‘Beef’ Creator-Director Lee Sung Jin Reveals The “Harrowing” True Story Behind Episode 4 & An ‘X-Men’ Reboot Update

Beef may not be autobiographical, but for creator Lee Sung Jin the anthology series certainly provides an outlet for his frustrations. “That’s probably how I get it all out of my system,” chuckles the jovial writer. Season 2, Lee says, was inspired by real life, after witnessing an argument that his friends, depending on age, had vastly different reactions to. “When I was retelling that story, that’s where inspiration struck,” he says. “A lot of my younger friends, Gen Z, they were aghast, like, ‘Did you call 911?’ Whereas my millennial and Gen X peers just kind of shrugged. I thought, ‘Oh, there might be a show there.’”

DEADLINE: Was there always going to be a Season 2 of Beef?

LEE SUNG JIN: No. Well, in my very early pitch decks, I had three slides that were like, “Hey, here’s other examples of beefs that could take place.” And when we were doing the awards run for Season 1, we still hadn’t gotten a Season 2 pickup. I was like, “What’s a guy got to do?” Jinny Howe at Netflix wisely pulled me aside and said, “You don’t have to do a Season 2. We can do another show together.” Which was a very brutal — but needed — call. I took it to heart and was ready to walk away. But real life inspired me when I heard a heated debate coming from a couple’s home in my neighborhood. I found the dichotomy of viewpoints about marriage and love [between different age groups] interesting.

DEADLINE: What is it that’s so fruitful about that generational divide?

LEE: A lot of shows and film have covered a wider generational divide — it’s usually boomers with a “Get off my lawn” energy. I thought what would be more interesting is closing that age gap and having two generations that are butted right up against each other. For me, what’s interesting is that, as an elder millennial/Gen X cusp, my fellow writers of the same age and I, we hadn’t gone through our midlife crisis yet. It felt like a good time to explore 40-somethings wrestling with age and the passage of time. And, when we started the show, it hadn’t really bubbled up in culture yet, but I do find now that culturally there are so many headlines about the Gen Z/millennial divide. We shouldn’t be warring with each other. We should actually be warring with the billionaire class that’s puppeteering all of this.

DEADLINE: Did you have writers who were younger in the writers’ room?

LEE: Most of the writers were millennial and older. We had a writer’s assistant who’s Gen Z cusp. Obviously, we had numerous conversations with Cailee Spaeny. But I think for a lot of us in the writers’ room, it was about trying to put ourselves in the shoes of our youth. I think sometimes, when you’re a millennial trying to write Gen Z, you start painting with really broad brushstrokes. But there were a lot of conversations in the room reflecting on how we were in our 20s. I remember being on staff for a show and we’d have to stay till 7:02 p.m. and I’d be judging the showrunner, thinking, “Oh, they must hate their family.”

And here I am 44, routinely staying until 11:30 p.m.There’s a lot of us being humbled, as we reflect on how we were and having a better understanding of how, when you’re young, you have these ideals but what happens is that life comes at you hard and fast, and you constantly have to compromise.

As a director, to be able to go straight to the HODs and tell them about my day and fine-tune all the little details was super fun. I’m very, very proud of Episode 4. I feel like we were able to push things visually more than our other episodes because it was such a bottle episode.

DEADLINE: When you tackle big themes like capitalism or classism, the message can sometimes overtake the character narrative. How do you tell a micro story while reflecting something bigger?

LEE: It’s about leaning into character, always. Thinking about Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) not just as an evil millionaire, but as a three-dimensional character that has a second husband. She probably got into that marriage just to have fun. At one point, they were Troy [William Fichtner] and Ava [Mikaela Hoover], where they just wanted an endless summer, and here he is with his hand tremor causing all sorts of problems. We’re constantly thinking about what Chairman Park’s actual day-to-day would look like, and once we have those pieces, it becomes about the story math.

There’s something that, over the years, I’ve tried to impress upon the writers’ room, which is my rise-fall method of writing. I didn’t create this. Many writers have done this before me, but there was an article that struck me where a university fed a machine learning algorithm all their classic pieces of literature, and the AI discovered that there’s only six to seven ways humans tell stories. And it’s all versions of rise-fall-rise, fall-rise-fall, different configurations of that. So, we’ll come up with a rise-fall shape for the overall story, and then we’re going to do that for each character. Then we’re going to do that for each episode, for each act, for each scene. You’re just rise-falling all the way down to dialogue. Once you have those shapes, you have a sturdy foundation of how to keep things propulsive and interesting.

DEADLINE: You directed four episodes this season. Did you want to add a new creative challenge?

LEE: I definitely caught the bug last season. Directing the finale was one of my favorite parts of Season 1. I felt like I learned a lot from my rookie season and I was ready to play more minutes. For me, because it’s all about trying to use analogies to get someone else to see something in your head, it’s much easier to not play the game of telephone if you can just do it directly. Being able to execute what was in my head saved me a lot of time and energy.

Episode 4, for example, was based on a real-life event in my life where a harrowing stint at a local LA hospital for 10-plus hours led me to write that episode the next day, in 24 hours. I just vomited it out. Everything you see in that episode pretty much happened. All the little textures, the man with the bent-over spine, the bandaged teenager with sunglasses, the weird liquid in the chairs — these are all things that I remember so specifically about my experience. As a director, to be able to go straight to the HODs and tell them about my day and fine-tune all the little details was super fun. I’m very, very proud of Episode 4. I feel like we were able to push things visually more than our other episodes because it was such a bottle episode.

