AUSTIN, Texas – Debuting on Netflix on Thursday, the comedy-drama Beef sees Ali Wong and Steven Yeun play strangers who turn a road-rage incident into an all-consuming feud.

But in real life, the two Asian-American stars are good friends, and pretending to loathe each other on-screen was so stressful, it took an unexpected toll on their health.

“Steven and I broke out in hives after the show,” says Wong, 40, at the series premiere at the recent South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

“Mine was on my face. His was all over his body because he’s weak like that,” jokes the actress and stand-up comedienne, who has Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry.

“If we knew what we were going to put our bodies and minds through, maybe we wouldn’t have said yes, but we’re really glad we did,” adds Wong, who also wrote and starred in the romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe (2019).

 Yeun, a Korean-American actor who was Oscar-nominated for the drama Minari (2020), says: “Our bodies shut down afterwards.”

But between takes, he and Wong were able to decompress by hanging out with each other and laughing.

“That’s the beauty of the chemistry – that we get to be safe and be friends, and then just totally go at each other on screen,” says the 39-year-old, whose breakout role was in the zombie series The Walking Dead (2010 to 2022).

Beef was created by South Korea-born writer-director Lee Sung-jin, who drew on an experience in which he was overcome by road rage himself.

The driver of a car “honked at me, cursed at me and drove away. For some reason, on that day, I was, like, ‘I’m going to follow you,’”, he says of the inspiration for the character Danny (Yeun) angrily pursuing Amy (Wong) after she honks her horn at him.

Thankfully, Lee’s encounter “didn’t end like it did in the show – that’s why I’m here, able to talk to you today”.

“But it definitely made me think about how we live in such subjective realities in which we project onto people we don’t know,” says the showrunner, whose writing credits include the comedy series Silicon Valley (2014 to 2019).

Lee identifies both with Danny, a struggling contractor who feels like he is a failure, and Amy, an entrepreneur who feels trapped inside her seemingly perfect life.

Like Danny, “I was quite poor and was very sad inside”, he says.

“Now, here I am at South By Southwest with this show. And I’m probably still sad inside,” adds Lee, who had worked with Yeun and Wong when they voiced the animated sitcom he co-wrote, Tuca & Bertie (2019 to 2022).

“This feeling never goes away, so you have to try and figure out how to accept it and live with it. That’s why I wrote the show the way I did.”

Yeun was intrigued by the show’s exploration of the idea of the “shadow self”, psychiatrist Carl Jung’s term for the parts of oneself one finds hard to accept.

“We all have that,” he says. “So, to tap into that and get paid for it, is great. And hopefully, it makes you feel seen too because this s**t’s very common.”

Quoting the late Jung, Lee says he wanted the series to highlight some of these darker corners of the psyche and “make the darkness conscious”.

“If we could just take our masks off once in a while, the need to go crazy with expressing some of these things wouldn’t be as high.”

For Yeun, there is a lesson in self-acceptance here as well.

“For someone like Danny, he’s really brought down by the fact that he feels misunderstood. And the thing that I had to learn early on in my life was that you have to validate yourself before anyone else can do that for you.

“That’s what I think about a lot.”

Beef debuts on Netflix on Thursday.