Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac Lead New Season of Netflix's Beef Exploring Generational Rage

In the new series of Beef, Netflix's hit show exploring rage and anger, Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac have beef and lots of it - with each other, with their Gen Z employees, and with the world in general. While the first season, released in 2023, followed a row between strangers after a prang in a parking lot, the second focuses on bust-ups between people who are closer to home. The couple's tempestuous marriage comes to a head when two twenty-something employees witness them having an explosive row - and, after filming it, decide it's ripe for blackmail. The two sides burn with a "mutual disdain for each other", explains Mulligan, who is known for films like An Education, Promising Young Woman and The Ballad of Wallis Island. "They can't stand us and we can't stand them. Everything they do is annoying, particularly after the inciting incident of the whole show. "When we meet this couple, it's not a spoiler to say they're on their knees," she adds. "Their relationship is really hanging on by a thread and actually it's their mutual disdain of this Gen Z couple, and all the things about them that are annoying, that binds us." "We thought it was so funny," smiles Mulligan. "We were always trying to find ways to be more annoyed by them. We called them 'the kids', which seems unfair because I think Charles is 33." Isaac says the disdain for the Gen Zs comes from what their characters see as the younger couple's "sense of entitlement, and how they're entitled to all these things that we feel we worked really, really hard for and to prove ourselves for". "That really rubs us up the wrong way," he continues. "Also there's a cynicism that we have about their view of love - all these plans and all these things they seem so certain about, where they haven't experienced any of the real pitfalls in what being in a relationship is." The show's creator Lee Sung Jin gave the older pair "this acidic point of view towards the others while not seeing our own petty behaviour", the actor adds. At one point Mulligan's Lindsay, an interior designer with a dachshund called Burberry, points out that she and Josh have "so much more experience being petty". "We had that sort of wild romance and we were obsessed with each other, it was us against the world, and no-one's ever been in love the way we've been in love. "We believed all the exact things they believe about themselves when we first meet them. So to accept that's gone is also part of it. "But instead of having grace [to accept] that and where they are, they rubbish it - because they can't stand them." Meanwhile, Ashley and Austin's idealism and belief in true love is shaken as they find themselves getting deeper and deeper into a murky underworld involving the club's new millionaire owner, Chairwoman Park. "What you see them do is navigate a world with the constructs of capitalism," he says. "The country club was a great example and a great structure for that, with the hierarchy of class." Lee says the new series was inspired by a real-life row he witnessed - but one that involved boomers (the generation aged in their 60s upwards). "You've got Gen Z and millennials having this feud, when really the thing that we should be beefing with is the billionaire characters in society like Chairwoman Park, and it's all kind of a distraction that actually enables those in power to puppeteer everybody. "When you open the box, there's actually other stuff going on. And I think that's true of the world."