How the Creator of “Beef” Got from Petty Feuds to Class Warfare
When the Netflix anthology series “Beef” premièred, in 2023, it was a revelation in more ways than one. The show, which traced the depths into which two Angelenos descend after a road-rage incident, reintroduced Ali Wong as a dramatic lead, gave Steven Yeun a chance to go darkly comic, and shined a rare light on the issue of Asian American mental health. It also remade the career of its creator, Lee Sung Jin, a seeming overnight success who actually had nearly two decades of TV-comedy writing under his belt.
Lee first pitched the show after he stalked another driver for a half hour following a parking-lot dispute; he similarly drew from life for Season 2, which stars Oscar Isaac as Josh, a country-club manager, and Carey Mulligan as his interior-designer wife, Lindsay. The couple are caught on video having a nasty fight by two members of his staff, Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny). The Gen Z employees, about to embark on their own marriage, see the footage as blackmail material—and thus an opportunity to start their next chapter on secure financial footing. As in the first season, the story quickly broadens beyond the central conflict, roping in the club’s new billionaire owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), her unreliable plastic-surgeon husband, and the seething resentments of both the haves and the have-nots.
I met Lee earlier this month, at his new office in Hollywood. The space was sparsely decorated, but he’d already mounted posters for “Beef”; “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” the show that gave him his start in the industry; and “Thunderbolts,” a 2025 Marvel movie directed by his creative partner, Jake Schreier. (Lee did a couple of passes on the blockbuster, and has been tapped to pen Schreier’s upcoming “X-Men” movie with one of his “Beef” writers, Joanna Calo.) A freestanding whiteboard charted more than a dozen future projects.
Lee, who has gone by Sonny since childhood and was credited as Sonny Lee for the first half of his career, opened up about the long road to “Beef”—a journey toward more intentional storytelling, as well as feeling “O.K. in my own skin.” Perhaps surprisingly, the “Beef” character he seemed to relate to most was Josh, a congenial go-getter who mires himself in workaholism to avoid addressing his grief, as Lee did when one of his dogs died suddenly during production. We talked about his method of tailoring dialogue to his actors, the differences between Korean and American billionaires, and why class and capitalism are such inescapable themes on TV today. Our conversation—which contains some spoilers—has been edited and condensed.
You changed your name professionally in 2018 or 2019. What led to that decision, and why did you put your last name first?
It actually might have been earlier, because I did it on “Tuca & Bertie.” I was born in Korea, went to elementary school there, then moved to Minnesota [for sixth grade]. And every single day, taking attendance was a nightmare, because the teacher would add new consonants to the name that did not exist. And so, one day, without telling anybody, I was staring at a piece of homework and wrote “Sonny,” and I told everyone I go by Sonny now. It fit my personality, I think.
How so?
Definitely a people pleaser. And I feel like my noonchi [a Korean concept for interpersonal observation] is really strong. So when you have that strong self-awareness, you’re always trying to make the situation O.K.
When I came up, the writing rooms were different and I was usually the only person of color on staff. You get these subtle digs your whole career—some not so subtle. One time on a show, I went to the bathroom and came back and everyone was laughing, and they told me to check my e-mail. So I opened my e-mail and one of the writers had put two chopsticks as buck teeth, wore a straw hat, and did slanty eyes, and they took a photo of it and sent it to me, apropos of nothing.
What’s so funny about that?
Exactly. In the moment, I just laughed it off. But I have that photo saved as a favorite in my phone, and I’ve stared at it a lot to motivate myself. If I hit a writer’s block, I push through it—I just bring up that photo.
Oh, wow, you’re sick. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Well, it’s quite motivating, because I keep wanting to go back to younger me and be, like, Why don’t you have a backbone? Cut to years later, I was working on “Tuca & Bertie.” I was at my local coffee shop, and they call out the name on the receipt when your order’s ready.
