In ‘Beef’ on Netflix Steven Yeun and Ali Wong felt connected enough to ‘go at it’

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s characters may loath each other in the Netflix series “Beef,” but behind the scenes the actors forged a connection that enabled them to give free rein to that fictional anger.

“With Ali, you could throw anything at her,” Yeun said in a video interview with his co-star. “I think she has this deep grounding in herself that feels really powerful to reflect off of.

“She has this graciousness to her that I think also creates this nice connection between us that allows us to, like, really go at it.”

Created by Lee Sung Jin, the 10-episode series follows the aftermath of a road rage incident between two strangers. Danny Cho (Yeun), a failing contractor with a chip on his shoulder, starts a feud with Amy Lau (Wong), a self-made entrepreneur with a seemingly perfect life. The increasing stakes of their feud soon start to unravel their lives and relationships.

The darkly comedic and deeply moving series toes the line between drama and comedy, and unpacks an existential dread that many might relate to, like a full-sized meal of pandemic proportions.

Wong, who is known for her standup comedy with “Baby Cobra,” takes on a very different role in this drama, which she hadn’t fully processed.

“When I do standup, I’m all by myself. The beauty is that I have final say and I’m in total control, and I write everything and I choose how I dress. But when you collaborate with people, I think you’re able to express things that maybe you weren’t able to by yourself,” she said.

For Yeun, performing this character felt personal to him in a lot of ways. “I relate to Danny in so much as we’re talking about a world that a lot of people have … not personally seen like Korean church or maybe a Korean-American existence, coming from a very lower middle class existence.”

Playing Danny reminded him of his early years as the first-born son of immigrants.

“When I was younger as an immigrant latchkey kid, I was pretty dukes up against the world … Getting older and more mature, you kind of are able to face yourself and see yourself a little bit clearer. But going back to Danny was interesting, because I was like, ‘Oh, right. I forgot, there’s this part of you that we all share’ … just this cringe part of early years in our life where maybe we’re not so forgiving of the person, and it was nice to revisit that.”

Showrunner Jin got the idea for the series from a road rage incident that actually happened to him. While the events in the show are embellished, he thought it was “sort of funny that you we never know what’s going on in someone else’s, not only vehicle, but in their head. And we’re trapped in these subjective views of the world and projecting so many assumptions onto other people. So that was the kernel of the idea.”

Danny and Amy are two characters who suddenly live in the rush of their feud, perhaps not having to impress or disappoint the other when their real rage and true selves bubble to the surface. The actors turn in career-best performances.

“The exercise with Danny for me was to never bail on him,” said Yeun, 39. “Never play him in a way where we’re laughing at him because then that gives a chance for everyone to just go, ‘All right, yeah, that’s not me.’ But instead, by embracing him, I hope people feel connected to him.”

“I so relate to that; the idea of never bailing on your character,” agreed Wong, 40. “Amy has two sex scenes in the show and some of them can be viewed as quite shameful, but I don’t see them as shameful. I wouldn’t have performed them on camera if I didn’t understand them on some level.”

While she was “a little intimidated” to work with Oscar nominee Yeun (for “Minari”), “on the first day of rehearsal, he said to me, ‘I don’t know anything you don’t know’ … He really meant it or he’s a really good actor,” she quipped. “Despite the fact that he has so much experience and he’s been nominated for an Oscar and everything, he didn’t hold any of this prestige over my head at all. I didn’t feel an ounce of it.”

The duo earned the same respect from their co-stars. For Joseph Lee (“Star Trek: Picard”), who plays Wong’s onscreen husband, it’s the off-screen comfort level that translates seamlessly onscreen.

“What I got from Ali was actually not talking about the scene or anything related to work; it was talking to her about life and just daily annoyances, and just joking around. I think those are the things where we were really able to jell and I was really able to get a connection to her personality.”

For Young Mazino, who plays Danny’s younger brother, it was a learning experience as an actor. “Steven and Amy are tremendously talented and, despite all their success and talent, they’re so real and grounded and human. I learned so much just by going through the scenes with them.”

Shooting the series was eye-opening for Wong too.

“I think of myself as a tough person and then I watched Steven in the forest for a week in the final episode and I was like, ‘I am not a tough person,’” she laughed. “He was thriving in that forest at 2 in the morning with the poison oak, with the darkness, the tripping, the branches poking the eye, the insects, the vermin … he was thriving and I was like, ‘I am not.’”

Yeun laughed. “I think the thing is Danny knows how to offer maybe a toughness in a different way with his body, but I feel like Amy offers this toughness that Danny can’t access, like this mental toughness, this emotional toughness.”

Even though the show seems to be about rage, “the rage is really just a Trojan horse to talk about the root of rage, which is this kind of empty feeling that’s in a lot of us,” Jin said.

This experience has been cathartic for him both professionally and personally. “I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin for a very long time and so my writing wasn’t very comfortable either. I was always kind of mimicking and copying.”

Through the support of the cast and crew, studio and network, he was able to be himself. “That is cathartic because it does help you, not only in your writing, but just in real life.”

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