‘Beef’ Star Charles Melton Is Always Ready to Surrender Himself to Something Great

IndieWire Honors: The Performance Award recipient found making Season 2 of the Emmy-winning Netflix anthology series "frustrating" at times, but found success in trusting his showrunner's vision.

On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Before his interview with IndieWire can begin, Charles Melton becomes distracted by a wayward eyelash. “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,” he says, as he pinches away the tiny hair with surgical precision. “Make a wish,” he instructs from a couch inside one of the many green rooms inside Netflix’s Los Angeles offices.

It’s little moments like this that have brought on a new wave of endearment toward the 35-year-old actor who, after six seasons on the hit CW series “Riverdale,” had a breakthrough film role in Todd Haynes’ “May December,” which earned him a Gotham Award in 2024. One celebration of his turn as Joe Yoo, the much younger half of a scandalous couple being shadowed by an actress played by Natalie Portman, is even the genesis for his latest acclaimed role in Season 2 of the Emmy-winning anthology series “Beef” on Netflix, created by Lee Sung Jin.

“They were honoring me at this dinner that [Gold House] put together and so many incredible filmmakers that now I have relationships with [were there], and Sonny was sitting next to me and said, ‘Hey, this is in our writer’s room,’” recalls Melton. The showrunner showed him a picture of himself. “We’re writing for you,” said Lee. “It was one of those ‘pinch me’ moments,” said the actor. “And I had a lot of ‘pinch me’ moments during the ‘May December’ press tour.”

Similar to Yoo in “May December,” who finds himself trapped in arrested development, Melton sees the role of Austin in “Beef” as something of a deconstruction of masculinity. “You can be kind and loving and endearing and sweet and also still kind of be a rock,” he says of the budding personal trainer rising up in the ranks of a Southern California country club at the behest of his fiancée Ashley, played by fellow Golden Globe nominee Cailee Spaeny. “That’s just something that bleeds in from the work that I do with myself, into my work.”

Austin resembles the Charles Melton of 15 years ago. “When I think about his journey throughout this, you’re really watching him come of age for the very first time, and it’s not just one thing. This person has codependency in his relationship and friendships, right? I relate to that to a certain extent of people-pleasing. Everyone I’m around or with is the sun I revolve around, and then slowly as that sun dims, in reference to Ashley, Cailee’s character, things start to crack,” said the actor. “Then he starts noticing the planets around him — his Koreanness, his Korean identity, his identity in the workplace after being this very celebrated collegiate football player — to then climbing up the social class, being completely broke and then starting to make some money.”

Part of what made the character so close to him as well was Lee making him and the other actors an integral part of the writing process. “Sonny and I would talk for hours on the phone and I’m like, ‘Dude, are you texting?’ He’s like, ‘No, I’m writing notes.’ Because he’d be writing in real time when I would share certain stories,” said Melton. “He’s really great at understanding the essence, mining his experience and blending it with my own, in order to create what we created with Austin.”

Having also worked with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Alex Garland on “Warfare,” Melton said, “These incredible filmmakers that I feel so honored to have worked with, what they all have in common is their uniqueness of collaboration and not being so constrained to just an idea that doesn’t allow you to exist in their world.” He says, “With the great auteurs, they have a vision, and once you trust the auteur and that vision, you know you’re going to end there. [Lee] goes, ‘I know this is going to end in Korea and there’s going to be an “Old Boy” fight sequence.’”

While the cast of “Beef” Season 2, which also includes Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan as an older couple in conflict with Austin and Ashley, do get to realize that scene in the finale, Melton shares that it was not as easy a journey as one might anticipate. “It was a very frustrating process for me,” he said of playing the often bumbly Austin. “I never once played the joke. You can’t. The subtlety and mundanity of life is funny enough. There was humor in every subtle aspect, whether you see it or not. And so it was frustrating for me because I had to unmask myself to be vulnerable and empathetic, to surrender to the seriousness of everything he was going through, which made the experience of whatever the audience is feeling funny.”

In most interviews he’s done about “Beef” Season 2, including one with IndieWire, the actor brings up a scene in Episode 1 involving a bee. How he felt while shooting it was so diametrically opposed to how he’s seen audiences respond to it. “Technically it was one of the hardest scenes I ever had to film. In the span of 30 seconds, Austin’s thinking about his place in this world, doing pushups, feeling of no use, codependent with Ashley, she’s not responding to him. Doing pushups, he notices a bee. The bee is struggling. He runs up, grabs a cup of water, gets back down in the pushup position, dips his hand in the water, tries to save the bee, the bee dies and that’s all in one shot. That tells you exactly who Austin is, but those circumstances, for me it was not funny, but it’s amazing how, through the edit and the final picture, it is,” he said. “If I were playing, ‘Oh, the audience is going to laugh at this.’ You don’t know. You have no idea, but reading things on paper, it could be humorous.”

Melton adds, “I love the complexity of Austin. He just slowly starts to crack and you’re seeing him trying to super glue the pieces of this mask that he has conviction in, that he’s plastered to his face that slowly starts to crumble all the way until the end.”

Though he is receiving the Performance Award for “Beef” at IndieWire Honors on June 4, Melton has a resistance toward viewing his work as a “performance” when he’s on set. “When I’m working, I’m not performing because there’s no grounded authenticity for me to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to perform it this way.’ No, I’m going to do the work,” he said. He realizes it’s just an issue of the semantics around speaking of one’s craft, “but I can’t academically say I’m going to perform this way because if I’m saying I’m performing, there’s something in my subconscious that tells me that I’m doing this for the audience to see… I can’t telegraph the story with the restraint of what you may think.”

That aforementioned frustration while shooting “Beef” was from Melton being so locked into the role. “I care about Austin so much, and that’s just like a part of me. Everything that I do, more so now than before, it’s a part of my soul. And what I mean by that is whenever I read something, something bubbles to the surface that needs to be explored,” he said. With “Beef,” it was “the Korean American experience, identity, being a former college athlete, all these things that I found that I related to, but I mean, if you told me what I was going to do next or what I wanted to do next, I couldn’t tell you. It will be revealed to me and I’ll know when I read it, spiritually.”

A 2026 Emmy contender for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, “Beef” star Melton does know that becoming a leading man is not one of the ambitions driving his artistic choices. “I’d rather be a part of something great and just have one scene than be a part of something maybe not as great and have an amazing performance. I just want to do good work,” he said. The actor has developed enough trust among visionary filmmakers that he says, now, “when I go to set, I’m not thinking about giving them one layer. I’ll give them all of me and they can figure it out themselves, where I completely surrender and just relinquish and let go.”

“Beef” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.