Asian A.V. Club newsletter #3
Creator, writer and director Lee Sung Jin talks to us about his spectacular new series 'Beef'. Plus your April viewing checklist!
If you haven’t already heard, Lee Sung Jin’s new series ‘Beef’ is getting all sorts of critical love before its official release this week. As we have mentioned in our last newsletter, the less you know about this series, the better.
But if you have to know… the general setup is that of a struggling contractor (played by Steven Yeun) who gets into an almost car accident in a parking lot and then switches to road rage when the driver of the other car (hey! it’s Ali Wong!) gives him the finger.
What ensues is something more than a revenge comedy, giving our two leads (and the rest of the cast) something so juicy to work with that we will be for sure talking about ‘Beef’ for quite some time.
Now, rather than fawn over this achievement, the Asian A.V. Club was even more curious about Lee Sung Jin himself. And so he was very kind to give us some time during his busy busy schedule last week to talk to us.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: Here at Asian A.V. Club, we love an origins story! Can you tell us how you got your beginnings in the entertainment industry?
Lee Sung Jin: Of course. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and I was an economics major and was supposed to go into investment banking. Needless to say, I did not really want to do that. (laughs) So I ditched that path after I graduated, moved right to New York, basically didn’t have any plan and I was very poor for a very long time. Thankfully I got into the NBC Page program at 30 Rockefeller. You wear the blazer and the peacock tie like on the show ‘30 Rock’ and you give studio tours for ten dollars an hour. That was my first introduction into the entertainment industry.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: How did you transition into writing?
Lee Sung Jin: I worked at the ‘Today Show’ for a little bit, but I knew that ultimately, I wanted to write. When I was growing up, there is something called Odyssey of the Mind where you create these sketches and you perform in these competitions and I really loved doing that. It was always there and so I think once I committed to the writing path, I just went really hard at it. Through a lot of luck and a lot of people helping me, I got my first staff job on ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ 15 years ago… and that is kind of my origin story.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: You wrote on so many different shows like ‘…Sunny’, ‘2 Broke Girls’, ‘Tuca & Bertie’ and ‘Dave’, at what point did you feel confident enough to say to yourself that you had it in you to create your own show?
Lee Sung Jin: Well as a writer, you try to do that always. I think since I started, I sold a pilot every year for the last fifteen years and none of them got made. (laughs) And so you are always trying to set your own stuff up. The closest I got prior to this was a pilot at F/X called ‘Singularity’ that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg directed, but that didn’t get picked up. I was always wanting to set up my own thing, but something about this one hit, I think probably because it’s the truest expression of my voice.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: How did you embrace your voice then?
Lee Sung Jin: I think so much of our lives were contouring ourselves trying to fit into other people’s expectations, so even as a human being I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin until very recently. It’s been an ongoing conscious decision to try and be as much of myself as I can be.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: Does that include trying to fit into writing rooms that weren’t as diverse back in the day?
Lee Sung Jin: In the early days, I used to lie in general meetings when people would ask me what’s your favorite comedy of all time and I would say ‘Caddyshack’, just because I had heard so many other white UCB writers say that. I am like, that’s the thing I am supposed to say. but I don’t really like that movie. (laughs) And so my writing at that time I think reflected my state as a human where if you are not being yourself as a person, your writing is also not going to feel like yourself. So I think over time I have really tried to work on who I am to try and be more comfortable being me and I think my writing has slowly reflected that. ‘Beef’ is probably the first time where I feel I’m writing as wholly myself.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: Working on all these different shows over the years, you’ve obviously met a lot of creatives both in front and behind the scenes. When it was time to put together your gang of ‘Beef’, did you already have the perfect people in mind from your ‘one day I’ll work with them’ vault?
Lee Sung Jin: That’s a great question. Yeah, that definitely happened, Steven (Yeun), I actually met doing my pilot for ‘Singularity’ back in 2016. Through that process we became very good friends. The second I met him, I was like, obviously I need to work with you, you are so talented. But as we got to be friends, we also realised we have such similar world views and our conversations often last for three hours at a time. So that was definitely a career goal as I wanted to find something perfect for us.
And Ali (Wong) similarly, when I was working on ‘Tuca and Bertie’ with her, I knew there was more in her that wanted to be expressed than what was happening on stage. Seeing her role in ‘Beef’ is just so rewarding because the world is getting to see what an amazing, not only comedic actor but dramatic actor she is and that is something that I felt that was in her for a while.
