Multi-million selling pop bangers, eleven Grammys, two Academy Awards, critically lauded solo work, and a growing catalogue of film and TV scores – Finneas O’Connell is on some run. Best known as the studio maestro behind some of the biggest hits of the last decade – including his ongoing collaborations with sister Billie Eilish – he’s become one of modern music’s most attuned architects. His latest Midas-touch turn sees him craft the original score for the second season of Lee Sung Jin’s surreal anthology series, Beef – centred around two couples locked in a power dynamic tug-of-war amid a backdrop of country club wealth. Within this storytelling, Finneas’ compositions act as a sonic pressure gauge, amplifying the simmering tension beneath the excess: the manicured setting hums with ambient wellness centre textures and hypnotic lawn-sprinkler samples, fracturing into ominous, glitching beats and waves of sound that crash the illusion. (You’ll also see Finneas on screen, playing a hammed-up caricature of himself.)

Carey Mulligan, who leads the cast alongside Oscar Isaac, Charles Melton, and Cailee Spaeny, found Finneas’ scores to be a rich creative entry point into her character – “we were just getting these drops of genius from you all the time” – listening to them on headphones before stepping onto set.

Finneas O’Connell: Can we start with the dog [in Beef]? How was he to work with?

Carey Mulligan: [laughs] I was talking about this last night. I remember the first couple of days of Oscar [Isaac] and I doing all of our stuff together, and being like, “Sonny’s [Lee Sung Jin, creator, writer] not really giving us any notes or talking to us very much,” for whatever reason he was quite hands off for the first few days. He also wasn’t doing the sort of like, “Well done actors” thing that we love. [laughs] But the first day that dog was on set, Sonny was like, “Oh, Jonesy, you’re amazing.” “Jonesy, that was brilliant.” “Oh my god, let’s get another one, but Jonesy’s looking over there,” or, “Let’s try one where Jonesy’s a bit more agitated.” The direction and affirmation that was happening for this dog was out of control. [laughs] He was a very good dog and he was incredibly well trained, but he did get an awful lot of attention from Sonny, who, as you now know, really likes dogs.
FO: [laughs] I found this out in the post process, because when I was going in for these meetings to work on cues, his dog was often at the office, and then our music editor, Luke [Dennis], would bring his dog. There was also a dog named Kubrick who was always there. It was dogs galore in the office; it was very sweet.

CM: Actually, when I signed on to the show, he’d had the first episode written, and he had some shape of the second two, but then episode five about Burberry [the dog’s name in Beef] was rock solid in his head. He was very clear on what that was. Did you write a Burberry theme?
FO: There’s not a [specific] Burberry theme. There’s that big sequence in episode four, where you’re leaving the house and you’re on the phone calling to cancel your thing and Ashley [a character played by Cailee Spaeny] sneaks in. There’s a lot of Burberry there – that was maybe the most screen time with music that I was working on, where Sonny would be like, “I really want you to score how intense this is for Burberry.” [both laugh]

CM: It’s so good. OK, I don’t know anything about scoring at all. Actually, I think this is one of the few jobs where I’ve had music that I knew was going to be [in it]. On Maestro we had it, and on Promising Young Woman, Emerald [Fennell] had some songs, like the Paris Hilton song, but there are very few projects where I’ve known [the soundtrack], particularly with an original score. How did you start – where did the first cue come from?
FO: Here’s the order for me. I meet Sonny probably around the same time you do in pre-production. He’s talking about things and I’m getting an episode or two. Then I’m sending little pieces back as a kind of audition. Like, “Is this working for you?” He was really liking these textural things – I was making all these pieces of music out of sprinkler systems. Already in those drafts, Oscar’s character had the Moog in his man cave, and so I was already doing all these Moog stylings, and Sonny liked all that. Then I was on tour and you guys were already starting to do pre-production. I would get these texts from Oscar that were like, “I’m in town, can we go to a synth shop?” I was like, “Sure, when are you free?” And then he’d be like, “I gotta cancel. We’re doing an escape room.” [both laugh] I was sending stuff and sending stuff and, not dissimilar to what you were describing as the process of acting feedback being on set, I was just sort of throwing cards across a room into a hat, and some of them were hitting and some were missing. Then I got home from a leg of the tour and I came to set… By the way, I would come to set through catering, and your kids would be there doing on set school or something, and I’d be like, “Evie, what’s up?”

CM: You saw my kids more than we saw each other.
FO: I never saw you once – crazy. But I eventually came to set, and it became clear that something… I think it was the piece that plays during that kiss at the end, people would be like, “Oh, Sonny’s played this for us,” and I was like, “Amazing.” Because again, I’m just throwing stuff, and I’m not seeing cuts of the episodes yet. So that was hugely relieving to me. Then I did that one scene much later in the season where I’m being a douche to Oscar, and then Oscar was like, “Me and Carey have been putting in earwigs and listening to stuff, you want to listen to some?” And I was like, “That’s cool, sure.” We listened to some LCD Soundsystem that day. But that was how I had the awareness of, like, oh, clearly they’re focused on music this far in advance. I was very grateful for that.