It was like a flashback to childhood, where they’d be, like, “Siong Ga Chin Lee.” I heard two thirtysomething-year-old white women laughing, and I literally cowered. [He rounds his back to demonstrate.] I got home, and I felt horrible that my default state is to crouch. So I asked Lisa Hanawalt, the showrunner of “Tuca & Bertie,” can I change my credit to my Korean name? And do you mind if I put the last name first, because that’s how it was meant to be said? She said, absolutely.
I was thinking, when I hear “Director Bong Joon-ho” or “Director Park Chan-wook,” I feel proud. Those names sound cool, and it’s because they are making the coolest stuff of all time. And I thought, if more Koreans went by our given Korean names and just made cool stuff, maybe that stigma [against Asian names] would change.
How often do you get called Lee?
I get called Lee or Mr. Jin all the time, so it’s led to much confusion. But my mom and dad were really happy—they were proud to see the name that they had given me. My mom always told me growing up that she put a lot of thought into the name Sung Jin. The Chinese characters that the Korean is based on loosely mean “shaking saint,” because she wanted me to be a saint who shakes the world.
What led you to TV writing? And when you started, did you feel like you had to choose between comedy and drama?
I was an econ major. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and, senior year, I decided to abandon it because I couldn’t stomach it. My poor parents, spending a fortune on an Ivy League education! I moved to New York with no plan. I packed all my things into a Honda CR-V and stayed at my friend’s house. I thought, just to play it safe, I’m gonna cover all my belongings with clothes to hide my important things. And when I woke up, everything I owned had been stolen. To this day, I don’t have my diploma because that was stolen.
Oh, wow.
The only thing they left was an “Aladdin” soundtrack. So I was really aimless in New York, just temping, really depressed. I watched “The O.C.” non-stop, never left my room. I started a blog called “Silly Pipe Dreams” that talked about TV, and especially “The O.C.,” that, later, Josh Schwartz [the show’s creator] referred to all the time. Josh actually invited me to visit the “O.C.” set. That was one of my first intersections with the industry. My friend then slipped my résumé to the page program at NBC. I got in, and I wore the peacock tie and gave tours for ten dollars an hour. I thought, O.K., I like this.
A friend of mine in the page program, Patrick Walsh, and I decided to write a script about the page program, and somehow it got in the hands of Jeff Ingold, who was the head of NBC comedy at the time. He called us and was, like, “This is incredible. Do you guys have agents?” We’re, like, no. He’s, like, “I want to call every major agency on your behalf.” When you have the head of NBC comedy calling, we were getting offers from top agents across every agency. We went to the fanciest agent and moved out to L.A., and everything fell apart again. I couldn’t get the agent to answer our calls, and suddenly I was unemployed. I slept on a hospital cot that my roommate’s nurse girlfriend brought from work because I couldn’t afford a bed.
I just thought comedy was the thing I was supposed to be doing. I started writing the pilot around 2005. My first job was on “Always Sunny,” 2007 or 2008. It was comedy’s heyday. And in my twenties—my whole life—my M.O. was to look around and copy and mimic. There was no true sense of self. I thought, everyone loves U.C.B.-type comedy, and that Tina Fey, “30 Rock”-like zinger thing is working. So all my early samples read like that. But it got me a job on “Always Sunny,” which I was super grateful for.
It was also their heyday.
Oh, yeah, very much. Season 4, Season 5 is when I was on there and started selling broadcast pilots. Eventually, I was on a multi-cam for three years. I was miserable. The work environment was really stressful and intense; someone cried every day. I did not feel like myself. More and more, my personality was turning into an amalgamation of everyone around me, and I was not around the best people at the time. At the end of that run, I had my lowest low, mental-health-wise. I’ve always struggled with mental health, and I attempted to take my own life.
How old were you?
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org.
