Lee Sung Jin is not inherently cocksure. If anything, the “Beef” creator defaults to self-deprecation.
Take the 44-year-old’s penchant for spinning fiction out of real-life occurrences. “I have a very limited imagination,” Lee deadpans. “I kind of have to wait for the universe to show me things.” Reflecting on his experience making Season 1 of “Beef,” the zeitgeist-seizing Netflix anthology that yielded eight Emmys and 13 nominations in 2023, Lee cites an online meme of a Venn diagram. “Crippling self-doubt” sits in one circle. “Absolute narcissism” occupies the other. The overlap? “Art.”