CM: Oh yeah. Because of the fires we got delayed by a week, and Oscar and I took our families to San Diego. I remember getting the first [score] cue then.
FO: Wow.

CM: We had it in our ears the whole way through.
FO: That’s so cool.

“We were just getting these drops of genius from you all the time and being like, “Oh, good, Finneas sent us another genius thing!””

CM: It was so helpful. I found our main theme so devastating. So for the big fight scene at the beginning, that’s the song that we had in our ears. It’s amazing how music… The thing with our show is that so much of it is absurd, and so much of it is hopefully a bit funny. But ultimately, for you to go along for the whole ride, it also has to feel real and emotional. A huge amount of that came from listening to your music; it embedded this history and importance into our relationship that we didn’t have to conjure as much. That theme is so huge, it has such a big heart to it, and such a tragedy to it. It was unbelievably important to us to have it from so early on. I think that was the thing that made us go, “Let’s just listen to music all the time.”
FO: That’s so cool. It’s a great honour. I have some odd questions that I’ve been wanting to ask you. Because I’ve seen this asked of the filmmaking side of the Beef world, of Jake [Schreier, director and executive producer] and Sonny, and obviously I get asked versions of this question, but I wanted to ask you, as an actor. Do you watch old movies or television shows that inspire you or help you when you’re preparing for a role like this? Is that part of your prep at all?

CM: Sometimes it is. If someone says, “I would like you to watch this and this and this,” then I’ll go away and I’ll watch them. I think sometimes when it’s self-generated, for me, I find myself sort of unintentionally stealing stuff, but in a kind of obvious way. I remember years ago I did a production of The Seagull in London. I played Nina, and I was very happy playing Nina, I felt like I’d figured her out, and it was all good. Then one day I decided to watch a film version with Vanessa Redgrave, who was doing a completely different interpretation – an incredible interpretation, but so not what I was doing at all. Then for like three or four nights I was doing Vanessa Redgrave because it was so brilliant. Even subconsciously I was like, “I should do it like that.” But it didn’t make any sense. Do you know what I’ve been so inspired by recently? The supporting actors in The Pitt – they are so incredible. I think everyone in The Pitt is incredible, but every person who comes in as a day player on the show, I’m blown away by them. They’re so brilliant. And you know they’re there for like a day…
FO: They’re there for a day, they’re being under-directed, they have to make up their whole world, they haven’t been given anything underneath it. They’re just in there with a gunshot wound. [both laugh]

CM: And they’ve got to figure out a whole life to bring into it. I find the detail of that work very inspiring. I’m also not a cinephile, so I have to be directed to go and watch things.
Finneas: I have a The Pitt day-player story to tell you. I’m going to condense it because I don’t want to monopolise the conversation. A couple years ago, I had food poisoning. I live in LA, and I hit up my GP like, “I need an IV, I’m dying today.” And he was like, “No problem, I’ll send my friend Ned over.” [laughs] I’m in my living room and this handsome nurse shows up. He’s in a mask, but he gets out of the car with no mask on, then puts his mask on, and I’m like, “LA is hilarious, even the nurses are beautiful.” [both laugh] This guy comes in and he’s so sweet, and we’re just talking about stuff. I was like, “I’m gonna play some music,” because you’re sitting there for an hour with a needle in your arm. I start playing music and he’s like, “Oh dude, play some Strokes.” He says, “I toured with this band in the 90s,” and I was like, “What the fuck? What band were you in?” And he goes, “I was the drummer in Rooney.” I was like, “I love Rooney, that’s crazy. And then you became a nurse?” He goes, “Yeah, after touring for enough years I then went to nursing school and got into this.” I was like, “Wow, that’s so cool. So that’s what you do now?” And he goes, “Well actually, now I play a nurse on a show – they like that I know how to be a real nurse. I’m actually shooting right now, but today I have the day off and I was like, ‘Oh sure, I’ll come give an IV.’” I was like, “What show are you in?” And he said, “The Pitt.” [both laugh] So he plays Nurse Jesse.

CM: No way! I love Nurse Jesse.
Finneas: [laughs] Well, if you’re in LA and it’s his day off and you want an IV from Nurse Jesse…

CM: That is just crazy.
FO: And by the way, this was before The Pitt had come out, so he just said the name and I was like, “Amazing, can’t wait to watch it.” And then The Pitt has become this phenomenon.

CM: And he’s so good in it.
FO: That was like two and a half years ago, early 2024. Then two months ago, Claudia [Sulewski, Finneas’ fiancée] gets the flu or something, and my GP is like, “I’m sending Ned again.” And I was like, “Ned’s on The Pitt now. The Pitt is huge!” And he was like, “He’s got a month off.” [laughs] But Ned is the nicest guy, and I’m happy for The Pitt’s success for every reason, but I’m like, Ned – I’m so happy for Ned!