I was thirty-two. I want to say it was December 13, 2013; I remember the thirteens. And I’m pretty sure it was a Friday. I still have scars from the incident that I can’t seem to get rid of. But there’s this piece of dialogue that Steven Yeun’s character, Danny, says in Season 1—something like, “Rock bottom can be a trampoline.” And for me it was.
I started therapy. I started reëxamining, like, if I am going to participate in all of this, why? And it made me think, O.K., I can’t write like this anymore. I need to write because I’m tapping into some truth, or there’s something in me that needs to get out. I started getting rid of all these performative layers and trying to become more comfortable being myself. It was really “Beef” Season 1 that made me feel O.K. in my own skin for the first time in a long time, and a lot of it is due to the collaborators I had that season. They created a loving environment to allow me to feel not judged. So that comedy-drama thing—it started as hard comedy, because I was trying to please others. And then it’s become what “Beef” is, which is more me. I like having a sense of humor, but I also want to talk about some very real things.
Speaking of, were you surprised that the theme of class resentment became such a core part of the show?
I was. Coming off Season 1—
Which also had a bunch of class resentments.
Yes, definitely. It was a literal upstairs-downstairs with [Ali Wong’s character] Amy and Danny. And coming off a season when we were doing the award stuff, we still hadn’t gotten a Season 2 pickup. I was aggressively pitching Netflix Season 2 ideas, and Jinny Howe, at Netflix, very wisely pulled me aside and was, like, Look, we will happily do another show with you, but you should only do a Season 2 if it’s something that you’re passionate about.
It wasn’t until real life happened that I got inspiration for Season 2, where I was in my neighborhood and there was a heated debate from a house that caused a bit of a stir. I told this story to several people, including fellow-writers, and without fail, the younger people were more shocked. They’re, like, Oh, my God, did you call the police? And a lot of folks my age or older would be, like, who among us hasn’t had a. . . . [Laughs.] I thought that was so funny, the dichotomy of that. Once I found that inspo, I pitched it to Jinny. She was, like, There you go: you want to talk about love through these two different couples. That’s how we started—no intention to talk about class.
Then I had the blessing of house-sitting for my goddaughter’s parents; I’ve known my friend since he was broke with me in L.A. He sold this tech company for billions of dollars. He’s a member of Montecito Club, and he let me use his membership. I would turn my nose up, like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re spending this much money on a country club.” And then I use it for a month, and hedonic adaptation kicks in. I’m, like, all right, show me the prices. In 2026, you really can’t talk about anything—life, marriage, love, career—without the theme of class being the variable.
In between seasons, I was able to direct a music video for one of the members of BTS, RM. It was my first time back to Korea in a really long time, and it was a side of Korea I’d never seen when I was living there, because I’m meeting with C.E.O.s, doing the red carpet, dining with all these important figures. And I very quickly knew, whatever I did for Season 2, I wanted this Korean-conglomerate piece to be a huge factor, so the dots started to connect. That’s how Chairwoman Park and this country club became the centerpiece.
The country club, to me, is a great little microcosm of society, because from my observation, most of the members seem to be boomers and Silent Gen, and most of the employees seem to be millennial, Gen Z, and sometimes Gen X. And no matter how hard those employees work, they’re never going to be members of the country club. I think that is a very potent feeling right now societally.
Do you have any theories about why there are so many TV shows about awful rich people?
I think, as writers, you’re looking around to draw truths from somewhere. Because we’re in an all-gas, no-brakes capitalism, it’s hard to look for inspiration in the world and not just constantly be barraged with, Hey, this is the thing that you have to talk about. We’re all trying to say this message louder and louder in the hopes that if you scream—
Someone’s listening?
Yeah. Austin says to Ashley, “I guess we should all get out and vote.” But we do, and yet nothing changes. So then, in your work, you feel a responsibility to try and tackle some of these themes. [He points to the whiteboard in his office.] On that board, I have my future slate. I’d say every single one on that board has the theme of class and capitalism really baked into it. But, if in my lifetime things change, I would love to be able to tackle other things.
