‘BEEF’ Stars Ali Wong & Steven Yeun Preview Vindictive Cat-and-Mouse Feud
Road rage is ugly, maddening, all-consuming. But let’s face it; it can also shake you out of the doldrums of everyday life. In the outrageous dark comedy, BEEF, one near miss in a parking lot — followed by an extended middle finger — brings together two Los Angeles strangers who are suddenly all in on an enlivening, vindictive cat-and-mouse feud. Rest assured that BEEF takes struggling contractor Danny Cho (The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun) and prosperous entrepreneur Amy Lau (Always Be My Maybe’s Ali Wong) to shockingly unpredictable places.
“Both of them are caught in a rat-race life where every day you wake up and you try to do the same thing and you get nowhere,” Yeun says. Danny faces suffocating debt and a slew of bad business decisions. “He’s placed himself in this position of needing to be the provider as the older son [in his family]. He feels like everybody’s counting on him to deliver. It’s a little sadder to see someone in their thirties unable to get out of this crushed-mind state.”
BEEF (Credit: Courtesy of Netflix)
By contrast, Amy’s affluent lifestyle suggests she should be satisfied with her lot in life. Yet there’s a moment where, parked in her quiet luxury car but unable to curb the motoring noise of dissatisfaction in her mind, she utters “Make it stop” in desperation. “She’s very much stuck in a maze of her own creation,” Wong explains. “She just always has to have this mask on, even in her own home with her husband. There’s something about both Danny and Amy where they feel not free, and that’s what they really connect to.”
And as each infiltrates the other’s life, both come upon the question of “how much is too much” — but crossing certain moral lines gives them an odd kind of satisfaction. An eye-popping incident at the end of the first episode sets in motion a chase that looks a lot like “a weird sense of play,” says Yeun. “That’s a very connecting moment [between them].”
In other words, in this desire for vengeance, there might also be some peace, Wong suggests. “We were running so fast and I had so much adrenaline pumping through me,” she says of that scene. “Danny and Amy become obsessed and it consumes their lives. But it’s not this thing where they hate each other. They really need each other.”
BEEF, Series Premiere, Thursday, April 6, Netflix
