Lee Sung Jin was on a mission. During a dinner party thrown by Gold House, an organization that champions Asian American excellence, the director—who also goes by Sonny—asked to be seated next to one Charles Melton. Fresh off the Emmy-sweeping success of 2023’s Beef, the surprise Netflix hit he created starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as road-raging strangers locked in a karmic cycle of mutual destruction, Lee was determined to pitch the Riverdale heartthrob on joining the second season of the anthology series. The soirée was held in honor of Melton’s role in Todd Haynes’s 2023 drama May December and like many in attendance, Sonny had been enamored by the actor’s performance.
“[Sonny] showed me a picture on his phone,” Melton recalls to W of the evening. “He was like, ‘This is our writers’ room.’ And it was a picture of me. I was like, ‘Does the character have my hairstyle or something?’ He goes, ‘No, we’re writing it for you.’”
It turns out Melton would be writing it, too—at least, in the form of long conversations during which he and Sonny, who both lived in Korea for several years as children (Melton was an army brat who has lived all over the U.S. and the world), reflected on the Korean American experience. “It was the genesis of a constant collaboration: of spilling the tea behind personal experiences and existential thoughts about life,” he adds.
Even over the phone, Melton is preternaturally affable—the platonic ideal of a mellow American dude. He’ll go deep on an idea, like drawing upon Carl Jung and the shadow self to inform his character-building, and then he’ll laugh at himself good-naturedly. It’s not hard to draw comparisons between Melton and his Beef character, Austin Davis—a former college athlete turned aspiring personal trainer and influencer, whose dreamy relationship with fiancée Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) is tested for the first time when they start working together at a country club. Austin is both the season’s central comedic relief and its most unabashedly decorative element, a role that required Melton, a former Kansas State football player who famously gained weight for May December, to get back to his athletic roots.
Since this is Beef, conflict drives the story, though season two is more about passive aggression. That plays out especially across generational lines: Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac play a burnt-out Millennial couple on the verge of divorce who go to war with Davis and Spaeny, the naive Gen Z-ers, over an unflattering video being used as blackmail.
Below, Melton tells W about Beef, identifying as a Zillennial, and the joys of fatherhood:
You helped create the character of Austin—you even have an executive producer credit. How much of yourself did you put into him?
There’s that scene at the Chinese Bamboo house restaurant, and Eunice [played by Seoyeon Jang] asks Austin if he’s spent much time with the Korean community. He goes, “We went to a church, but everyone thought I was Mexican.” [Laughs] Like, people have thought I was Mexican. That was one blip of hundreds of hours of conversations with Sonny that he found a way to incorporate. When Ashley says, “I’ve never seen us as a mixed race couple. He’s always been Arizonian to me,” you know? It was all drawn from these conversations about what it was like living in Korea, and then America, and the cost of assimilation and the construct of capitalism.
The whole show is about conflict. At first, it’s Millennials vs. Gen Z. Did that generational divide show up on set at all?
I’m a Millennial, but I consider myself—I heard this term yesterday—a Zillennial, both Millennial and Gen Z. There were a lot of conversations [on set], and there was a lot of improv. The humor in Beef is reminiscent of Korean cinema. When you think about No Other Choice by Park Chan Wook or Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder, they’re funny, and the circumstances are either so absurd or just intense. I’ll just call it this “Korean levity,” that’s reminiscent of the Coen brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson.
Melton with Cailee Spaeny in Beef season 2.
Courtesy of Netflix
You and your partner, Camille Summers Valli, just had a daughter; Austin is newly engaged and heading toward fatherhood. Did being a new dad influence the way you approached him at all?
With Austin, there are a lot of things about him that I understand. There are a lot of personal things I dream and hope for, and sometimes not all the puzzle pieces are there. But sometimes they do come together, and now I have my partner and my daughter, who are the best things in the world.
You have a lot coming up as an actor—Love Child with Elizabeth Olsen, and Her Private Hell by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. What quality do the projects you’re gravitating towards right now share?
I go filmmaker first, and then I read the material, and then, like, I want to know who the cinematographer is. And obviously, my scene partners. The last thing I finished was Saturn Return with Greg Kwedar. That’s my brother right there—I’m very excited for that film. I got to work with one of my best friends, Will Poulter, and Rachel Brosnahan. We filmed in Chicago and had such a special time.
