Warning: spoilers for Beef season 2 ahead!
C*nty Carey Mulligan was not what I had anticipated for 2026, but here we are. A far cry from her normcore acting gigs of the past, Mulligan’s character in the latest season of Beef is completely electrifying and anything but safe. At one point, I laughed so hard at her performance a trickle of tea came out my nostril (yes, really).
“These f*cking kids don’t know who they messed with. We have so many more years’ experience being petty,” her on-screen persona, Lindsay, declares. And, well, never has a truer sentence been uttered. Because not long after, she and her husband Josh (played by the phenomenal Oscar Isaac) stoop to all kinds of levels to get one over on their insufferable Gen Z counterparts, Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton) – who, besides sounding like a duo from a Disney Channel sitcom, are also blackmailing their way to promotions and better healthcare at the country club where they all work.
While Josh’s response to their extortion, as the general manager, is to use the youngsters to cover up his own dodgy dealings and mismanagement of the club’s finances, however, Lindsay’s retaliation (including giving out Ashley’s number to members and telling them to think of her as their “personal concierge”) is far more subtle. She could easily dismiss these occurrences with plausible deniability, but deservedly gets a kick out of inconveniencing these work-shy twentysomethings who spend more time texting and asking each other what they are thinking than doing their actual jobs.
“Entitlement,” she concludes, is what it boils down to. “If I had pulled this sh*t at Soho House, Kevin Nader would've cut my f*cking bollocks off” (The irony of her own privilege and sense of entitlement completely lost on her).
In case there was still any doubt over her levels of pettiness, though, Lindsay proceeds to brag to her husband about the time she turned her colleagues at Oliver Peoples against “this one kid,” Mark Ritter (“what a c*nt!”), until he quit. “He had no idea it was me,” she muses, with a faint smile curling up at the corner of her mouth.
Of course, the fact that Mulligan is British adds an entirely wonderful layer to her character (who also has a jumpered dachshund named Burberry, naturally). In no small part because of her accent and eccentricities, Lindsay can get away with the vast majority of her foul-mouthed rants and bitchy quips. Even in the height of a raging argument, she will casually drop in the fact they haven’t completed their herb garden in five years or shrug off taking a golf club to Josh’s possessions with a breezy, “Just got a bit carried away.”
Then there’s her interior design career. Showing the new club owner, a powerful Korean heiress named Chairwoman Park, her redecorating skills, Lindsay parades around in a silky floral suit that could give Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen a run for his money – that, or the Von Trapp children.
When her tastes are said to be “colonial”, she replies, in all earnestness, “Oh, thank you so much!”
Her antiquated world views aside, it is the mundanity of married, suburban life that seeps into her everyday, along with impossible beauty standards and pressure to get plastic surgery as she turns 40 – and she’s simply had enough.
It probably says a lot about me, but Lindsay is the level of c**t I can only aspire to be. Yes, she is cutting and cruel, and undoubtedly toxic and flawed… but I can’t help but be drawn to her. There's something compelling and loveable about her self-possession and unapologetically Machiavellian ways – and it’s not as if she’s completely devoid of compassion and understanding (she’s particularly sweet with Ashley upon hearing about her fertility struggles and she does love that bloody dog).
Though she’s nowhere near old enough, Lindsay is the epitome of the "middle-aged kooky c**t" – a trope we’ve seen more and more lately, between Rachel Weisz in Vladimir, Laura Dern in Big Little Lies, Rosamund Pike in Saltburn and Parker Posey in The White Lotus – and I sincerely hope Mulligan continues on this path.
Olympic athletes, musicians and a very famous spouse.
You see, I first became aware of the actor in An Education in 2009, when she played the sweet (if not wildly naive) Jenny Mellor – a 16-year-old student who abandons her dream to go to Oxford to read literature in favour of marrying an older man. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well.
And don’t get me wrong; it’s a fantastic film, and it’s a role Mulligan approaches with a certain wistful sincerity that struck a deep chord with my 18-year-old self. But from that point onwards, she seems to have played more subdued characters than anything else, whether that’s Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd or Edith Pretty in Netflix’s The Dig.
It’s not that she didn’t play those roles well, of course – it’s that she quite clearly has more talent and ability than they necessarily allowed her to demonstrate.
Thankfully, after playing Daisy Buchanan alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby, Mulligan began to land roles with more grit and range – not least Cassandra in Promising Young Woman and Poor Dear Pamela in Emerald Fennell’s subsequent hit, Saltburn.
But even so, Beef feels like an entirely new chapter for Mulligan. And she totally deserves these meatier roles (if you’ll pardon the pun) because she positively shines in them.
As for me? I’m going to go cut my hair into a short blonde bob, take up smoking and get myself a c*nty little dog. Ta-ra!
Beef season 2 is streaming on Netflix.
