Creator of award-winning Netflix show ‘Beef’ on his Minnesota roots, writing the show

Minnesotans are known for keeping anger deep inside, only letting it out through passive aggression — or perhaps on the occasional stranger dodging through traffic.

Most of us have witnessed, or even been a part of, some sort of road rage incident. Once we drive away, that’s usually the end of the story.

However last year a Hollywood writer with Minnesota roots launched a streaming sensation by imagining a road rage beef amplified to the max. Lee Sung Jin created the popular A24 Netflix show, “Beef,” released in April 2023.

Lee Sung Jin immigrated with his family from South Korea to the United States when he was a child, and spent several years growing up in Minnesota. He joined Minnesota Now to discuss writing the show.

The following is a transcription of the audio heard using the player above, lightly edited for clarity.

Why did you decide to embrace rage in this series?

I think anger and rage is such an interesting emotion because I don’t find it to be a primary emotion. It’s usually a secondary emotion that sits on top of a deeper root, whether it’s fear, or insecurity and anger is just usually the thing that’s covering the real thing.

I think that’s always narratively a very interesting place to start, when characters are projecting an emotion that actually isn’t the actual conflict or issue that they’re dealing with inside.

Why did you situate the main characters in that way?

A big part of the show is finding commonality in our shared pain and so we wanted to show very different people from opposite sides of the socioeconomic spectrum that are inside dealing with similar things.

And there’s a point in episode seven, where there’s a time jump in this series and Danny’s character play by Steven Yeun, he’s gotten a little bit further in life. So he’s climbing that ladder, and wondering if it’s worth it, if that feeling inside is going to go away if he just climbs a little bit higher.

One of my favorite scenes is the moment where he asks Ali Wong’s character Amy, whether it was all worth it, and she says “everything fades, nothing lasts, we’re just a snake eating its own tail.” And to me, that’s the core of the show. There’s this collective feeling, I think, and a lot of us have this void of this feeling in our chests that just kind of never quite goes away.

I think the systems that have been built in are a reality, give the illusion that that is a solvable thing through materialism, through the grind. We always find the more we go through it that it isn’t. So I think two characters having to grapple with that, then the finale was an ending that we always knew we wanted to head towards.

I understand that you were inspired to create ‘Beef’ from a road rated incident that you actually experienced in Los Angeles. Tell me more about what did happen then.

There are only a few similarities, thankfully. It started you know, as all road rages do, where, you know, one person, myself, didn’t go fast enough on when the light turned green, and another vehicle was very frustrated. On this day, for some reason, as he drove off after he yelled and cursed at me, I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna follow you.”

We’re getting on the highway and I revved up behind him. It wasn’t as climactic or action packed as the show, but we were just stuck in traffic for 45 minutes going in the same direction and going to the same exit. I think in his mind, he thought I was a lunatic that was following him through all of Los Angeles and for me, I was just commuting home.

I thought that was very interesting, here we are in our literal bubbles, driving around projecting so much onto the other person without knowing anything about that human. So that was the kernel of the idea.

I had been friends with Ravi Nandan, the head of A24 television, for quite some time and we were just catching up over lunch and I told him the story. And I was like “is there something here? I feel like there’s definitely a story about people who think they know each other, but they don’t. And it’s spiraling out of control.”

He was so encouraging and he just told me to really flesh it out and that absolutely, there is something here. He asked me who I’d want to do this with and Steven Yeun has been a friend of mine for many years prior to the show and we’ve always been looking for something to do together. So I was like, you know, maybe this is the one.

I want to talk a little bit about your time in Minnesota. I know a lot of people and kids feel pressure to change their names when they moved to the States. What nudged you to kind of go back to your given name?

I was born in Seoul and I actually moved to Illinois when I was nine months old. And then I moved to Louisiana and then to downtown Minneapolis and then to Plymouth, Minnesota. And then I moved back to Korea for third, fourth and fifth grade. And then I moved back to Wayzata, Minnesota for sixth grade.

I had been in Minnesota kind of two different chunks of my life. But I didn’t start going by Sonny Lee until that Korea to Wayzata move in sixth grade. They take attendance where I was, Greenwood Elementary School, and then Wayzata Junior High School and every day of attendance was just the worse because teacher would say your name and and everyone would make fun of you.

So one day, I was just staring at a piece of homework and I thought Sonny. I just wrote Sonny for some reason and and that just kind of stuck. The people that know me feel like Sonny is a accurate representation of my personality a little bit. And so it did well for me and I you know, it's a very good name for as I started writing as well, people can remember it, it's easy to type.

I never planned on switching professionally until around the year “Parasite” came out. But I was working on “Tuca & Bertie,” a show on Netflix and I was getting I believe coffee somewhere. And I paid with my credit card and my legal name is my Korean name. And they they try to call the order with my legal name and they butchered it much like sixth grade. There are a few folks around me that started laughing.

I immediately felt ashamed like I did in sixth grade, I grabbed my order and I rushed out of there and I just started thinking about that feeling. I was like, well, you know, when when I hear names like director Bong Joon-Ho or director Park Chan-wook, I feel proud people don’t make fun of those names.

So I just thought if more Korean names are associated with things that people love, maybe that'll help change the stigma associated with it. I went to Lisa Hanawalt was the show runner on “Tuca & Bertie“ And I asked her hey can I can actually switch names midseason? That was the first time I think professionally I went by Lee Sung Jin was on that show and it just it felt great so I stuck with it.

Did you feel like you called on that experience of being among many different cultures in ‘Beef’?

Danny isn’t a Midwestern Korean American. I think his his psychology is a little bit different I’d say. His character grew up in San Bernardino, which is a slightly different I think psychology. For me per similarly, I think I actually had a fairly great time. One thing that happens to you then is because you know, you're kind of one of the very few Korean faces, you become very quick at adapting.

You enter a room, you immediately try to recognize who the personalities are, what this person’s like, what that person’s like, who’s the alpha of the situation, who’s the bully and you get really quick at reading people. I think that made me very observational from a young age, writing is all observations, so I think that’s probably the biggest takeaway from from moving around in Minnesota so much is how it developed that muscle in my mind.

You’ve said that writing ‘Beef’ was the most ‘you’ thing you’ve ever worked on. Is that part of it?

There’s a Korean word called “nunchi,” it basically means like, the awareness of how others perceive you at all times. And so my nunchi was really high, because of growing up and and trying to adapt. And I think, when you do that, especially at a younger age, you try to be a chameleon and so you lose your sense of self. You are copying and mimicking how others behave so who you are, it goes on the back burner.

When you’re trying to write from that place, you can’t really write from an authentic point of view, because you’re just copying and mimicking your point of view. And that was probably the first half of my career.

It really took like kind of a mental breakdown halfway through my career, to shake myself out of that, and start to really re examine why it is I’m writing and moreover, why I’m here on this planet wanting to participate in existence. And so I think, that led me on a slow journey to be like, okay, well, maybe you should just try being yourself and then beef became kind of this watershed moment for me.

That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. It sounds like you came back to yourself. And then you found this amazing success.

I just also want to say real quick, Minnesota Public Radio for me growing up was such a huge part of my development, my parents would have it on all the time, listening to like, all of it just kind of like molded my brain and storytelling at a young age.

Minnesota Public Radio was so influential for my formative years. So just to want to toss that out there. And thank you all for what you do and just for existing.

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