In Beef, the new A24 series that’s currently the most-watched show on Netflix, Ali Wong gives a stunning performance as Amy Lau, a seemingly put-together entrepreneur whose aesthetic lifestyle is the stuff of Pinterest fantasies. That is, until a case of road rage threatens to derail her picture-perfect American dream.
In Wong’s March 1 Hollywood Reporter cover story, reporter Rebecca Sun writes that Beef creator Lee Sung Jin had initially pictured a different version of the story based on his own real-life experience—one in which Steven Yeun’s Danny Cho faced off not with a #GirlBoss but with a white guy. Specifically, “a Stanley Tucci type.”
What Lee meant by “Tucci type” is unexplained in the article, but such is the power of the 62-year-old actor’s brand that I can see him now: He is a quiet older gentleman living in Amy’s posh Calabasas home, one he built after selling the filming rights to his wildly popular though artistically unfulfilling YA book series. Now he’s working on his first Serious Novel and wrestling with self-doubt while the money he overspent slowly runs out. His neighbors describe him as “gentle” and “put together.” He is, obviously, played by the bespectacled Stanley Tucci and outfitted in cashmere knits that are just a tad too tight, showing off the shapely outline of his Cross Fit-earned biceps.
And all I can say is, thank God Lee didn’t follow through with that original vision.
That’s not a knock against Tucci (love you, Tuch). It’s more that…I’ve seen that film before. And that TV series. And that biopic inspired by a real-life figure whose documentary series on HBO won an Emmy. The “white guy in sheep’s cashmere” is, for lack of a better word, tired. To that end, so is the white woman-who-cracks trope. We’ve been there, done that, and honestly, no one can top January Jones’s Betty Draper breakdown.