In all the experiences you’ve talked about, have you noticed any differences between American and Korean élites?
[Laughs.] That’s a question that could get me in trouble. There’s definitely differences. No knock on American C.E.O.s or anything, but there’s just a more elegant way the wooing and wining and dining goes about in Korea. There’s, like, a decorum, you know? In America, there’s a more overt “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”
Were there any actors you had in mind or who had already signed on when writing the characters?
Almost all of the main cast. I always like to have the cast attached before I write. I have a hard time writing to nothing. I wanted to have this Korea piece, and I knew there needs to be a tug-of-war for this person’s identity. So will it be a Korean American character or a half-Korean character? I felt that we covered so much ground in Season 1 about the Korean American diaspora, and one huge part that we didn’t cover was the experience of half-Koreans or half-Asians. Several people on the writing staff are half, and, my daughter being half-Korean, it felt like fertile ground. So I was, like, O.K., who do we go after for this? And I’d just seen “May December.” I was blown away by Charles Melton, as many people were. I pitched him several beats of the season and he said yes. That was the first piece, because I felt that that was going to be the harder couple to cast.
Then I looked at the older couple. I knew the configuration had to be two actors who have a history together, because when you meet them, it’s such a bad first impression that if you don’t sense an inherent long history, you may lose the audience. And what I love about what Oscar [Isaac] and Carey [Mulligan] have done is that even though they’re being horrible, you believe that there’s some love buried underneath there. And I think it is partly due to them having, in our collective psyche, been a couple for multiple decades. On “Drive,” they were the young, volatile, twentysomething couple, and then on “Inside Llewyn Davis,” it’s, like, late twenties, early thirties, breaking up, paths starting to diverge. And now they’re an older couple who have been together for fifteen years, reaching a tipping point.
I met with Oscar first—on a Zoom which lasted three or four hours. We quickly departed from the show because I didn’t have a script yet, and we just started talking about life, and I knew I had found a great creative partner. He also had a dog named Bugsy. It felt so synched. I asked him, Hey, I’m thinking about Carey Mulligan, given you guys’ history. He was, like, no-brainer, that’s my favorite person to act opposite of. We’ve been trying to work together again. Every project they pitch each other, and it just hadn’t happened.
Oh, wow.
So I met with Carey. And I actually had to meet her from a country club because we had budgetarily run out of money to have an office for the writers’ room. And so we were meeting at one of our writers’ country clubs’ conference rooms that we were just booking every week.
One of the writers belonged to a country club?
He’s a big golfer. The club is in Brentwood—but traffic to Brentwood sometimes is insane for me. So, I was severely late for the Zoom meeting with Carey Mulligan. Also, I’m meeting her in a country-club restaurant with plates of calamari behind me. I was mortified. Carey told me later that it actually helped her decision, because she was, like, Lee Sung Jin is such an important man that he’s showing up late to my Zoom and he’s in the middle of eating at a country club. She was so ready to tackle this kind of tone, because so many people cast her in dire, dramatic things. One of the first things she said to me was, “Sonny, can you just promise me I won’t be a dying mother?” I was, like, I can assure you.
Can you talk about the paintings that serve as the title cards in this season?
They’re all Flemish and Danish paintings from the sixteenth century, I believe. And it just happened accidentally. I have a habit of collecting paintings on my phone, whether I’m at a museum and I take a picture, or I see something cool online. And for some reason, for Season 2, I was saving a lot of Danish and Flemish painters from that era—there’s just something about that style that fit the mood of the season. Like, that first painting, [Quentin Matsys’s] “The Moneylender and His Wife,” kept calling to me. In the corner, you see the hint of something, like another couple.
We had the dark Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting with the four seasons at the finale, because they just felt very appropriate. It’s got the four faces all looking at each other, and seasons was such a big theme. We have the couples that represent each season between Ashley/Austin, Josh/Lindsay, Troy/Ava, and Park/Kim.
