Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac decided to wear earbuds so they could listen to music while acting in Beef – resulting in massive VFX costs. But they’re the tip of the iceberg when it comes to wild onset choices…
C
ome awards season, you probably wouldn’t think that the second season of Netflix’s Beef would be a contender for many visual-effects gongs. After all, while it is tight, tense and sublimely acted, it is ultimately a small ensemble piece grounded in some form of reality.
But you might be wrong, since it has emerged that VFX artists had to painstakingly paint out earbuds worn by Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan throughout the shoot. On a recent podcast appearance, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, told Isaac and Mulligan that digitally erasing the earwigs, as they are known, “cost a fortune”.
Unlike the traditional use of the technology, whereby everyone from Marlon Brando to Robert Downey Jr would be fed their lines through an earwig to save them the bother of memorising their scripts, Isaac and Mulligan used theirs to listen to songs as they acted. In a blackmail scene, they played complicated Thom Yorke music to add to the tension. For love scenes, they listened to songs that would heighten the passion. “The beat would drop on the [kiss],” said Mulligan. “We were so delighted every time, we were like: ‘It did it again!’”
