Expect a Big Night for Beef at the 2024 Emmys

At the Golden Globes on January 7, the team behind Beef took the stage three different times, sweeping the limited-series categories at the show. Not only did the Netflix revenge series win for best limited series, but Ali Wong and Steven Yeun both won in their respective acting categories.

We’re expecting the series, which first hit Netflix in April, to have just as good of a night at the Emmys, coming into the show with 13 nominations (it already won three awards at the Creative Arts Emmys for editing, contemporary costumes, and casting).

Since it premiered nine months ago, it might be worth a refresher. Created by Lee Sung Jin (who wrote the show based on a real-life road rage incident), Beef stars Yeun as Danny Cho, a handyman who gets into a road rage altercation with a well-off woman named Amy Lau, played by Wong. As the 10-episode series goes along, Danny and Amy’s acts of vengeance against each other continue to escalate. The series is a pressure cooker of rage, exploring two protagonists whose inner turmoil manifests in twisted and sometimes violent ways. Lee told Vanity Fair, “I really wanted to explore two people who have just a lot of things that they haven’t dealt with, and they keep repressing it and pushing it inside—and how does that come out?”

Yeun and Wong both serve as executive producers on the show, and were involved before the scripts were completed. Yeun drew on some of his own background, including his time as a part of the Korean church, to flesh out his character, Danny. For Yeun, playing Danny was an exploration of a lot of human nature, beyond his identity as an Asian American. “For me, I felt like we were playing with aspects of ourselves, not explicitly Ali and me, but more as human beings,” he told Vanity Fair. “Who are we and what are we on a daily basis? Are we just like a performance every day or are we being honest and truthful about how we feel, and how we feel wronged or how we feel unsupported by society or reality?”

Wong, known for her successful stand-up career, and Yeun, whose film work has included an Oscar nomination for Minari, both deliver unexpected performances that made them fast front-runners for awards early on. But the supporting cast is also stellar, and several actors earned nominations including Joseph Lee and Young Mazino in the supporting-actor category and Maria Bello in the supporting-actress category.

Lee plays Amy’s artist husband, George, a sympathetic character who gets swept up in Amy’s drama. “You can’t really judge your character. If you’re stepping into somebody’s shoes, you have to legitimately see things from their point of view,” Lee, who is also an artist in real life, told Vanity Fair. “George is very much in love with his work, but, at the same time, the thing that I connect with him is, like many artists, he also has insecurity over his work.”

Mazino, who plays Danny’s younger brother, Paul, went to a Korean nightclub and gaming cafes to study up for his Beef character. “Paul is definitely somebody I understand,” he told Vanity Fair. “I understand his head space and the kind of mentality where you feel like the world is against you and you’re in this bubble.”

Mazino, who is likely to win in the supporting-actor category and told Vanity Fair he’s now only looking for the “really, really good stuff” for his upcoming projects, has already booked his next big role, in the next season of The Last of Us.

But the big question is after the show’s success will there be more Beef in the future? For a while, it seemed unclear if Beef, which also has two directing nominations going into Monday night, would compete in the limited-series category or perhaps land in comedy or drama series. Lee had previously stated he imagined a three-season arc for the show. But when Vanity Fair asked Yeun about the plans moving forward, he seemed more sure he wouldn’t be returning to Danny’s story. “I think from the very get, the way we pitched this was as an anthology limited series,” he said. “So we did want to close that loop at the end.”

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