When Charles Melton was the exciting new face at the center of Todd Haynes’ masterful 2023 film May December, a whole lot of people were angling to rub elbows with him at awards season events. Lucky for him, Lee Sung Jin — then on his own awards campaign for the first season of Netflix’s Beef — was one of them.
“He maneuvered his way to sit next to me at dinner,” Melton remembers of a Gold House event hosted by co-founder Bing Chen. Lee, who goes by Sonny, didn’t just have a pitch for Melton to star in the second season of Beef — which already had a writers room up and running — he had a part already in progress.
“He showed me a picture of myself and said, ‘This is in our writers room.’ And I thought, ‘Cool, does the character look like me?’” Melton tells me on today’s Prestige Junkie podcast. “He goes, ‘No, we’re writing for you.’ So it was a very pinch-me moment.”
Set — initially, at least — at a Southern California country club, Beef’s second season kicks off as a generational battle between the club manager, Josh (Oscar Isaac), and his wife, Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), and their younger employees — another couple played by Melton and Cailee Spaeny. Melton’s character, Austin, is mostly sweet and well-intentioned — always trying to do the right thing and put people ahead of himself — and the actor tells me how he worked hard to make Austin nice but never boring or pitiful.
“I had to just be as truthful as I could be,” Melton says of the performance, which netted him an Emmy nomination for best supporting actor in a limited series. “It was a very vulnerable place for me to be in this sense — catering to everything around me and trying to fix so many things. Sometimes we learn sooner than later that you kind of have to make decisions for yourself.”
Melton, 35, has become one of the busiest actors of his peer group, starring in film projects for Alex Garland (Warfare), Nicolas Winding Refn (Her Private Hell), Greg Kwedar (the upcoming Saturn Return) and, soon, the Daniels (the Oscar-winning directing duo’s untitled follow-up to Everything Everywhere All at Once).
“It really is my education when I’m working with these filmmakers,” Melton tells me. “With each filmmaker, I’m kind of this sponge. I want to digest as much as I can. I’m not just curious what references or films they want me to watch for the specific role or character. I’m like, just send me the films you love.”
For Beef, for example, he went back to early episodes of The Sopranos, “because our characters are always hiding something,” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. With such a significant portion of Beef also focused on the Korean experience — Melton’s own mother is a Korean immigrant who moved to Alaska after marrying his father in 1990 — he also looked toward South Korean masters like Bong Joon Ho and Park Chan-wook, both of whom find humor in their material without trying for the laugh.
“If I’m playing the joke, there is no joke,” Melton tells me. “Austin’s funny, but it didn’t feel funny when I was doing it.”
Hear all of that and much more on today’s episode of the podcast, in which Christopher Rosen and I also continue our fall preview series — this time with The Hollywood Reporter’s David Canfield. He joins us to look at the awards contenders from the studio indie shingles Focus Features (Obsession, Andrew Scott in Elsinore), Searchlight Pictures (Wild Horse Nine and Behemoth!) and Sony Pictures Classics (The Only Living Pickpocket in New York). As a reminder, you can watch our full episodes on YouTube in addition to subscribing on your podcast platform of choice!