Director Jake Schreier I met kind of through some musician stuff, a world that we were both tangentially involved in. We worked together briefly on ‘Dave’ as well and have been friends for years. It does feel nice to have a squad. People like our DP (director of cinematography) Larkin (Seiple) and Grace Yun our production designer, I hope to be working with this group for as long as I possibly can, because they are the absolute best.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: ‘Beef’ was developed and written during the pandemic. Did being stuck at home and living in your feelings reflect plotlines and the tone of the show?
Lee Sung Jin: Definitely having a Zoom room is hard because you don’t get to interact with the writers in person and you are stuck looking at what seems like bots all day (laughs). I know it was tough on the writers too. But in terms of creatively, I’m not sure. I think being isolated probably helps to really focus on those feelings that are very prevalent throughout ‘Beef’. I did notice through the pandemic that you would see headlines every other month that was like “road rage has shot up 750 percent” and I was like, oh that’s interesting.
I am unsure how that affected the show because I would have to go through it without a pandemic to have something relative to compare it against.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: I hope you don’t mind me making this food analogy, but all the characters in ‘Beef’ feel like onions. With each episode, you slowly peel off layers until you get to the center in tears because it’s stanky and spicy and weirdly sweet (laughs). But it’s so juicy to see that kind of character portrayed by Asians. What kind of vision did you have for these characters?
Lee Sung Jin: I think ultimately, we wanted to just chase what was true and real for these characters. I think as a room we were trying NOT to top down, where we have to tackle identity this way or that. I think that is in my opinion, not a fruitful way to write.
We always just focused on character first, who is Danny Cho, who is Amy Lau and what would really happen? And when you think about Danny, this kind of contractor who has a chip on his shoulder who just can’t get a break in life, things start to come together. You start to think he probably did go to Korean Church and he would maybe return to that as a security blanket.
You think about Amy Lau as someone that’s an entrepreneur that is stuck in a maze of her own creation. What kind of family would she have? Maybe it would high art, better yet, a Japanese high art family. And so you just try to look at life and mine real things from it. If you lead with character then all these other things about identity I think naturally will bubble up and people will interpret things however they want. But I think your north star is always character first and everything kind of organically springs up.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: How important was it to have Steven Yeun and Ali Wong involved in the production also?
Lee Sung Jin: Oh yeah, I mean an endless amount. Steven and Ali were attached even prior to us pitching the show. Ravi Nandan, who runs A24 TV, was really encouraging and had me dig in and explore these characters more than even I thought I should. And then once we got Steven and Ali attached, that’s when we took out the pitch to buyers. Having them on as EP so early on was so helpful because I am working on the presentation and at midnight, I could text either of them and just be like, hey I am kind of stuck on this thing, what do you think about this, and they will just riff with me for like an hour. So there’s just endless amounts of their fingerprints all over the characters.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: Is there anything particular about these conversations that ended up in the series?
Lee Sung Jin: In terms of specifics, there is one where Ali’s mother-in-law, eats Go-gurt in the pilot. And that was a specificity from talking to Ali. Something that she noticed with the mothers of her ex’s was that they didn’t really care about food, it was more about the convenience and the cleanliness of how quickly you could dispense of it. And I was like, that is so weird (laughs).
On Steven’s side, one of the discussions we had was about Korean Church and me being like, hey did you have a tailored guitar and try to sing secular songs to flex on people after prayer team? And he would be like yeah, I did it all the time. I even asked if he sang Incubus and he was like, oh my God, I sang “Drive” at church. (laughs) We were like, oh we’ve got to put that in the show.
So a lot of that stuff is from conversations with the both of them and that is the fun of adding the specificities.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: Not to give any spoilers but even though Steven and Ali’s characters are each other’s foils, we don’t actually see them have a proper episode together till the final ep. I also love that it was some of the last things you guys shot for the series too. What was it like to finally get them in the same space together and see them play out all the things they went through while making this series?
Lee Sung Jin: I think real life started to reflect the narrative a little bit where because we withheld intentionally, the moments that they were together, there was just this magnetism and gravity that pulls you in.
And so it felt like that in real life. All season long, we never really see them on set together and then that last week, shooting the finale, it just felt like everything had been leading to this. There’s a lot of emotion, there was a lot of laughs and it just felt like the dams had broken open for us. It really felt like Summer Camp was ending and everyone had a good cry. I think a large part was because all three of us just never worked together for that long.
There’s nothing better than working with people that you love and trust. Every moment that final week felt like we were just little kids having fun together and how rare is that as an adult, to experience joy pure unbridled joy. I hold that week very near and dear to my heart and we still talk about it all the time.
