The Netflix TV series “Beef” stars Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as strangers who become locked in an unwinnable battle to destroy one another’s lives after a road rage encounter. I admire the show more than I like it — it pinged all my anxiety receptors — but I liked it enough to give the show three stars.
I might have written something different had I known what I know now.
David Choe has a supporting role in “Beef,” playing the cousin to Yeun’s character — he’s a bad influence recently out of prison and looking to set up his next scam.
On Twitter, a few days after the show premiered, investigative journalist Aura Bogado resurfaced a podcast clip from 2014 featuring Choe gleefully boasting to his co-hosts about committing rape while getting a professional massage. The story is graphic and disturbing, and involves Choe committing a sex act in front of a masseuse and then forcing her into a sex act.
I was unaware of this until last week. But there was reporting about it at the time by BuzzFeed and other outlets, and shortly thereafter, Choe posted a statement saying the story was made up:
“It’s a dark, tasteless, completely irreverent show where we (mess) with everyone listening, but mostly ourselves. We create stories and tell tales. It’s not a news show. It’s not a representation of my reality. It’s not the place to come for reliable information about me or my life. It’s my version of reality, it’s art that sometimes offends people. I’m sorry if anyone believed that the stories were fact.”
It’s up to you to decide if that is a credible explanation.
But it strikes me as extremely bad judgment to package a story of rape — whether fact or fiction — as entertainment and something to titillate listeners and the people in the room with him that day. I also wouldn’t describe it as “art.”
Choe is primarily known as a graffiti artist who made as much as $200 million in Facebook stock for murals he painted at the company’s headquarters. His artwork is also used in the title cards at the beginning of each episode of “Beef.” To be rich grants a person entrance into Hollywood circles, and it is notable that telling this story nearly a decade ago did not cut him off from those kinds of connections. Before landing his role on “Beef,” he hosted an interview show for FX on Hulu in 2021 called “The Choe Show.”
“I’m a recovering liar,” he told The New York Times in a profile in 2021. Bearing that in mind, how are audiences meant to take anything he says at face value?
The New York Times story noted that Disney, Hulu’s majority owner, had reservations about giving Choe the interview show but the deal went through anyway despite their concern that “I might be getting canceled,” he said. “If you want to come and try to cancel me, that’s OK.”
And yet the podcast clip originally posted by Bogado was recently pulled off social media. “David Choe wrote to Twitter to get the video I posted of him talking about the woman he says he raped taken down on copyright grounds,” Bogado wrote, sharing screenshots of the notice.
As a TV and film critic, I think a lot about who gets opportunities in Hollywood and who doesn’t. It is not a meritocracy. Far from it. Plenty of talented, capable actors lose out on jobs for a variety of reasons — sometimes that reason is: This person has too much baggage.
So I’m baffled that Choe, who is not an actor, was given a role on “Beef.” I can only imagine how this looks to any other Korean American actor who doesn’t have a rape story in their past — and would have loved to have had a spot on Netflix’s latest hit prestige series that will surely be campaigning for awards consideration.
As an industry, Hollywood has been eager to move on from #MeToo and other rumors of unseemly behavior. The thinking seems to be: Harvey Weinstein is in prison, so any other related issues — even performative joking that doesn’t feel like joking at all — are non-issues. That’s why James Gunn is now co-CEO of DC Studios. In 2018, the film director apologized after several of his old tweets resurfaced in which he made jokes about rape and pedophilia. I think that disqualifies a person from having the kind of professional judgment needed to run a division of a multibillion-dollar media company. Warner Bros. disagrees.
You might, too. I’m not here to tell you what to think. I’m here to tell you what I think. And this turn of events is a good reminder: If I’m unfamiliar with an actor and they have a prominent role, I should take five minutes to do a quick search. Because you never know what might turn up. That’s my job as a critic — to provide context.
And that context might have shaped my review of “Beef.”
TV and film make a pact with the audience. These characters aren’t real. What’s happening on screen isn’t real. These are inventions of the writers and the actors and that’s why it’s safe to explore potentially unsettling ideas. I described Choe’s performance in “Beef” as “entertainingly slippery,” but his real-life history complicates how I feel about that.
In light of the Choe news, I’ve seen a number of people on social media change their minds about watching the show. Typically it’s some version of “I was looking forward to seeing it, but not anymore.”
It’s hard enough to get audiences to watch any one particular show — did anyone involved with “Beef” consider this possible outcome?
Clearly, there are audiences who care, and I should have done my due diligence. Few TV critics did, with the exception of Hannah Bae writing for the San Francisco Chronicle.
We don’t know if Netflix or the producing studio A24 were aware of Choe’s back story when he was hired because neither has commented publicly since the podcast resurfaced last week. Do we think these entities do less due diligence than Disney?
The show’s creator Lee Sung Jin and its stars — Wong and Yeun — have not said anything.
None of the major Hollywood trade publications have covered the story either, as of this writing.
The silence is deafening.
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