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When Beef creator Lee Sung Jin finally settled on the premise for season two of the hit anthology series, he had one actor in mind — Charles Melton.

Lee decided to take matters into his own hands, calling up Gold House founder Bing Chen to cash in a favor. The writer-director asked to be seated next to Melton at a dinner they’d both be attending to honor the actor, so he could pitch him the second season. “I remember just being immensely flattered because I didn’t know he went to the extent that he went to sit next to me,” Melton tells The Hollywood Reporter during the show’s season two junket.

“It was amazing to have Lee Sung Jin, Sonny, the creator, show me a picture of my face and say, ‘This is in the writer’s room and we’re writing it for you,’” Melton continues. “I was completely astonished.”

Beef’s second season leaves behind the parking lot feuds, instead focusing on two couples, one millennial (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan) and one Gen Z (Melton and Cailee Spaeny), working at a California country club. The new season follows “a Gen Z couple [who] witnesses an alarming fight between their millennial boss and his wife,” according to the synopsis.

“Newly-engaged Ashley Miller (Spaeny) and Austin Davis (Melton), both lower-level staff at a country club, become entangled in the unraveling marriage of their general manager, Joshua Martín (Isaac), and his wife, Lindsay Crane-Martín (Mulligan),” the synopsis continues.

Melton says he and Lee “really got to know each other” over the course of season two. “One of the many great things about Sonny as a collaborator, as a filmmaker, he creates so much space. There’s this vulnerability of just trust,” Melton says. “Sometimes we would speak on the phone, I promise you, 60 plus hours, just in a week.”

Isaac and Mulligan also say they’d spend several hours a week speaking with Lee about the show. “My Oura rang legit says I’ve averaged four hours of sleep for the last two years,” Lee jokes. “So, it comes at a cost.”

Similar to the genesis of season one, Lee took inspiration from a real-life event for the central beef of season two, which came after cycling through several ideas of what the latest installment’s premise could be. “It just goes to show that real life is so much more interesting than anything my writer brain can come up with,” says Lee.

The writer says he overheard a real-life “heated debate” coming from a couple’s home in his neighborhood. When he relayed what he’d overheard, he realized one key difference in how the generations reacted to the tale. “I found that my younger peers were a lot like Ashley and Austin [asking], ‘did you call the police?’” he recounts. “My similarly aged or older peers were just kind of like, ‘yeah, big deal.”

He adds, “I just thought, ‘oh, that’s a show.’” Lee says he hadn’t seen anything juxtaposing younger love versus older love since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and that he felt like TV and film tended to examine just one couple.

“Then as you dig in, we find that the passage of time became such a bigger theme, and you have actually four Russian nesting dolls of couples showing the four seasons of life,” the creator explains. “I think at the end, it became a meditation of [the idea that] the stages of life come for everybody, and what are you going to do at the end of it?”

Heated Rivalry showrunner Jacob Tierney is teasing the storylines and “new challenges” that will be at the center of the queer hockey romance drama’s second season.

While speaking at a BookCon panel on Saturday, alongside the book series’ author Rachel Reid, Tierney got candid about Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) being “in much more serious territory” in the second installment, set to be released next year.

“It’s different. It really is different,” he said. “And the challenge of it, from an adaptation point of view, is that you’re in much more serious territory. A lot of the initial — there’s still lots of flirting and lots of sex — but this kind of danger, this kind of hotel-room-adolescent-sex stuff is largely gone. And so it presents really new challenges.”

After Shane and Ily confessed their love for each other at the end of season one, season two — which will focus on The Long Game, the sequel to Heated Rivalry in Reid’s Game Changer series — sees the couple navigate being in a secret relationship.

But Tierney revealed that the show’s season installment, which is also being cowritten by Michael Goldbach, will include part of Role Model, the fifth book in the series. Role Model largely unfolds concurrently with the plot of The Long Game, focusing on Ilya’s new Ottawa teammate, Troy, and the team’s social media manager, Harris, making the Russian hockey player a major part of the story.

“Part of the reason you start off with Heated Rivalry, as far as adapting goes, is because you want to get to The Long Game,” the showrunner explained to the panel’s audience. “Because The Long Game is an emotionally sophisticated book that takes this couple seriously. What I’ve always said about this show is there are a lot of books — Game Changer is in Heated Rivalry and obviously, as I think you guys all know by now — obviously parts of Role Model are going to be in [season two], to the great surprise of absolutely nobody. But Ilya and Shane are the heartbeat of this series, of my show. It’s always going to be about Ilya and Shane; that is what is the trajectory that runs through it as their world expands.”

The realities and challenges that come with romantic relationships are something Tierney is notably looking forward to unpacking in season two. He even recalled a major fight between Shane and Ilya being one of his favorite moments from The Long Game.

“There’s a Bergman-y kind of, what do you do after the rush of danger is gone and now you have to live in a relationship where you still aren’t communicating properly, much as you would like to?” he said. “You can say you love each other, but as adults know, there’s so much more to making a relationship a success.”

Tierney noted that The Long Game isn’t the only storyline that’s “here to ground this in something that feels very real,” but that Role Model also gets quite deep.

“The same thing with Troy and Harris, right. I think there’s an easy, facile way of looking at Role Model as it’s very grumpy/sunshine, it’s very apple orchard. It can drift into things that you want,” he explained. “But Troy is a really damaged guy. And Troy is quite damaged on the show. I would say we are digging into that even harder. Because that’s what’s interesting.”

Heated Rivalry season two, from Canadian streamer Crave and airing on HBO Max in the U.S., is set to be released next year. Reid also previously announced that she’ll be publishing her seventh book, Unrivaled, in the Game Changers series in June 2027.