NetflixCarey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac (centre) find themselves in a feud with a younger coupleIn 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.
Isaac's character runs a prestigious country club in California, and Oscar-nominated actress Mulligan plays his British wife.
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.
NetflixMulligan plays a British interior designer with a dachshund called BurberryThe tensions within and between the two couples - one millennial, the other Gen Z - reverberate throughout the episodes.
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.
"We have a common enemy in them, and that's the way we stay together."
Indeed, the marriage between Mulligan and Isaac's characters Lindsay and Joshua appears on the brink.
"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."
NetflixCharles Melton and Cailee Spaeny play engaged couple Austin and AshleyTheir adversaries are personal trainer Austin (played by Riverdale actor Charles Melton) and his fiancée Ashley (played by Alien: Romulus star Cailee Spaeny), who also work at the country club.
"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."
In fact, Melton is 35 in real life - just five years younger than Mulligan herself.
At 47, Star Wars and Frankenstein actor Isaac, who has previously starred with Mulligan in Drive and Inside Llewyn Davis, qualifies as Gen X.
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.
NetflixThe drama plays out at a prestigious country club The couple's bitterness towards than their younger counterparts is "rooted in envy", Mulligan says.
"It's what we used to have - they have this first flush of romance.
"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."
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".
Generations 'brainwashed to squabble'
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.
Melton says his character and Ashley are "in the honeymoon phase" at the beginning.
"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).
However, Lee thought it would be more interesting to have younger characters, "where the generation divide could be smaller", he says.
"Much like society, we're brainwashed - by social media, by the headlines, by those in charge - to beef and squabble with each other.
"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.
"That felt like an appropriate microcosm for what's going on right now."
The anthology show's running theme of anger is "just the wrapping paper" for those deeper issues, he says.
"When you open the box, there's actually other stuff going on. And I think that's true of the world."
Beef season two is on Netflix now.
TelevisionGeneration ZCarey MulliganNetflixMillennials
