the show wants to explore — that it’s not one thing. It really is about how hard it is to be alive.

Is that BMW driver going to see a picture of you and go, “Hey, that guy made this into a TV show”?

LEE: No, I was wearing sunglasses.

YEUN: Also, that guy probably gets into five of those a day. He’s telling somebody off because they didn’t go fast enough? That guy lives in that space.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Beef is available to watch on Netflix.

Written by: Robert Ito

Photographs by: Ryan Pfluger

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