When Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac signed on for the latest installment of the Emmy-winning anthology BEEF, they were stepping into a world defined by its razor-sharp balance of cringe, comedy, and compassion — and into the roles of Josh and Lindsay, a millennial couple holding their marriage together by the thinnest of threads. In creator, writer, director, and producer Lee Sung Jin’s series, Josh (Isaac) is the general manager of Monte Vista Point, a gilded Montecito country club, and Lindsay (Mulligan) is his wife, a woman who has arrived at a crossroads she can’t quite name. Together, they project the vision of a couple that has it all — until a violent argument at home is witnessed by their younger coworkers, Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), upending their carefully constructed image.

Oscar Isaac

It’s a rich canvas for the two actors, now Emmy nominees for their performances in BEEF, who have known each other since working on the thriller Drive (2011) and the folk-scene drama Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). “We’ve been friends ever since. There’s a lot of relational stuff that’s out of the way when you’ve known someone for that long,” explains Mulligan. “Oscar’s the most fun person to fight with. We’ve had a really good time.” The admiration is mutual. “Carey is the best actor I’ve ever worked with. Nobody compares to her in my book,” says Isaac. “She’s incredibly funny, deep, and soulful. She’s both intuitive and also incredibly precise. It’s a real magic trick with her.”  

BEEF and its singular blend of humor and heartbreak gave them room to discover something neither quite expected: how funny they could be together. “There was a certain glee in Oscar and I working out more and more ways to be really annoying and smug,” says Mulligan. “Things like, ‘God, wouldn’t it just be awful if we had matching tattoos? Let’s do it.’ ” The tone they’re navigating is, as Isaac puts it, “semi-satirical, but there’s also a lot of pain at the bottom of it — and a lot of compassion for these characters that behave so horribly and can be so small.”

Carey Mulligan

Below, the two performers reflect on their deep creative partnership, the season’s emotional finale, and the joys of being a part of the latest BEEF installment, now nominated for 16 Emmy Awards. 

Cracking the inciting incident 

Mulligan: How the whole show starts is this thing happens, this fight happens, and the kids witness it, and then the whole show takes off from there. So we felt the onus on us to get that bit right. It was a tricky thing because you are meant to meet [Josh and Lindsay] at a fork in the road. It could have been the end.

We rehearsed a version where the dialogue that was written led us to the point where, actually, Josh throws his wine glass first. And the minute we shot it, we were like, “Oh, that doesn’t work.” Because the minute he’s violent first, it’s over in reality.  You have to play the truth of it, and the truth of it is, when that happens, statistically, a woman will just shut it all down and back off. And so it felt like, “Oh, actually it has to be Lindsay that throws a glass first, otherwise the scene is done.” 

So then we had to figure out, well, what’s the thing that will get us to the point where there’s enough anger in the room for that to happen? It just wasn’t working in the way that we wanted to. Sunny [Lee Sung Jin] was watching every take, and we were like, something doesn’t work. And then he came over and said, “I don't think you want to say that. I think you want to say ‘you’ve wasted my whole life.’ ” And I was like, “That’s what I want to say. That’s exactly it.”

Isaac: Gratitude really is what I take away [from BEEF], that we had each other to do this. It’s a humiliating thing to do this stuff. That’s the live-wire act. And so to have someone that you can trust so completely and there’s no judgment, it’s incredibly valuable, and it’s freeing, and it allows for working in a way that’s really exciting and fun, as hard as the circumstances are.

Mulligan: There were so many elements to this that were riskier and more embarrassing, and I did feel like we were taking swings here and there. That is hard to do with someone that you don’t completely trust, and also isn’t also taking swings. You can do stuff, but if your scene partner is enormously supportive, but playing it safer, that ultimately doesn’t totally work. But I felt like we were both like, “Let's just give it a crack.” 

Isaac and Mulligan in BEEF Season 2

 Love can be a vicious cycle

Isaac: Seeing the full-circle moment of Ashley and Austin taking up the mantle of what Josh and Lindsay were doing, it feels kind of sad too, right? These cycles, they just repeat and repeat over and over again. And you do become, in some ways, the thing that you are railing against.  [Despite telling yourself,] “This time it’s going to be different.” There is also a bit of a silver lining that Josh and Lindsay [eventually find] some modicum of peace in their separate lives and still hold a lot of love for each other, too.

Mulligan: We talked a lot, when we were building Josh and Lindsay’s relationship, about how we were [Ashley and Austin once], and that we felt the way that they feel about each other — that sort of sickening “It’s us against the world and it’s only us.” That is the cycle of things. I always find stories about the passage of time so interesting: what we do with the time that we have, the mistakes that we repeat and the ones that we learn how to, maybe, steer ourselves away from. To your point, at least with [Josh and Lindsay], they do seem to have found... I mean, [Josh] absolutely loved being in prison.

Isaac: [He’s] kind of his best self in prison. It’s still in service, but more of a pure service. Whereas the [country club] was this aspirational thing, feeding this greed. I heard something recently that I think Josh and Lindsay are doing at the end: to wear the world like a loose garment. Just not hold on so tight, but wear it with ease. It feels like they’re starting to do that. The irony is that in prison, he was able to find his way to be like, “Oh no, this is actually who I am.”

Isaac and Mulligan in BEEF Season 2

The power of collaboration 

Mulligan: The most dangerous thing when you’re acting is to start self-editing and doing less because you feel like you’re not safe with the other person. I never for a second feel like that with Oscar; I feel like I can do literally anything, any old weird thing or go way over the top, and it will — largely — always feel right because he’s on the other side being so truthful.

In the way that, for Lindsay, Josh is the thing that binds her, Oscar, you really were [for me]. Someone said to me, “How do you know you were on the right track?” And I was like, “I would look at Oscar” — that was how I knew, because you don’t try.

Isaac: It’s not a radar for truth — it’s a radar for bullshit. I’m like, “I don’t know what the truth is, but it’s not this.” Carey in particular, her bullshit meter is incredible. 

Because of the subject matter, and because of Sunny — the way he encouraged us to bring people we know [to the characters], things that have happened in our lives, stories — we were encouraged to bring a lot of ourselves to it.

Isaac and Mulligan in BEEF Season 2

The grief of an emotional finale 

Mulligan: I remember this little huddle of the four of us — Oscar and Cailee and Charles — just all crying. It was really emotional, I think because of [the shoot] being over and knowing that this oddball crowd probably wouldn’t all work together again. We all hopefully will work together in different iterations, but never this group.

Isaac: When you really allow yourself to feel the full love of somebody, that’s usually called grief. You feel the full tide of the human being, and it’s usually in a moment of grief when you lose somebody.

Mulligan: The thing that I think is so fun about filmmaking and TV: There’ll be these moments where everyone just has to do their job exactly the way they’re meant to. And if that all aligns in the perfect way — the cameraman does the right thing, the extra, if it all comes together at the right light — then it’s sort of magical. Everyone has that feeling of like, “Oh my God, we got that minuscule mark.” That’s such an amazing feeling.