Beef Season 2 has a messy world, but unlike Season 1, it pretends to be sane on the surface. Ardent viewers know better than to believe a country club setting with wealthy clients. There is a sense of tension brewing under the surface. Beef Season 2 is uncomfortable in its confrontations, but the humor keeps it balanced. The story, this time, puts a seemingly loving couple, Lindsay and Josh, in the limelight.
Carey Mulligan plays Lindsay in Beef Season 2. She is an interior designer at the club, who is pretty composed and elegant. But you realize it’s all a facade when you hear her ear-shattering complaints about her husband not being able to earn enough for them to live a better life. She is a treat to watch because of how easily manipulation comes to her.
Beef Season 2 does not categorize villains and heroes. In fact, the show has neither. It falls in a grey zone where people are lost but do not want to look like they are. Lindsay’s life is similar, a drifting one. She is barely holding on to the rough edges of her marriage with the club’s general manager, Josh (Oscar Isaac).
Beef Season 2: Lindsay’s identity crisis, Josh dynamic, and Carey Mulligan’s creative process
Beef Season 2 wants us to do a character study of Lindsay. The character is purposely made layered and complex. She loves her husband, but also likes to flirt with other men. She wants to be independent, but dependency seems easier and more convenient to her. Mulligan herself points out that Lindsay is someone who has kind of floated into her life rather than building it meticulously. Her identity is tied to her marriage, her social standing, and how she is perceived. Carey Mulligan explains in The Kelly Clarkson Show:
“We worked together for a long time before we started shooting on the characters. And I remember saying to Oscar, like, “Who is she?” Like, she just sort of doesn’t, you know, she’s sort of reached this point in her life sort of just through social currency. Like, she dated the right person, and then she came to America, and she was sort of English in America, which is kind of a thing.”
Lindsay is portrayed either as a walking contradiction or as an utterly confused woman in Beef Season 2. She has charm and knows how to walk into rooms, but she does not know herself. And when her marriage starts falling apart, she begins disintegrating too. The reason behind this is that being a wife is the only version of herself she knows. In Mulligan’s words:
“There was these various ways in which she sort of used her charm or, like, her social skills to get to a place, but she never really found a thing that she loved or a thing she was passionate about or really knew much about much. And so I think this marriage falling apart is like, well, that was her identity. That was all she… That was who she was, was being part of this kind of royal family.”
Lindsay’s panic does not come from nowhere in Beef Season 2. It comes from realizing that she has built a life that cannot stand on its own. Mulligan shares:
“And now maybe this is gone and then what next? And then sort of mass panic ensues and then she- A little bit off the rails.”
Beef Season 2 also thrives on the dynamic between Lindsay and Josh. The stars, Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac, have worked together before. So, their familiarity is evident in their scenes together. According to Casting Networks, Oscar Isaac had shared in a press conference:
“Being able to bring in that history, that shared past, that lived experience, and to have so much trust already, I knew that it would be an opportunity for us to be able to be bold together and know that we had each other’s backs.”
He further said:
“We spent so much time calibrating that and getting the tone just right, knowing that we needed to end in this tableau. Trying to figure out every version that made the most organic sense to get to that place was an incredible puzzle to solve together.”
Mulligan also talked about how easy it felt to work with Isaac.
“It’s so easy to act with Oscar because … he’s very bold in all his choices, but none of it feels forced. Because we had a long lead-up – lots of conversations with Sonny, we had rehearsals – and when we actually got to shooting it, it felt like doing a play. That meant that we could try things. There was a sense of real ease to it.”
The duo also had a music trick while acting in Beef Season 2. They used music to stay loose and present in the moment. Oscar Isaac shares in The Kelly Clarkson Show:
“In order for us to be able to record the dialogue cleanly, we had the music playing in these little earwig pieces. And as we did the scene, it really tracked with what was happening emotionally, which is also Finneas’s genius, but- But it kind of just happened that way. And we both thought, “This is kind of fun, we should keep doing this.” And then I said, “I’ve actually done this a couple times before for a couple scenes in the past.” And it’s kind of fun because, you know, as an artist, tension is the worst thing that can happen, right?”
Carey Mulligan’s Lindsay looks all put together but is actually coming apart. She is insecure about her looks and is constantly comparing herself with her rich friends from the club. She also needs validation whenever she feels low, so she turns toward her admirers. But that requirement vanishes when there is something happening in her life.
Lindsay in Beef has just moved through spaces and relationships, and along the way, she has picked up identities. This is the reason she feels lost when her marriage starts ripping at the seams. The sense of being unmoored shows up in how Mulligan performs her.
The music trick they used during scenes actually fits this really well. By listening to music through earpieces, Mulligan could stop overthinking and avoid falling into the same emotion every time. This lends her performance an authenticity that would have been missing had it been a totally rehearsed act. It also weaves in this subtle layer of Lindsay being present in the moment but not really there. A part of her is always somewhere else. So the music trick actually helps Carey Mulligan bring that feeling out in a realistic way. In her words:
“Sometimes you can fall into a sort of rhythm that you don’t even realize we’re doing. And you’re like, “Oh, I’m kind of doing it the same way.” Or particularly if it’s a bit funny, you’re like, “Oh, that was funny.” I’ll hang onto that and do it again and then it’s not funny. It was a way of just like, you take half your brain and you listen to something…”
Beef Season 2 lives in a liminal space. There is overthinking, and then there is no thinking at all. Lindsay is stuck in that very space.
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Edited by Parishmita Baruah