‘Beef’ production designer Grace Yun on Amy’s and Danny’s different but equally claustrophobic homes [Exclusive Video Interview]
When “Beef” creator Lee Sung Jin pitched the show to production designer Grace Yun, he relied on art and math. “I wish I could remember, but it was this crazy percentile formula of shows he really admired,” Yun tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: TV Production Design panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I think ‘The Sopranos’ was in there. I think ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ was in there and a bit of [Hirokazu] Kore-eda references. Obviously those are things I love and felt like, wow, that’s incredibly ambitious and something I wanna be a part of.”
The Netflix dark comedy follows two strangers, Danny (Steven Yeun) and Amy (Ali Wong), who cross paths during a road rage incident and subsequently can’t stop making each other’s lives a living hell. But even before that fateful chase, both were deeply dissatisfied in hells of their own making. And nothing conveyed that better than their homes. A successful business owner who’s on the verge of selling her bespoke plant store, Koyohaus, Amy has remodeled her home into a minimalistic, carefully curated cage. A bird motif runs through the series and Amy’s house is modeled after a cage with wooden slats and a constricted views.
“I think her character, as well as Danny’s character, they fall into that trap of thinking that the American dream and success is going to bring some sense of fulfillment, but they’re actually quite different. They’re just different types of the human condition. So with Amy, we wanted to display that she is successful and she’s very calculated in some ways in how she wants to present her life to the outside world and also created for herself too with the family life and her home and her business,” Yun explains. “And so we wanted to convey the sense of control in the way she designed her house, using a lot of rectangular lines, but also the sense of the influence of her husband’s heritage of bringing in a Japanese style, mid-century influences, kind of a Scandinavian-Japanese mixture of those things. Also this idea of a cage having the first floor of the house all the rooms flowing into each other, making it feel like an open plan, but not necessarily feeling that way because there’s no big picture window that looks out into the yard or the sky or anything, so it feels quite cold and closed.”
SEE ‘Beef’ creator Lee Sung Jin on Emmy nominations: ‘To be recognized by our peers is the best thing’
On the other hand, Danny is a down-on-his-luck contractor, who lives with his younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino) in a messy one-bedroom apartment he has tried to convert into a two-bedroom. Key word there is “tried.” Danny’s place has a lot of unfinished business because he can’t seem to finish what he starts. His financial constraints also means he has mismatched furniture and hand-me-downs from his family.
“The initial conversation I had with Sonny was he felt that Danny’s apartment reminded him of his very first apartment in L.A. It was next to the train tracks and furniture couldn’t fit properly. And so we started to think of ideas of what would it be like for Danny if he had these physical obstructions in his own home and where the clutter itself could feel oppressive because it’s leftover from unfinished projects. And also hopefully convey that it’s something that he struggles with, being able to complete and finish something that he sets out to do, which is a struggle for his character,” Yun shares. “I think Danny has the shame of feeling like he caused parents to have to move back to Korea and he’s adopted this idea of scarcity mentality that’s part of the immigrant experience of holding onto something so long as it’s still useful. His world is a bit overwhelming with the stuff that he carries.”
While Danny keeps generational items, Amy is the opposite. A chair designed by her late father-in-law is a highly coveted piece on the show that Amy is more than happy to sell. The three-legged bright green chair also features the butt outline of Amy’s mother-in-law, Fumi (Patti Yasutake). “I think I remember reading that line and laughing out loud. I love that little specific detail that Sonny put in there,” Yun says. “We started thinking about this egg curvature shape that would work well with the shape of Fumi’s butt outline and the sense of the seat is a lot heavier material than these dainty three prongs it’s landing on. So I think it was important to do that and also use a color that we don’t necessarily see a lot in the show, at least not in an object, with this really vibrant green.”
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