Beef creator on the 'deaths everywhere' in original script and Steven Yeun's 'pitch perfect' vocals
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WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Beef season 1.
It's been a wild ride for Amy and Danny.
In Lee Sung Jin's dark comedy Beef, the foes (played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun) let a road rage incident burrow deep into their neuroses and bring chaos into their lives. The feud reaches dizzying heights (acts of retribution include catfishing, vandalism, framed arson, etc.), culminating in a fatal hostage situation before delirious clarity is reached in the wilderness.
Below, Lee and series executive producer Jake Schreier discuss the original death count in that chaotic hostage situation ("Just think of a name and they're probably dead"), that big finale pitched by none other than Wong herself, Yeun's church vocals (drop the full Incubus cover, Steve), and more.
Andrew Cooper/Netflix Ali Wong and Steven Yeun on 'Beef'
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: A lot of people will be surprised to learn Steven can sing, and quite well. Tell me more about the decision to incorporate that musical church aspect into the show.
LEE SUNG JIN: Steven and I have been friends for years, and we've talked about the Korean church for a while. We never could quite find the right thing to focus on that. And once you start thinking about Danny, it just makes sense that he grew up in the church. In terms of singing — for episode 7, I actually had a different song that I wanted to do for that cold open, and then I got a text message, a voice note from Steven one day. I press play, and it's just acapella pitch perfect, him singing "Amazing Grace," the Chris Tomlin version, from start to finish. And it was beautiful. I was like, yep, that's it. Jake and I worked with Jason Min, who's Justin Min's older brother, and Ariel, Jake's friend, who's a music producer, to arrange this song to be more tongue in cheek, very Korean church happy rendition.
JAKE SCHREIER: It was one whole week that we did all of the church stuff across the episodes, and that felt just like a very special week on the show. It was extremely interesting for me, because I obviously have very little connection to the Korean church, but Sonny and the whole show did such a good job of bringing in Justin's brother leading an actual praise band, and all of these people from their actual church in [Pasadena] that came and filled it out. Steven would come in and just talk about how real it felt, and how much it had captured what he wanted it to feel like. And it felt real to the people who were in it. It was very special to watch.
I stumbled across some of Steven's fan-uploaded covers from years past. They're great. He's singing Alicia Keys.
LEE: He has covers? I'm looking it up right now.
SCHREIER: It is a live performance, what's in the show. He sang, we had a recorded performance ahead of time, and he did it.
LEE: [Laughs] Oh my God, I can't believe this. He covers "Shelter" by Ray LaMontagne. He's getting texts about this when this interview is done.
An unexpected turning point for Amy and Danny is that hostage situation led by Isaac. How did you arrive at this storyline? It came out of left field.
LEE: It did come out of left field. Narratively, there's something to be said of just pulling the rubber band as far as you can until it snaps. When I wrote the outline, there were way more deaths. Just deaths everywhere. Everyone was like, "Sonny, you okay?" Even Jake called me. Jake was like, "Hey, buddy…" And the studio and network, they rightfully were like, "We love it, but maybe not everyone dies." And they're right. So I walked it back and then really thought about character. For our characters, what is the most important thing going on? For Danny, it's his brother, and for Amy, it's George. And so having those two north stars really settled the episode into what it really is about emotionally.
SCHREIER: Yeah, there's a lot of heightened cinematic stuff in the show, and that's obviously very fun from a directing perspective, but it all comes from characters. And our characters are so flawed that it's not a Michael Mann version of a hostage situation. It comes from a lot of really, really poor decisions and people who aren't experienced at operating on this level. It doesn't feel like we've escaped the world of the show that we've set up, even when the stakes appear smaller.
Well, now I have to ask who was originally killed off.
LEE: I'd rather not say, but just think of a name and they're probably dead.
Andrew Cooper/Netflix Steven Yeun on 'Beef'
Amy and Danny's feud reaches dizzying heights throughout the series. Were there any other ideas, in terms of petty acts of revenge, that didn't make the final cut?
LEE: Alice Ju, one of our writers and co-executive producers, had the idea of Amy being introduced to the idea of Zersetzung [a psychological warfare technique] via Jordan, and then subtly messing with Danny's life: moving things around in his apartment, using up his toiletries, etc., little things to make him feel like he's losing his mind. It was a great idea but ultimately didn't fit within the episodes.
With the finale, how much of the lines were ad-libbed? There are so many funny one-liners.
LEE: There wasn't much ad-libbing in the finale. There wasn't much in the show in general ... I'd say if anyone riffed the most, it was David Choe. Isaac got to have a lot of improv.
SCHREIER: There were great times where there certainly was freedom within what Sonny wrote. Steven's line, "You got to get away from me, man. You got to get away from me." That line is in the script. It's not exactly in that form. The way Steven says, "What you did was not nice!" in episode 8, that is scripted, but that's not how I imagined that being; it's much better.
LEE: No one expected that. That's the brilliance of Steven. You can write, "What you did was not nice!" but no one on set is expecting him to scream it in that manner.
Andrew Cooper/Netflix Ali Wong on 'Beef'
I know Ali pitched the ending. What did that pitch conversation look like?
LEE: It was less glamorous than one would imagine. We were all on a Zoom together; it was me, Steven, Ali, and I think Ravi [Nandan] and Alli Reich at A24. We were preparing to take the show out, and I just didn't have an ending for the pitch. I had thrown out some other ideas, and you could tell, it was very lukewarm reactions. And then Ali was just like, "What if he just crawls into bed or she just crawls into bed?" And we were all like, "Oh, wow, that's really beautiful." It all felt right.
I'm assuming, then, that there were no other alternative endings?
LEE: No. Having that endpoint locked was such a huge help. I was open to something else coming up at any point of the process, but nothing came up that beat that moment, so we stuck with it.
SCHREIER: That's also the first scene Sonny ever directed in his life, and he had to direct over Zoom with COVID.
LEE: Yeah, my assistant was walking around with my face on an iPad and I was just like, "Yeah, that looks good." And Jake was on set. So Jake and [cinematographer] Larkin [Seiple] — the best training wheels that the business could ever afford me. I'm very happy with how it turned out.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
All 10 episodes of Beef are streaming on Netflix.
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