Ione Skye's creepy Beef cameo as a Viola Swamp-inspired witch, explained
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Warning: This post contains spoilers for Beef season 1.
Ione Skye makes an unexpected, creepy cameo in Beef, Netflix's road rage dark comedy that's about so much more than a sour traffic incident.
In episode 8, Amy (Ali Wong) returns to her childhood home to visit her parents after the dissolution of her marriage to George (Joseph Lee). Reeling from her own experiences with infidelity, Amy informs her mother about her father's affair decades ago (though this comes as no surprise to the matriarch), which she witnessed as a young child. In a flashback scene, a young Amy is reading what appears to be a book from the Miss Nelson collection as her parents loudly argue from the other room. She's enjoying a snack she shouldn't be eating, and when she hides the wrapper under the fold of her mattress, she's confronted by a Viola Swamp-inspired witch in her bedroom.
Underneath all those prosthetics is none other than Skye, known for her roles in River's Edge and Say Anything, who eerily informs a young Amy that she's "always watching."
Netflix Ione Skye and Remy Holt (as a young Amy) in 'Beef'
"Ione was so down," series creator Lee Sung Jin says of the cameo. "[I'm a] big fan of her and all her movies. She was really a champ in terms of going with the flow."
"We were lucky in so many places with the show," executive producer Jake Schreier adds. "Yes, it's a witch and it has to be scary to young Amy, but at the same time, it shouldn't feel like a cartoon monster. To have Ione be willing to show up and do all the prosthetics and the makeup, but then still give a very real performance in that moment, that's such a lift for the show."
Lee — who notes the witch isn't Viola Swamp per se, but a loose reimagining and amalgamation of characters from books he read as a child — says the idea to personify the witchy character stemmed from the series' narratives of shame.
Paul Archuleta/Getty Images Ione Skye
"It's something from my childhood, especially for, I think, people my age when we were young," Lee says. "There's so many things that were bombarded at us that I think highlighted shame. I often had, as a child, I almost want to say borderline hallucinations. I remember distinctly my mother had this fur coat that reminded me of Cruella de Vil, and I felt like [the coat] was always watching me."
"I was so scared of this manifestation of all these shameful feelings that the media had embedded in my mind," he recalls. "When thinking about Amy's character and what's driving a lot of her actions, it felt natural to revisit her shame and what she was like as a child."
Lee sings the praises of makeup department head Dana Hamel, who was left scrambling after production ran out of money for prosthetics, for bringing the character to life. "She went and got a Halloween costume, like $3 noses," he says. "We were all truthfully a little worried: 'Is this just going to look silly?' But she did a great job and there's this nostalgic creepiness that we were able to capture."
Beef is streaming now on Netflix.
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