ASIAN A.V. CLUB: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us and we can’t wait for everyone to fall in love with ‘Beef’ like we have!
Lee Sung Jin: No, thank you!
Photos courtesy of Netflix.
ONE MORE THING:
We got to grab Steven Yeun and Ali Wong for a second to talk about how happy they are for Lee Sung Jin.
Steven Yeun: People are really connecting to it. He made this thing that feels so vulnerable and honest in its own expression. Then to have people connect to it is such a wonderful feeling because we get to share in this experience together.
Ali Wong: I think for me personally, I'm just really, really excited for Sonny because he worked so hard on the show. And he's getting all this great feedback. And people seem to understand all of the themes and the questions that the show brings up, which some of them I, frankly, don't even understand. (laughs)
Beef is streaming in its entirety on Netflix now
Movies:
Renfield (In Theatres) - It’s Nicolas Cage as Dracula being the worst boss to his human familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult). After a chance encounter with a police officer (Awkwafina), Renfield is convinced that he wants out of this toxic work relationship. Blood and laughs ensue!
Hunger (Netflix) - The awesome Thai actress Aokbab (Bad Genius) stars in director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri’s food centric drama ‘Hunger’. Playing a street food cook, (pad see ew never looked any better!) the young Aoy gets the chance to work as a sous chef in an extremely exclusive restaurant and guess what… the head chef is a tough bully of a genius. Will she win him over?
Beau is Afraid (In Theatres) - Director Ari Aster basically explains the concept of his latest film as, “Beau is really worried about everything that could go wrong in one of 10 ways.” So Aster decided to ask, “What’s the eleventh way?” (#Headfu*k)
Ghosted (Apple TV+) - Chris Evans as the ‘normal’ guy who meets the woman of his dreams (Ana de Armas) only to find out that she’s a spy. I mean… this sounds like a Friday night no brainer!
TV:
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Prime Video) - It’s the final season and though we are so excited to see Amy Sherman-Palladino’s series get a proper sendoff, it’s also very bittersweet to know that the glorious world of Maisel is coming to an end. Will ‘Midge’ Maisel finally become a household standup comedian after hitting rock bottom last season? Will Susie Meyerson finally find success as a debt free manager? Will ex-husband Joel marry his sassy smart pregnant girlfriend Mei Lin (Stephanie Hsu!!)? All that and more set against the most beautiful production design on any show. Please say there’s going to be a spinoff!
Drops of God (Apple TV+) - The SUPER popular manga by Tadashi Agi is getting a new swirl as the wine focused drama brings on a young French girl who may inherit her late father's extraordinary wine collection IF she can beat her dad’s Japanese protege. It’s the battle of dry vs acidity vs smokey vs fruity… and that’s just the wines!
Somebody Somewhere (HBO) - With besties Sam (Bridget Everett) and Joel (Jeff Hiller) becoming roomies, the gentle bittersweet buddy comedy continues to look at how two lonely souls elevate each other to find their space in the world. You will cry, but the joy of seeing these two together makes for some of the best warm hug tv around.
Dead Ringers (Prime Video) - Those who were traumatised by the classic David Cronenberg 80’s film might get a hint of PTSD as the mighty Rachel Weisz takes on the roles of twin gynaecologists who are not only at the top of their game, but decide to push the limits of women’s health care to well… new PTSD levels for the viewers.
The Diplomat (Netflix) - 2023 is turning into Keri Russell’s year as she goes from the forests of ‘Cocaine Bear’ to the hallways of ‘The Diplomat’. Created by Debora Cahn (The West Wing, Homeland), get ready for alot of walk and talks as Russell plays an unwilling new US ambassador to the United Kingdom and strays from the script of being a glorified diplomatic handshaker in order to prevent a potential war. Yikes!
Barry (HBO) - Our favorite hitman turned actor Barry (Bill Hader) gets a final hurrah as the much loved burgeoning character actor kicks off season 4 in prison. That’s all we know, but the previous seasons are some of TV’s best so what more do you need convincing?
Awkwafina is Nora from Queens (Comedy Central) - The show can be all over the place, but at it’s core is a charming family led by BD Wong, grandma Lori Tan Chinn and Bowen Yang constantly bringing Awkwafina’s character back down to earth as she navigates her crazy life.
Citadel (Prime Video) - I mean do you need to know more than it’s Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jones as sleeper spies who reconnect to their past lives by kicking ass on a global scale. Apparently spinoff versions are already in the works set in India and Italy, which means we will have a gaggle of very attractive actors taking down baddies like a spy Justice League … but in Zegna suits and couture dresses!