There's a scene in A24 and Netflix's Beef where Ali Wong quietly stops the show and punches you right in the heart, truly connecting to the core of her deeply complicated character, Amy Lau, and her fears about unconditional love.
In episode 7, "I Am a Cage," after Amy's husband George (Joseph Lee) has confessed to emotional cheating, Amy speaks to her therapist Dr. Catherine Lin (Kayla Blake) about it. Without revealing her own past physical infidelity, Amy speaks of her relationship with George, her fears and doubts around motherhood, and her deep anxiety over the possibility that forgiveness will inevitably run out, even in loving, communicative relationships.
"Do you really think it's possible to love someone unconditionally?" she asks. "You know, there must be some point where we all fall outside the reach of love, right? Like, the mistake is so big, and then the love has to stop."
Shot by director Jake Schreier and written by creator/showrunner/executive producer Lee Sung Jin, it's a truly stunning performance by Wong, who we're used to seeing as confident, hilarious, and provocative. In this scene in Beef, however, Wong takes Amy to a point of near-breaking point (though not yet, unfortunately for Amy), knowing her whole life is about to implode with the truth of her own actions.
"It's one of the scenes I was probably most nervous about," Wong told Mashable. "Because it's me talking for a long time, and I am used to being able to stand, to gesture a lot. It's just me sitting down in a chair with one other person, so it's a really quiet scene. The director had told me, 'OK, we don't have that much time, we just have a couple takes.' He told me he was just going to do one setup, where the camera was just going to move from here [behind Wong] to here [in front of Wong]. So, I felt a lot of pressure."
"That was an interesting scene that Jake Schreier shot, where the camera's moving extremely close up on her, and there's a lot of pressure on Ali," Lee said. "But she brought it. I think by take two or three, the waterworks were coming, and you can tell she was touching something very true inside of her. I don't know what she was thinking to get her there, but you can really feel the repression, that it's starting to lose out. Very, very proud of that scene, and I just admire Ali's performance every time I watch it."
Through Wong's exceptionally controlled performance of Amy as she struggles to bottle her core vulnerabilities, the scene exemplifies the deep cracks in Amy's well-built facade, how deeply her guilt and penchant for self-sabotage sits, and how her feelings around conditional love come back to her childhood and parents (yup, they always do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). It's a fleeting moment, only three minutes at most, but it captures the embedded desperation in her character, who smiles through gritted teeth at everyone else's bullshit for the most part.
"Amy can't talk about anything freely in her life, but she so desperately wants for someone to tell her it's going to be OK, and that that despite everything you've done, you're still worthy of love," Lee told Mashable. "But I think her inability to express that freely just keeps getting her trapped in a maze of her own creation. [If] she would just be honest, I think the latter half of the season wouldn't exist."
"I let go all of it, and I did connect to the writing," said Wong. "I didn't expect to get as emotional as I did. I think it is one of the things that I look at and I'm like, 'Wow, who was that person?' I can't believe I did that. It's one of my favourite things, actually."
Beef is now streaming on Netflix.
