'Beef' Season 2: A Juicier Drama Unfolds at the Country Club | Vanity Fair

For Beef creator Lee Sung Jin, the success of his delicious Netflix series has been both a blessing and a curse. Season one, starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as strangers whose lives become intertwined after a volatile incident of road rage, was a hit with both critics and audiences; it dominated at the 2024 Emmy Awards, winning eight statuettes. So the pressure to deliver a captivating second season was immense.

“I think it helps to keep going back to character first and what are the realities of being alive that we all can relate to,” Lee tells Vanity Fair. “That’s really the only reason to do this, is to try to be a mirror in some way to help us change.”

Melton plays Austin Davis, a trainer and former athlete who is newly engaged.

Just like the first season, Lee’s initial creative spark for season two came from a tense situation in the creator’s own life: a vicious fight between a couple in his neighborhood that some of his other neighbors happened to witness. That incident, which inspired the inciting moment of season two’s premiere, led Lee to think about how different generations approach love and relationships.

The 8-episode second season, which will debut on Netflix on April 16, centers on two couples who work at an exclusive Southern California country club. The younger couple (played by May December breakout Charles Melton and Priscilla breakout Cailee Spaeny) accidentally witness an intense argument between the older couple (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan), then use their recording of it to get ahead in their own careers.

Mulligan's Lindsay Crane-Martín is grappling with aging and struggles in her marriage in the series.

“I started ruminating a lot on what love means to those different generations,” says Lee. “And when you think about time passing, you realize that in your youth, you had all these expectations and promises to yourselves of never becoming like the older generation. But we’re faced with such similar hurdles. Are we going to repeat the same mistakes as those that came before?”

Isaac's Joshua Martín is the general manager of the country club. “To have them respond to the material in the way that they did and be so on board to just go for it, to just open their chests and reveal all the shadows inside, that was really fun to watch,” says Lee of Isaac and Mulligan.

Isaac and Mulligan first worked together on 2011’s Drive, then again in 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis. On Beef, the characters they play also have a rich history. Their frequent collaborations “bring an inherent backstory that makes you believe them a little bit more,” says Lee. And their chemistry is palpable enough to override how terribly their characters treat each other. “I find myself still rooting for them at times, because you can feel the subtext of a long love there—rather than just two people who hate each other.” As elder millennials, both characters are grappling with aging as they come to understand that many of their dreams will not come to fruition. “I thought it was interesting to think about recontextualizing elder millennials as leaning into the ‘elder’ part of that equation,” says Lee.

Melton and Spaeny play a Gen-Z couple who witness an alarming fight between their Millennial boss and his wife.

Spaeny's previous roles included Priscilla and Wake Up Dead Man.

Lee got to know Melton in 2023, when they were both promoting their separate Netflix projects. “There is just such an earnestness and a sweetness in him as a human being. It just kept percolating at the back of my head,” he says. Melton’s character, Austin, is a former athlete and aspiring physical therapist who has a bit of a himbo vibe, but his heart is in the right place—at the start of the series, anyway. Lee paired him with Spaeny, who proved in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla that she could exude complicated emotions with just a look. “The more I got to know her, I just thought, ‘Oh, wow, there is range here that hasn’t been showcased,’” Lee says. “And so then I started writing to that.”

After Beef became a hit, Lee, who is of Korean descent, found himself being invited into the upper echelon of Korean society—meeting with CEOs and well-known chaebol family members (family-controlled Korean business conglomerates). “Being courted by these very, very powerful Korean men and women, it made me realize how tempting that world can be. You start to feel important,” he says. “I didn’t like feeling that, but I thought it was juicy.”

Korean stars Song Kang-ho and Youn Yuh-jung play a powerful married couple in the second season of Beef.

So he worked that into the second season of Beef, too. A wealthy Korean couple is taking over the country club; the conflict between the two couples is further complicated when they come into the orbit of the billionaire chairwoman, played by Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung. Lee also brought personal touches into the show’s first season, like an emotional scene at a Korean church. The second season continues that trend, casting top Korean talent including Youn, Parasite star Song Kang-ho, and K-Pop star BM in his acting debut. “It was funny to see some of the online reactions that either that I was abandoning Korean culture, or that I had only put Koreans back into season two after reading the reaction,” says Lee. “But that was never the case. I had always had that intention.”

William Fichtner and Mikaela Hoover are among the stacked supporting cast.

“She is like royalty to me, but she was so sweet and so welcoming. And she knows that world so well that I felt like she could bring stuff to it that I didn’t know,” says Lee of Youn Yuh-jung

The second season of Beef maintains the bones of the first: rich, complicated characters; explosive, surprising storylines; a few A-list cameos you won’t want to miss; and a personal touch that lends everything an extra layer of authenticity. “The biggest lesson for me was to not just copy and paste from life…but to try to deconstruct real life stories into what the core root emotion is, and to very specifically write to that,” says Lee. “The more specifically I can write to that, the more universal it’ll feel.”

“We really wanted to take a swing where it didn’t feel safe, but we also don’t want to completely abandon the core of who we are as a band, so to speak,” says Lee of the writers room’s approach for season two.