Carey Mulligan on the Gen Z v millennial feud at the heart of Netflix's Beef

In the new series of Beef, Netflix's hit show exploring rage and anger, Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac have beef and lots of it - with each other, with their Gen Z employees, and with the world in general.

While the first season, released in 2023, followed a row between strangers after a prang in a parking lot, the second focuses on bust-ups between people who are closer to home.

Isaac's character runs a prestigious country club in California, and Oscar-nominated actress Mulligan plays his British wife.

The couple's tempestuous marriage comes to a head when two twenty-something employees witness them having an explosive row - and, after filming it, decide it's ripe for blackmail.

The tensions within and between the two couples - one millennial, the other Gen Z - reverberate throughout the episodes.

The two sides burn with a "mutual disdain for each other", explains Mulligan, who is known for films like An Education, Promising Young Woman and The Ballad of Wallis Island.

"They can't stand us and we can't stand them. Everything they do is annoying, particularly after the inciting incident of the whole show.

"We have a common enemy in them, and that's the way we stay together."

Indeed, the marriage between Mulligan and Isaac's characters Lindsay and Joshua appears on the brink.

"When we meet this couple, it's not a spoiler to say they're on their knees," she adds.

"Their relationship is really hanging on by a thread and actually it's their mutual disdain of this Gen Z couple, and all the things about them that are annoying, that binds us."

Their adversaries are personal trainer Austin (played by Riverdale actor Charles Melton) and his fiancée Ashley (played by Alien: Romulus star Cailee Spaeny), who also work at the country club.

"We thought it was so funny," smiles Mulligan. "We were always trying to find ways to be more annoyed by them. We called them 'the kids', which seems unfair because I think Charles is 33."

In fact, Melton is 35 in real life - just five years younger than Mulligan herself.

At 47, Star Wars and Frankenstein actor Isaac, who has previously starred with Mulligan in Drive and Inside Llewyn Davis, qualifies as Gen X.

Isaac says the disdain for the Gen Zs comes from what their characters see as the younger couple's "sense of entitlement, and how they're entitled to all these things that we feel we worked really, really hard for and to prove ourselves for".

"That really rubs us up the wrong way," he continues. "Also there's a cynicism that we have about their view of love - all these plans and all these things they seem so certain about, where they haven't experienced any of the real pitfalls in what being in a relationship is."

The show's creator Lee Sung Jin gave the older pair "this acidic point of view towards the others while not seeing our own petty behaviour", the actor adds.