Steven Yeun as Danny in Beef on Netflix.Andrew Cooper/Netflix
Beef, an exhilarating new Netflix series, wastes no time in cutting to the chase.
Only minutes elapse before handyman Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) backs his red pickup truck out of a big-box parking spot and is nearly hit by a white SUV. Or maybe he nearly hits the SUV?
“WHAT? WHAT? WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM? WHAT?” he spits with as much force as a quote in all-caps can muster, as the other driver leans on the horn, delivers a raised middle finger and peels away.
Danny takes a beat to consider the most extreme recourse available to him in a suburban Los Angeles parking lot. Suddenly the show’s inciting road-rage event is off to the races as one angry driver takes off after his even angrier white whale.
It’s this volcanic “meet cute” that connects Yeun’s down-and-out Danny with co-star Ali Wong’s entrepreneurial Amy Lee in a series of escalating showdowns that threaten to derail their lives and those of their friends and family. While plot twists that will keep audiences hooked and bingeing abound, it’s Yeun and Wong who command attention with every twitch and snarl (and one-liner) of their physical performances.
Which is why it’s so strange to see Yeun so chill. He’s relaxed, so relaxed, in a director’s chair as he reflects during a Zoom call on what makes Danny tick, what makes him explode.
“He’s always in a constant vibration of anger and envy and all the other things that are running through his body,” Yeun says of his character, who is decidedly not living his dream life, stuck in the motel his family no longer owns and desperate to provide better for his parents and younger brother.
“I think he’s overcome by a little bit of a scarcity mindset. I think he is feeling oppressed. To live in that space is a very intense, tiring vibe.”
Which probably explains why, so the story goes, both Yeun and Wong broke out in hives after shooting Beef.
“My body released it all. It was just like, ‘Oh my God, I’m itchy everywhere.’ It was crazy.” (Over video, Yeun, a former Walking Dead star, looks every bit one of Hollywood’s top leading men.)
Yeun’s character springs from the mind of showrunner Lee Sung Jin. Beef was inspired by a road-rage incident of his own, where he pulled a Danny and pursued the target of his ire down a Los Angeles highway. He explores the question of what sorts of inflexibly juxtaposed worldviews must two drivers have to come crashing together in titular conflict.
And as a writer known for an unimpeachable resume of comedies such as Tuca & Bertie, Silicon Valley and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Lee instinctively serves his road rage with a side of punchlines. The necessary dark comedy of Beef – low-key sight gags, did-that-just-happen microaggressions and the kind of burns reserved for people you love to hate – feels like a natural collaboration for Lee, Wong (better known as a stand-up comedian) and Yeun, who spent time with the Second City in Chicago.
“I love that we weren’t trying to make fun of Danny,” Yeun says. “We were more just laughing at the whole situation of both Danny and Amy’s existences.”
Ali Wong, left, as Amy, and Maria Bello as Jordan in Beef.Andrew Cooper/Netflix
Indeed a chaser or two of laughs, even awkward ones, is just the medicine for the tragedies at the heart of Beef, a tonal duality that Lee has said is inspired by the likes of The Sopranos. (Or as Danny charmingly puts it, in discussing Italians and Koreans: “Yeah, they’re the same as us. Peninsula mentality.”) For every absurdist scene of loaded-gun masturbation or attempted suicide by indoor hibachi grilling, there are twice as many punchlines that would be right at home in a stand-up’s “tight five.”
While the moniker of “Asian The Sopranos” would do a disservice to both shows, it’s worth noting the additional inspiration Beef takes from the HBO hit for its worldbuilding. Tony and company are iconic characters who happen to be Italian; Danny and Amy happen to be Asian. They travel through a diasporic Los Angeles filled with second-generation Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese friends and their families and a smattering of interlopers (including Maria Bello playing a scene-stealing CEO, where the C surely stands for “colonizing”). It’s a setting as natural as any to this observer from Toronto.
Yeun, who has been asked a million times about diversity and representation in Hollywood, and is still relaxing in that director’s chair, naturally has chess answers to this very checkers question when asked about it – again.
“The thing that’s difficult sometimes to unpack,” he offers, “is that even labels like Asian-American or the Asian-American experience, those are all definitions of an experience from the outside looking in. You are going to comment on the outside gaze at times. But for us, this whole show was about the gaze of these people’s lives themselves.”
Diasporic artists (“I actually more personally ascribe to a third culture,” Yeun says), for better or worse, are asked more than most to mine personal histories in their work. When Danny, in despair, attends a Korean church and eventually sings in a praise band, it feels infinitely relatable to Yeun’s own oft-discussed churchgoing and singing in a praise band. But representation isn’t as simple as being able to look up and point at yourself on screen.
“The most difficult part that I think everybody has to deal with, whether you are any ethnicity, is yourself at the end,” Yeun says. “Can you operate from yourself as a human being and express yourself from a singular place that only you can have?”
And so it’s what Yeun brings to bear in these church scenes – say, a single take of him slowly breaking down and bawling at the first strains of a familiar hymn – that elevates simple recognition into something more real. For the actor, it is less being everything to everyone than it is being himself. “I live in this third place where all I can really root myself in is my own intrinsic humanity.”
Yeun himself is, for some, a marker of diversity’s progress in Hollywood, from his early casting and mixed-race coupling in The Walking Dead to his Oscar-nominated performance in Minari as an immigrant Korean father. Danny, with his millennial anxieties and confidence to cover Incubus’s alt-rock classic Drive, will feel to many like his most complex – and real – role yet.
“We’re all desperately trying to get to this human, relatable place where we can feel full amongst each other,” says Yeun, who also confidently covered Incubus in his youth. “That we’re not pushed down by a singular rendering of society, but it’s actually a shared, spacious society in which everyone can participate in full.
“If we can. That’s not an easy thing. But that’s my goal. That’s my hope.”
Beef is available to stream on Netflix starting April 6.
Cliff Lee