I was also really struck by the final image of the season, with Chairwoman Park at the grave.
That was actually a reshoot. I thought it would be clever to show the four seasons again, ending with winter, which was Chairwoman Park, and winter being filled with regret. Even with all the money in the world, you’re crying at the graveside of your first love and realizing you did it all wrong. As scripted, it was in extreme closeup: Chairwoman Park rests her head on the grave as a tear falls, and ants cover her face. We cut to black. We shot that. We even VFX’d the ants. And I just wasn’t feeling anything.
I had saved these samsara paintings on my phone. Throughout Buddhist and Hindu history, it’s always the same thing: It’s the wheel of life with the god of death holding it. And I would just look at that for spiritual inspiration, but then I’m, like, what if it’s visual inspiration? What if we do a top shot that depicts samsara? We should do these little vignettes of each couple. It can rotate like the four seasons, like time passing, and Ashley and Austin and Josh and Lindsay. The outer ring could be vignettes of other lives. We put that together in a week. We didn’t even have all the cast, so we had to shoot each element separately.
We actually Easter-egg that monster earlier in the season—you blink and you miss it. I talk in the writers’ room a lot about good confusion and bad confusion, and the thing that I always want to try to avoid is bad confusion, where the audience isn’t sure if we meant for them to be confused. My hope is, with the god of death, that people are, like, I think they want us to interpret this and I’m going to Google what this might mean.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this season is that all of the characters have such different styles of speech. What is writing such different voices like for you?
It’s something that I take great pride in, because it takes hours and hours of conversations with your actors to start molding the dialogue to how they naturally speak.
With Charles, we would spend hours on the phone, and I would tell him, Hey, I’m gonna have my Notes app open and just write down the way you speak. And he loves to put handles on everything before he gets to his point: “Sonny, if I may say this . . . ,” “My perspective is, Sonny, if I may say this . . .” And so throughout Austin’s dialogue, you’ll see these Charles Melton-isms.
That’s very sweet.
Cailee will do a lot of sorries. She’ll cut herself off a lot, interrupting herself, which is a very anxious-attachment-style type of dialogue. And then for Oscar, when he doesn’t like something, he purses his lips and does a lot of eyebrow raises. So we put that into the parentheticals [in the script]: “Eyebrows raise.”
Were the actors ever freaked out by it?
Well, they knew that was the process. They knew that I was trying to get this to fit like a glove. And, for me, that’s the best part of this. As writers, our first instinct is to write things a bit more “written” and a bit more jokey, and then you get it on its feet and it doesn’t feel real. So then you start rehearsals, and you start molding it. But it requires a two-way street: you need actors that are willing and vulnerable and giving to allow me to absorb as much as I did.
I’d love to talk about the role that the tech-assisted “soft” adultery plays in the season. Josh seems to prefer OnlyFans to intimacy with his wife. Lindsay flirts with other men online when her marriage hits a rough patch. It felt very timely.
Thank you for highlighting that, because that’s something we talked about at length in the writers’ room. Originally, for Lindsay, we had a version where she had one person that she was actually cheating on Josh with, and it felt like a bridge too far. And then I saw a headline someone sent me that said—and I’m gonna butcher the statistics—something like sixty per cent of married women have a backup guy ready and willing to go if the current marriage fails. And forty per cent are thinking of someone that could be their backup plan.
As we got to know the character of Lindsay more, it just felt appropriate for her to dabble, and right when it gets too far, block someone, and just get joy out of seeing how much she can push this emotional connection. But ultimately she keeps revisiting this royal ex, which came out of a conversation with Carey. She was, like, I went to school with these women; I know these women very well. They for sure have a royal ex that they can’t stop thinking about.
It’s always fun, starting with these first-thought ideas and looking at headlines and life and all these things. Suddenly we found these textures that are so much more complex—and weird—in a way that only life can supply. ♦