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Come awards season, you probably wouldn’t think that the second season of Netflix’s Beef would be a contender for many visual-effects gongs. After all, while it is tight, tense and sublimely acted, it is ultimately a small ensemble piece grounded in some form of reality.
But you might be wrong, since it has emerged that VFX artists had to painstakingly paint out earbuds worn by Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan throughout the shoot. On a recent podcast appearance, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, told Isaac and Mulligan that digitally erasing the earwigs, as they are known, “cost a fortune”.
Unlike the traditional use of the technology, whereby everyone from Marlon Brando to Robert Downey Jr would be fed their lines through an earwig to save them the bother of memorising their scripts, Isaac and Mulligan used theirs to listen to songs as they acted. In a blackmail scene, they played complicated Thom Yorke music to add to the tension. For love scenes, they listened to songs that would heighten the passion. “The beat would drop on the [kiss],” said Mulligan. “We were so delighted every time, we were like: ‘It did it again!’”
It seems a strange acting decision. On the one hand, to watch Beef is to watch a pair of undeniably powerhouse performances, so maybe the earwigs proved their worth. Then again, you could argue that Isaac and Mulligan are professional actors who probably could have turned in performances of similar intensity through acting alone. This argument might also be popular among any VFX workers who grew up dreaming of creating new and impossibly fantastical worlds only to find themselves spending several weeks airbrushing Mulligan’s auditory canal thousands of times.
The big danger, however, is that this unconventional way to get into character could end up overwhelming Beef altogether. It has happened before. The first Suicide Squad movie was remembered not for the story, the characters or the production design, but for all the stories about Jared Leto sending rats and dead pigs to his castmates to prepare for his role as the Joker. Similarly, the memorable headlines generated by Fury, which like Suicide Squad was directed by David Ayer, were all about how Shia LaBeouf got ready for his role. Specifically, he refused to wash, had a tooth removed and cut his face with a knife.
The Beef story is slightly different, though, because this is a television show. Traditionally, TV doesn’t have the time or money to indulge some of the more wayward actorly attempts to get into character. Which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. The stories about what James Gandolfini did to get inside the mind of Tony Soprano are legendary. Co-stars report him “chirping like a chicken” before scenes, and crew members have told stories about his tendency to punch cars until they dented. Little wonder that he would fail to show up on set with such regularity that HBO started to fine him $250,000 a day when it happened.
Jeremy Strong in his portrayal of Kendall Roy in Succession set a reputation for, let’s say, attention to detail that has followed him around ever since. In 2021, a New Yorker profile described him isolating from the rest of the cast and, in one particular scene, arguing about the sort of salad his character would order at a restaurant. What made this especially awkward was the fact that his co-stars clearly did not enjoy his level of commitment, with Kieran Culkin stating: “That might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn’t help me.” Nevertheless, Strong has kept up his technique, reportedly asking Aaron Sorkin to teargas him on the set of The Trial of the Chicago 7.
Then there is Maisie Williams. Naturally right-handed, she apparently went to the trouble of learning how to swordfight with her non-dominant hand purely because George RR Martin mentioned in passing that Arya Stark was left-handed in his Game of Thrones books.
On the surface, as with the Beef earwigs, this sounds like another example of an actor doing too much work on something that the audience aren’t really getting anything out of. Then again, we are talking about Game of Thrones fans, so all that effort probably saved Williams from being bombarded with a lot of angry emails. Sometimes, just sometimes, the preparation is worth it.
