BEEF's Ali Wong and Steven Yeun Talk Finale's Heartbreaking Final Moments and What 'Really Feels Like a Shame'

Imagine being trapped in a deadly situation and the only person you can count on is your mortal enemy.

That’s exactly how the BEEF finale begins as Amy and Danny’s (Ali Wong and Steven Yeun) attempt to once again run each other off the road culminates in both vehicles flying straight off a cliff into a remote desert. And if that wasn’t traumatic enough, Danny finds the still-armed Amy and pushes her off a steep, rocky embankment, leaving her for dead. But when the sun eventually comes up, they realize that in order to survive their new reality (and the hallucinations that follow), they must finally work together. Ultimately, the experience brings them closer in ways they never thought possible.

“It’s incredibly bonding,” Wong tells TVLine. “Just when you think these two characters have seen each other at their worst, their most despicable selves, it just keeps going down. When you see that in someone else and you still choose to spend time with them and be close to them, that’s something, you know?”

“When you’re put in those situations, you let go of the hard ‘Self’ character that you desperately identify with,” says Yeun, “and you realize that maybe you’re a little closer to each other than you thought… a lot closer.”

Amy forces Danny to forage for elderberries at gunpoint, but the duo quickly realizes they’ve poisoned themselves. Soon, they can’t tell the difference between reality and hallucination, or where Amy ends and Danny begins. Over the course of the next couple trying days, the newfound — is it safe to call them “frenemies” yet? — deeply connect, as they assume they’ve met the end of the road. Danny admits to his whole hibachi-grill suicide attempt. Amy confesses to hating George’s art and unpacks her struggle to connect with her daughter, June.

“I think she has shame about parts of her that are really human, that she’s chosen to repress for the sake of the life that she has chosen, in this big edifice she has built that’s so perfect,” says Wong. “She’s unaccustomed to having people see the uglier parts of herself and she’s not used to it. It makes her really uncomfortable. I think that’s something everybody can relate to.”

She adds: “The part in the finale that always made me emotional when reading it and saying it was when Steven and I are saying something to the effect of, ‘We should have done this earlier. What a waste.’ It took all of this for [Danny and Amy] to just connect and that really feels like a shame.”

The characters finally trek their way back to civilization, with Danny helping the injured Amy along the way. Soon, their cell phones start getting reception again (Paul’s alive!), but as they make their way through a tunneled enclosure, George finds them and shoots Danny before asking any questions. When we cut, Amy is by Danny’s bedside at the hospital where she relives the last year of her life and the entire beef she had with this man she very much cares about now. In the last heartbreaking shot of the series, she crawls onto the unconscious Danny’s bed to cuddle with the one person she now feels closest to, hoping and wondering if he’ll ever wake up again.

“I think she just hadn’t realized — even though it seems like this kind of face-off situation — how much she really cares about Danny,” says Wong of the finale’s final moments. “He’s the only person she’s let really see her and I don’t know if she even let it happen. It just happened and she realizes how much she appreciates it. And now with the risk of Danny dying, she’s just like, ‘Please don’t go away. I’ve never felt more at home in my life.’”

Thoughts on Amy and Danny’s last chapter? Grade the finale and series overall, then light up the comments!

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