How a Real Urine-Soaked Bathroom Inspired a Key Scene in ‘Beef’

When trying to pull out of a parking lot, Danny (Steven Yeun) nearly collides with another car, a white luxury SUV whose driver then proceeds to flip him off. The road rage incident escalates into a high-speed chase through a nice neighborhood that leaves both drivers shaken — though they never get a good look at each other.

But then comes the moment in Beef when Danny finally meets his adversary — and discovers it’s not exactly who he expected. Danny tracks the car to its home, and knocks on the door, pretending he’s a contractor who noticed an issue with the recent remodel. He meets Amy (Ali Wong), who gives him a tour of the home. When Danny asks to see the garage, he mentions that he sees some “warp” with the cabinets, which sends Amy into a tailspin about how there’s never an end to the work.

“This is a nice car. Does your husband like driving this?” asks Danny, pointing at the white SUV. When Amy says that she actually drives that car and her husband takes the minivan, Danny pauses, realizing his road rage nemesis is actually the woman standing in front of him. You can see the wheels in his head turning as he figures out what he’ll do next. He casually asks to use the restroom, where he proceeds to urinate all over the floor before making his escape from the home.

For Beef creator Lee Sung Jin, the scene is the ultimate payoff for the tension that’s been building up as the viewer followed Danny and Amy’s separate stories. “You have a whole episode now of going back and forth, and back and forth, and it’s almost like just stretching this rubber band, waiting for them to meet,” he tells Vanity Fair. It’s also the first time that one of the main character’s expectations are thoroughly dismantled, a theme that will run through the whole series. Lee talks to Vanity Fair about this key scene and how it was based on a disturbing moment from his own life.

THE SCRIPT

So much of this scene is taken directly from Lee’s own experience as a first-time homeowner. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the term ‘warp’ in the first year of owning a home. And you trust people that come into your home, but it was a hard lesson for me to learn, ‘Oh, they’re all there to kind of up the bill a little bit,’” he says.

Originally, the script for the first episode started with the road rage incident and then followed Danny’s story. Halfway through the episode, it would switch to Amy’s story up until the meeting at her home. But in the edit, he realized the tension would be more intense if they bounced back and forth between their stories. “Truthfully, through a lot of Netflix and A24 notes, it felt just like you’re watching two trains collide, and so cutting back and forth between their stories helped ratchet up that tension a little bit more,” says Lee.

The scene was written in a way that allows Danny, a down-on-his-luck contractor, to have the power position, tricking her into thinking there’s warp on her cabinets and getting a look inside her home. “Danny has the upper hand here, really for the first time ever in his life it seems like in any situation,” says Lee.

But the payoff comes in the moment he realizes that the car doesn’t belong to Amy’s husband, but to her. “It’s step one of many assumptions and many subjective things that Danny views the world in, having to get unraveled through this incident,” says Lee. “Steven, the way he plays that moment, it’s so funny to me because he is so trying to tamp down how shaken his world is. He does this turn with his head that makes me laugh. It’s almost like whatever my dog is trying to figure something out, he cocks his head, so that’s very funny to me.”