‘Beef’ Director Jake Schreier Breaks Down Season 2 Finale’s Action in Korea & Symbolism

Beef Season 2 has arrived, and it’s delivering double the drama with two couples at the center of Netflix’s award-winning anthology. Spinning the tale of Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton), Beef‘s latest chapter explores a see-saw effect as one pair continues a toxic cycle and the other duo begins to realize their honeymoon phase may be just that. Warning: Spoilers for Beef Season 2 ahead!

When country club employees, Ashley and Austin, find their boss, Josh, and his wife in a compromising position as they try to drop off his wallet at their home, Ashley captures their violent fight on film. Worried about how that may look in front of the new club owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), Josh and Lindsey are blackmailed by Austin and Ashley to the point of giving them new and better jobs at the club, particularly for Ashley to gain health insurance for a necessary surgery.

Along the way, Ashley and Austin’s relationship begins to see cracks surface, and as Josh and Lindsey’s lives become more intertwined with Austin and Ashley’s they’re sent on a collision course that finds them facing the fall-guy position for Chairwoman Park’s shady business dealings as she attempts to cover up her sick husband Dr. Kim’s (Song Kang-ho) botched surgeries and other shortcomings.

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It all culminates on a trip to Korea as Austin, Ashley, and Lindsey travel for services from Dr. Kim, but Chairwoman Park’s interpreter Eunice (Seoyeon Jang) seeks to be a whistleblower after digging through her boss’s phone, and it puts them all in a dangerous position. When Josh is clued into what’s set to occur, especially after he’s targeted by the Chairwoman’s henchmen, he sets out for Korea as well, despite his impending divorce from Lindsey.

When they all converge, it turns into a dramatic and surreal action adventure, until Josh eventually agrees to take the blame for everything if the Chairwoman agrees to let Lindsey, Ashley, and Austin go, which she does. This sends Josh to prison for embezzlement, and Lindsey lives off the earnings agreed upon in their divorce settlement. Meanwhile, Ashley and Austin rise in the ranks to essentially fill the spots once occupied by Lindsey and Josh.

Below, series director and executive producer Jake Schreier breaks down the finale’s symbolism, filming in Korea, Season 3 hopes, and more.

The finale finds everyone running through the streets of Korea, bringing those characters into such a high-stakes atmosphere. What was the most exciting part of that?

Jake Schreier: Getting to shoot in Seoul, and to shoot Song Kang-ho, who’s been a hero of mine for so long, and YJ, I mean that was such a special experience to get to bring an entire cast and our department heads over there and make a show with a friend of mine where both of us love Korean cinema so much, and to be there and director Bong [Joon Ho] came by set and visited… On that level, it just felt very special.

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The season does start differently, where Season 1 starts with such a bang, and you’ve got that incredible cold open, and the stakes are raised to violence so early, it’s more of a slow burn in Season 2. Eventually, it certainly does get there, and I remember as we were working on Episode 8, I had this moment of looking around and being like, “Oh yeah, now it feels like Beef. This is starting to feel like the show that we were making in Season 1.”  I think where Oscar is sneaking around Fitchner’s house, and you’re like, oh yeah, this is still a thriller and a kind of crazy revenge caper, or fantasy, but it just took a little longer to get there and through a different route, and so it was fun to play in that sandbox again because it’s something that we knew how to do from Season 1.

There’s a lot of mirroring between Josh and Lindsay and Austin and Ashley throughout the season. Which characters are most similar in each of their relationships?

Well, I think the idea of all of it, when you get to that sort of Saṃsāra circle at the end… Sunny’s really interested in this idea of a wheel and cycles and these different points in your life where whatever you maybe resent when you’re younger, you’re going to become a version of that someday, and each of these couples are moving through a progression where they become some version of the other couple that they have resented or had their foot over them, and so I think in a way they’re all just becoming each other at some point.

The final shot is of Chairwoman Park lying over the grave of her husband.  What can you say about the symbolism of that framing that we see from above?

So in the development and prep for the season, something that Sunny and Gracie [Yun], and our wonderful production designer, had talked a lot about is the Hindu idea of Saṃsāra, and there’s Yama, the god of death. Everyone is sort of trapped in these cycles, guarded by the god of death, and the only means of escape from those cycles is through acceptance of them, in some way. Season 1 has that great shot that’s booming up that we needed an echo of that in our own way in this season of something to take it into a kind of surrealist shot, and put that on the end of the season and contextualize that for the audience.

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Ashley and Austin end up married with a kid. Are they happy, or will they inevitably end up like Lindsay and Josh?

Well, I don’t want to do too much of the interpretation for the audience. I think obviously, there are a lot of visual, and narrative cues to suggest that they have become some version of Josh and Lindsay at the same time, you get to see Josh and Lindsay in the future and there’s a measure of acceptance and happiness that they have, and so I think the show isn’t taking a hard line on those kind of happy, sad value sets of where we go. [It’s] more watching all of these couples move through this progression and trying to give them, and maybe the audience also, some broader kind of perspective on what it means to go through those cycles.

Is Josh’s sacrifice for Lindsay as it appears on the surface, or was it also a way for him to escape the burdens that have been building up in his life? 

My understanding is that Josh absolutely is making a sacrifice, that he has learned from [his experiences]. The show deals a lot with the sense of self versus the collective or a partnership, and Josh does achieve some level of selflessness towards the end of the show.

If the show were to return for Season 3, what would you like to see explored?

Wherever Sunny wants to keep taking this thing, whatever feels personal to him. I think he needs a little bit of a rest before then, but I’m excited to see where that goes.

— Additional reporting by Erin Maxwell. 

Beef, Season 2, Streaming now, Netflix