Beef season two stars Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan made an on-set decision that proved rather expensive.
The Hollywood stars play the leads in new episodes of the hit Netflix show, playing a couple whose marriage starts to disintegrate after their lives collide with a newly engaged pair (Cailee Spaney and Charles Melton).
During the eight-episode season, there are many scenes of rage and passion, and it’s been revealed that, for certain moments, Isaac and Mulligan listened to music while performing their character beats.
However, when it came to the edit, these earphones had to be removed and, according to creator Lee Sung Jin, they “cost a fortune to paint out”.
Speaking on a podcast breaking down the first episode, Sung Jin said: “You two were always playing songs as you performed.”
Isaac revealed he initially had one for a scene in which he played a Moog synthesizer, but enjoyed the experience so much he thought he might try to listen to songs that matched the scene he was performing. After telling Mulligan about his plan, she asked for one also.
Potential spoilers
They both wore earwigs for one particular scene in which their characters passionately kiss.
“That was amazing because it timed out unbelievably well to the moment,” Mulligan said. “The beat would drop on the [kiss]. We were so delighted every time, we were like, ‘It did it again!’”
Isaac added: “Yeah, the rhythm was lining up. We had to do that because you couldn’t have the music playing to cover up the audio, so we liked [wearing the earwigs] so much. We were like, ‘Why don’t we keep doing that in other scenes?’ And so we started doing that and it was great.”
During another scene involving blackmail, the pair were listening to “really chaotic” music by Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard, which Isaac said “added to the tension”.
However, one song that didn’t fit with the rhythm was one suggested by Mulligan – Meat Loaf’s 1993 epic “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”.
“We did so many takes on the blackmail scene that eventually I was like, ‘Let’s do Meat Loaf!’ Halfway through, we were like, ‘No, that doesn’t work.’”
Might it have been cheaper to just get bone induction ear phones that are flesh colored? They sit behind the ear instead of in it and are barely noticable at all. They also don’t cover up external sounds like regular ear phones or noise cancelling head phones so they would have an easier time directing the actors.
Uhh that’s not how you direct actors.
Uggh, thats nit how you marker earpods.
How the fuck did you fuck up writing 7 words correctly and then somehow not notice it?
Stupid spellcheck. And an inaccurate touchscreen. Whats your excuse for not having proper sentence construction past a 3rd grade level?
You don’t speak to them to direct? 🤨
Not during a take.
You absolutely do. Somebody getting shot at without real squibs? It’s an assistant director off camera shouting “BANG BANG BANG.” Phone conversation? AD reading the other lines off camera. Complex choreography? Good chance someone is calling cues.
Any audio can be replaced later, and most is no matter what.
Even in live theater, some productions use earwigs so that someone can give cues and adjust things on the fly if they go wrong.
Cueing is not direction.
This isn’t an argument, it’s just contradiction…
I thought this was pretty interesting. I haven’t heard of actors performing to music of their choosing via earbuds before.