DEADLINE: Which came first here? Did the hospital episode happen before the rest of the season was written, or was it happening as you were writing it?

LEE: Happening as. We had been stuck on Episode 3 for quite some time and then this happened and it just gave me such a clear midpoint for the season. Once we did that, then we could retroactively change 2 and 3 so it could flow into 4 better.

DEADLINE: The American healthcare system, which is a horror show, plays such a big part in the entire season. Did that come to you mid-process?

LEE: Ashley’s need for health insurance, that was early on. When we were doing that exercise of putting ourselves in the shoes of our youth, something that came up time and time again was how anxiety-provoking health insurance was, because you have to get off your parents’ at the age of 25 or 26. And then most staff jobs, whether writing or PA-ing, certainly don’t come with health insurance. That felt like such a palpable, visceral part of just trying to climb the ladder in your 20s, that it was an essential part of Ashley’s arc from the beginning. But when this harrowing experience happened at the ER, that’s when I knew that her condition has to get significantly worse midpoint. Ideally, it can coincide plot and story-wise with the fall of Josh (Oscar Isaac) so that the beef can get reignited.

DEADLINE: Did you want Season 1 and Season 2 to feel similar?

LEE: What we tried to do with Season 2 is not copy rise-fall shapes from Season 1. I know that could be a safe, easy way for success, to just take a formula that works, copy and paste, and do it over again. There are certain shows that I watch for comfort and there’s a repeated formula. And I’ve definitely been a part of other rooms where mentors of mine have told me, “In television, you always want to have each season start the same and end the same.” But for me, all my favorite bands, their debut album and sophomore album are very different. I find that when bands repeat themselves, I start to lose interest.

DEADLINE: Does success change the process at all, either in terms of expectation or timeline?

My dad and I, every Saturday morning, used to watch the show on television, so to be able to look around this Marvel conference room and have every X-Men character on the board and be able to spitball and freestyle on, “What about this person? “it’s so emboldening, because you’re like, Oh, wow, this isn’t going to be a safe movie. This is actually going to be a really exciting new take.

On co-writing the upcoming X-Men reboot

LEE: I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t create a new inner monologue that becomes hypercritical. I already have very critical self-talk and success can introduce almost heightened self-criticism. But to me, the exercise this season has been to figure out a way to quiet that voice and return to making bold decisions that I would want to watch. For me, it’s all about quieting that talk.

DEADLINE: Do you guys sit in a circle and talk about visceral ways to screw over people? That airplane scene stayed with me.

LEE: Yeah. On the airplane, we were piggybacking off the Ashley thing in Episode 4. When I was writing that episode, an early draft had her blowing her nose into Josh’s pomade, which was funny and cute, but certainly not visceral. So, I thought, “How appropriate if she actually uses the very wound that Josh caused to get back at him.” Once we had that, when Lindsay finds out about Burberry’s death, we thought, how can she take that idea a step further? We’re always trying to mirror these two couples as the ghosts of Christmas future and present, so it was humorous to us that Lindsay also creates a drink. And, to me, there’s nothing more disgusting than an airplane bathroom. Every flight, it gets worse. We had a lot of fun dialing up and down the level of grossness.

DEADLINE: Before I let you go, you’ve taken a stab at Marvel before and now you’re doing the next X-Men movie. What is it like to do something that has those kinds of parameters after the freedom that you have on Beef?

LEE: Truthfully, it’s same parameters on this project, which is so exciting. I’d say there were actually more parameters on Thunderbolts because it was plugging into an existing arc and existing characters, whereas with X-Men, Kevin [Feige] just wants to take a big swing and start anew, not be beholden to any of the movies that have come before. And Jake Schreier has such a clear vision in terms of wanting to get back to character first, and to what is exciting about those early [Chris] Claremont-run comics, which was all about team dynamics. There were a lot of soapy elements to those comics. We’ve been in the room every day together. Kevin and Louis [D’Esposito] are so dialed in, and they have such incredible instincts that it’s been fun to just blue-sky.

I’m such a big fan of that IP of the comics. My dad and I, every Saturday morning, used to watch the show on television, so to be able to look around this Marvel conference room and have every X-Men character on the board and be able to spitball and freestyle on, “What about this person? “it’s so emboldening, because you’re like, “Oh, wow, this isn’t going to be a safe movie. This is actually going to be a really exciting new take.”

DEADLINE: What do you feel beholden to when you write something like that?

LEE: It’s, “Would younger me want to run to the movie theater to watch this? Are we honoring all the amazing work that the comics set up? Are we playing it safe? Are we pushing things?” It’s just trying to look at my childhood self, who loved these characters so much, and making sure we’re doing right by him and all the other fans that love X-Men.

DEADLINE: And are you and Steve Yeun still working on a film together?

LEE: I actually just talked to Steven the other day. It’s really early, but it is the thing that I’m most excited to write next — and I’m going to direct it as well. I can’t say when it’ll come together, but it is a father-daughter story that I’m ready to just vomit my insides into, because I have a one-year-old daughter now and there’s this wellspring of new themes and inspiration and emotions that having a daughter has brought up. I think this movie will be the perfect vessel for it.