Inspiration can strike from anywhere. Just ask BEEF creator Lee Sung Jin, who presents All the Rage: The Films That Inspired Lee Sung Jin’s BEEF at the Paris Theater in New York City. From March 25 to April 21, celebrate the return of BEEF by enjoying the onscreen tensions, rivalries, and conflicts that came before Season 2, premiering April 16. From modern favorites like Anatomy of a Fall to classics like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, there’s a beef here for everyone.
Lee’s highly anticipated Season 2 explores a fresh, sizzling rivalry: A Gen Z couple, Austin (May December’s Charles Melton) and Ashley (Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’s Cailee Spaeny), witness a shocking fight between their boss, Josh (Frankenstein’s Oscar Isaac), and his wife, Lindsay (Maestro’s Carey Mulligan). This single interaction pulls at the threads of the country club at which they all work and threatens to destroy lives around the globe. Rounding out the rest of this rarefied enclave are Song Kang-ho, Youn Yuh-jung, Seoyeon Jang, William Fichtner, Mikaela Hoover, and Matthew Kim, aka BM.
“Much like Season 1,” says Lee, “this season was ripped from the headlines of my life. It was loosely based on a loud argument overheard from a neighbor’s home. The varying reactions from everyone who heard [it] fascinated me. We changed the setting to a workplace, because I wanted to explore the boss-employee dynamic more. And rather than a ‘boomer couple versus younger couple’ setup, which we’ve seen a lot before, we thought, what if we actually made them a little bit closer in age and highlighted the generational divide between the millennial couple and the Gen Z couple?”
Lee had a cornucopia of films to pull from: All the Rage includes some of cinema’s greatest beefs between strangers, friends, enemies, and lovers — and five of the films have select screenings on 35mm. Whether it’s the psychological domestic clashes in Revolutionary Road, the poorly thought-out schemes that spiral out of control in the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, or the labyrinthine deceptions in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, it’s evident that Lee drew from a rich visual history of uncovered secrets and explosive betrayals when crafting his latest feud.
To see how these references manifest, watch Episodes 1 and 2 of BEEF Season 2 at a special free screening at the Paris on Friday, April 17.
Season 1 proved how important Lee’s references are to his creative process. When accepting an esteemed award, most people thank their family, or the cast and crew who collaborated on their gilded series or film. But soon after he was handed the statuette for the Best Anthology Series at the Golden Globes in 2024, Lee took care to recognize the person with whom he’d experienced the road rage incident that sparked his juggernaut Season 1. “Sir, I hope you honk and yell and inspire others for years to come,” he said to laughs from the audience before expressing gratitude for the more traditionally involved parties like his family and creative teammates.
A parking lot skirmish isn’t the only unlikely place in which Lee found inspiration for BEEF Season 1, which charts an epic vendetta between plant-store maven Amy (Ali Wong) and down-on-his-luck contractor Danny (Steven Yeun). Lee cites sci-fi novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, philosopher Simone Weil, feminist activist Betty Friedan, filmmakers Werner Herzog and Ingmar Bergman, the intelligence of crows, a line from a Sylvia Plath poem, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and The Sopranos as just a few of his wide-ranging references.
Buy your tickets for All the Rage now, and stay tuned to Tudum to put together the puzzle pieces of what inspired Lee for BEEF Season 2, hitting the grill this April.
