Netflix series Beef was ‘unhinged’ – Charles Melton spills his guts on season 2

2023 was one hell of a year for prestige TV: Succession, The Bear, Happy Valley.

Each was a returning all-timer, but then, there was Beef.

The hugely inventive, ragey drama hit Netflix with Ali Wong and Steven Yeun starring as two strangers brought together by roadway fate and a mutual capacity to be bloody unhinged.

The miniseries is now back, in anthology form, with a new set of nitpicking players to go hell for leather over eight berserk episodes.

Instead of mano a mano, this season pits two couples against each other.

A loved-up Gen Z pair, played by Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton, witness their millennial boss (Oscar Isaac) in a violent domestic dispute with his wife (Carey Mulligan) and record it.

That bit is key.

The fallout of bribes and coercion balloons at their exclusive country club workplace, which counts Michael Phelps and Benny Blanco as members.

Of the four points in this boxing ring, the most upright and sinless among them (to begin with, at least) is Melton’s character Austin.

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He told Metro that when Beef creator Lee Sung Jin approached him about the show, they had already put up his picture in the writers’ room and were penning Austin specifically for him.

In a move a character from his show might make, Lee wangled himself a seat next to Melton at an exclusive dinner to make the season two pitch.

Melton said ‘hundreds of hours’ of conversations followed, taking on the big topics: existentialism, the subconscious, the shadow shelf.

The artistry is that all of this is rendered on screen with the lightest touch.

‘Austin took form and took life,’ said Melton.

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He’s a character that I suspect audiences will fall in love with.

The word that came to mind when watching was ‘himbo’ (complementary).

But when I referred to Austin’s dafter side, Melton was clearly protective.

‘There’s this earnestness to him, this innate kindness and goodness that I think, some larger than others, but I feel we all have,’ he said, speaking to me from California, where the season is set.

‘I remember thinking of the dichotomy of Austin having to navigate doing the right thing compared to doing the good thing for him.’
Austin is someone who, when holding the last bottle of Gatorade in the flavour he wants, will hand it over if it’s also someone else’s favourite.

He wants ‘to do good and be good, not for himself, but for others,’ said Melton.

We had to speak in oblique terms because there are some major spoilers along the way, which I would hate to deprive you of the shock value of.

But Melton pinpointed Austin’s journey, which ends on a corker, as a ‘discovery that his identity is a mask’.

Austin is reckoning with much.

We meet him after his American football career has fallen out from under him.

He’s ‘madly in love’ with his other half Ashley, who might need him a bit too much.

But one of the most poignant parts of that coming-of-age journey is Austin’s reckoning with his Korean ancestry.

He’s grown up in a heavily white, westernised culture.

Even his fiancée admits she never thought of them as a mixed-race couple.

In her mind, he was just an Arizonian.

We’re seeing him come in touch with something that’s in his genetic makeup, but so far away, and that’s his Korean-ness

Such lines ‘came from conversations of experiences that we’ve experienced,’ said Melton.

Lee has managed to find humour in moments that, in Melton’s living of them, he said were not funny.

Austin bursts with a joy that’s unfamiliar to him when he finds a Korean community, explaining it to Ashley like an internal chemical reaction.

Melton might have been the inspiration, but he said his ‘heart broke’ for Austin in such moments.

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So I’m first generation on my mum’s side,’ he said.

‘But I lived in Korea for six years and that experience is a part of my own epigenetic makeup.’ (If, like me, you’re reaching for a dictionary, that means environmental influences that cause subtle changes in our genes.)
Melton added, ‘I think what I felt sad for Austin is that he didn’t get the luxury of living in Korea for six years.

He didn’t have a Korean community.

So we’re seeing him throughout the season come in touch with something that’s in his genetic makeup, but so far away, and that’s his Korean-ness.

‘What a gift it was to have Lee Sung Jin, a Korean American filmmaker, tell a story and touch on things that are a part of my construct.’
Beef season 2 launches on Netflix on April 16.
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