Yahoo News Danny’s L.A. Apartment in ‘Beef’ Delights in Terrible Vibes
Even as “Beef” delights in showing how Danny (Steven Yeun) and Amy (Ali Wong) are not so dissimilar from each other, the Netflix series begins by emphasizing the difference in their economic circumstances. While Amy’s house is more showroom than home, Danny and Paul’s (Young Mazino) apartment is a vortex of mismatched furniture and trash. The set exists in a state of perpetual goblin mode. But the details that production designer Grace Yun and her team layered into Danny’s apartment inspired the crew to dig into the desperation and fear that Danny operates from.
Both cinematographer Larkin Seiple and costume designer Helen Huang told IndieWire that walking onto Danny and Paul’s apartment set was like walking into a memory. “Danny’s apartment is like practically a mirror of the apartment I first moved into Los Angeles,” Seiple said. “Even though there’s all these windows, it’s always kind of dark and there’s never a very positive vibe happening in there.”
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The lack of good vibes made the apartment a rich place to shoot; Seiple takes advantage of the apartment’s vertical blinds to craft the sense of light barely filtering through the cave-like atmosphere, emphasizing the clutter and lack of care the apartment received instead. The blend of Seiple’s lighting choices and Yun’s wall paint and carpeting selections for the set — there must be a line of industrial carpeting called “depression beige” — combine to eat any natural light that might offer relief in the space.
Even though Huang saw Yun’s sketches and initial concepts, the final set took her by surprise. “When you walk into their apartment — down to the gamer lights, down to the fact that Paul’s curtains were not really tacked up, but rolled up in the corner — I was like, ‘I’ve been to this house. I lived in that house,’” Huang said.
So did series creator Lee Sung Jin, at least to a degree. Yun told IndieWire that in talking about Danny’s space with Lee, the idea came up to plant little physical obstructions and inconveniences, the kind of thing that would make the character unconsciously tighten his jaw just a little bit more and wind himself a little more tightly. Amy arguably has too much space and flow in her home and it’s cut her adrift, but according to Yun, Danny’s apartment was designed with a memory Lee had of constantly hitting his toe on the corner of his desk in an old apartment because the space forced an odd arrangement of his furniture.
The story of Danny’s apartment is that of a giant unfinished project: A one-bedroom space that Danny haphazardly converted to a two-bedroom for himself and Paul with whatever leftover contractor supplies and YouTube how-tos he could find. “I’m really grateful we got to do the character-motivated details like the patched wall and exposed door jamb for Paul’s bedroom door — to show that Danny almost but not quite finished the renovation,” Yun said.
The fact that Danny bit off more than he can chew and found himself stuck in a hole he dug is a perfect reflection of the character’s dilemma in “Beef,” and allowed Yun, art director Michael Hersey, construction coordinator Drew Simmons, and their teams to make the details of the space lovingly imperfect. “[We] made a huge effort to execute the details: popcorn ceilings, layers of over-painted and aged walls with hairline cracks, slightly wonky ‘90s-inspired cabinets, imperfectly laid tiles, vintage sourced carpeting with painted-in suspicious stains, bugs in the overhead light fixture,” Yun said.
The story of who Danny is also guided the set decoration, spearheaded by Kellie Joe Tinney and her team. “We came up with a method of approach,” Yun said. “Danny had organized the apartment intentionally about two years ago, [but] the upkeep to return objects to their designated areas inevitably unraveled. There’s the base layer of organization with objects that have been picked up and dropped haphazardly. [Tinney] and I walked around the set carrying clothes or cups, sitting down at various points dropping things in place.”
The clutter might not register on camera but forms a foundation for how the cast and crew thought about the character. Seiple told IndieWire he loved a Medieval Times cup above Danny’s TV that never quite makes it into the show but made Yun and Tinney laugh. “I loved the idea that Danny and Paul could have thought it was an awesome souvenir from a special outing,” Yun said. It’s a perfect example of the ways in which Danny tries to make his life feel full, but the clutter inevitably trips him up.
Yun and her team used the non-Medieval cups and furniture, though, to express the particularities of a Korean-American home. “[Lee, Yeun, and I] talked about our parents saving and repurposing housewares and supplies simply because it was useful,” Yun said. “The Korean folding table — close in style to one I grew up with — originally meant for people seated on the floor, is being used as their coffee table. The serene landscape painting hung near the kitchen is the same one in the motel flashback when Danny and Paul were kids.”
The painting is sentimental in the same way Danny is. “My favorite details in Danny’s came from a conversation with [Lee and Yeun]. We talked about Danny’s character believing in totems and holding onto scraps of things that had meaning for Danny,” Yun said.
“Grace is amazing and so artistically outside of the box and creative, I can’t say enough about her production design,” Huang said. “It comes from very intimate knowledge of the material that you can’t learn, you know? It’s just in you. It’s like a sensory memory or something and you’re designing to your sensory memory. That’s how I felt with Grace’s designs.”
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