Beef Creator Shares ‘Real Life Incident’ That Inspired Season 2

If bingeing your way through the most recent season of Beef cut close to home at any point, that’s probably because creator Lee Sung Jin was inspired by incidents from real life when putting the new episodes together.

The second iteration of the award-winning Netflix series focusses on two couples – played by Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny – on opposite sides of a generational and class divide, who become embroiled in a feud that takes over all four of their lives.

Speaking to People, writer and director Lee admitted that the “springboard” of the whole season was a “real-life incident” in which he overheard “a ‘heated debate’ coming from a couple’s home”.

It was only when retelling what he heard to people of different generations and backgrounds that he realised this could form the basis of a new season of Beef.

“Younger people reacted like Ashley and Austin,” he recalled. “Whereas my similarly-aged or older peers were like, ‘It’s a fight. I mean, who among us [hasn’t had one like it?]’.”

But that’s not the only part of the new season that took inspiration from the real world.

The Emmy winner also spoke about how a trip to A&E inspired the scene in which Charles and Cailee’s characters are in a hospital waiting room.

“I literally just wrote down in my notes app everything that happened, dialogue I overheard, and pretty much copied and pasted it and wrote it in a day,” he admitted. “So that episode is not an exaggeration. That is the state of [the American] health industry at the moment.”

He concluded: “I’d love to get to a point where society isn’t what it is, so we can write about something other than class. But until then, [we’ll] just keep trying to shout it from the mountaintops.”

Beef’s second outing has once again been a hit with both critics and Netflix users, many of whom are now speculating about whether a third run could be on the cards.

Netflix is remaining tight-lipped for the time being, but the screenwriter has made it clear that he originally envisaged Beef as a three-season anthology series, each focussing on a different cast of characters and central feud.