CM: That’s incredible.
FO: Anyway, that’s my Pitt anecdote.

“The volume [of music for Beef] was so high. On episode eight alone, I had to make like, 40 minutes of music, so it just shakes off the preciousness… sitting at the piano and being like, “Is this good?””

CM: Have you acted?
FO: Very little. I had an agent in high school and I did a couple of episodes of Modern Family as little guest parts, and I was in a couple of episodes in the last season of Glee. So it was all tied into music. “You can sing, you want to do this audition?” I was like, “Sure.” I have no problem with an audition, but I want to do a good audition, and if I have a week where I have to be in the studio all the time, then I’m gonna bomb my audition. So now I trust the people around me to be like, “This is really worth it, take a couple days off to focus on it and do a good audition.” I love doing it, but I’m very inexperienced at it. I’m just a real fan.

CM: So are you just in the studio all the time making stuff until you go on tour? Is that how you work?
FO: At this point in our lives, Billie and I are working on a new record, and we find that the best way for us to work is a kind of loose schedule where we work like, three days a week minimum. Sometimes we work more – sometimes we have a day where we’re very inspired, and sometimes we have a day where we’re not. But there are often tasks to do. There’s often like, “We need to get all those harmonies,” or “We need to get all those backing parts for that song we worked on the other day.” Yesterday we wrote a brand new thing and it felt really good, but we didn’t know that until 35 minutes in, you know? Each of the past albums has taken us a year, from nothing at all to the album being done. So now when we set out to make a record, we’re often like, “OK, twelve months from now, we’ll probably be done.” We used to – and I’m sometimes forced to do this with other artists – be like, “Six weeks? Yeah, that’s fine.” People make amazing albums in six weeks, but it’s so luxurious to take forever to make a record, because you just plod along and you don’t feel that pressure of, like, this has to be done tonight. I have to stay here all night.

CM: How many other people are there day-to-day? Or is it just the two of you?
FO: It’s just us. I mean, we’ll outsource – like, I’m a very mediocre drummer, so I’ll do little demo drums, and then we’ll write in our ledger: “We’ve got to get a real drummer in here to play some real drums.”

CM: And then you just keep going until you’re like, “We’re absolutely done, there’s nothing more.” When do you call it?
FO: We call it when we start making stuff worse. [laughs] Like the clay on the wheel – you’re like, “OK, it’s starting to look like a pot, look at that.” Then suddenly you do more and it collapses on itself, and you’re like, “I should have stopped a minute ago.”

CM: Are there people that you’ll play it to first, where you’re like, they’ll know if the pot’s gone weird? How do you know?
Finneas: Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we think it’s awesome, and someone else is like, “A version before this is way better.” My fiancée is a great audience member, and she has taste in music that we love. So if she’s on the aux in the car, we’re like, “Wow, everything you’re playing is really cool.” So she’s our litmus test. And she’s a very nice person, so she doesn’t come down and go, “This one’s not for me, guys,” but her genuine appreciation is apparent to us. So if she’s like, “I love it,” we’re like, “OK.” And if she’s like, “I really, really like this,” then we’re like, “OK, we’re gonna pay attention to that!” What’s your relationship with feedback? If you’re on set and you have people you’re working with telling you that they think what you’re doing is the right thing – what’s your relationship with believing that stuff? Do you have to feel it?

CM: At a certain point I’ll say, “If you’re happy, I’m happy.” Unless I really think there’s something that I’m missing or that it hasn’t worked. I remember on Promising Young Woman, I had to do the final monologue right at the end about her friend. It was the scene that, when I read it in the script the first time, I thought, “God, that’s such good writing.” And I think I built it up so much in my head that when I came to do it, I just kept tanking it. I kept saying to Emerald, “Can we do another one? Can we do another one? Can we do another one?” And we still had to do the whole stunt at the end. I would have done it for like seven hours. But I think for the most part, if I’ve got a director that I feel like I trust, then I can sort of walk away. Actually, on Beef I had that, definitely with Sonny and Jake. Also because Oscar and I have worked together so much, and we’re such good friends, we’d give each other the [does a satisfied nod].
FO: [laughs] Your Promising Young Woman story really makes sense to me, because you’re talking about the thing that you looked ahead to nail. That’s always where I’m in my head.

CM: Do you feel that about live performance? Marcus [Mumford, Carey’s husband] was playing a song the other day for the first time on tour, and he was like, “We just completely fucked it, and I knew we’d fuck it.” He was really annoyed because it was the first time they’d played it and it went really badly, and he was like, “I spent the whole show knowing it was coming…”
FO: “And I’m gonna bomb it.” I think about that with Billie all the time when we put new stuff out. You think about how many times Marcus and the boys have played Little Lion Man, right? If Marcus got a concussion right before he went on stage, he could still play that song fine. It’s so deep in the sense memory – he can just do it. Then anything that really is taking concentration, you’re in trouble with. I’m not really a drinker in general, but especially not on stage. But I was in Australia a couple of years ago and they do a thing called a ‘shoey’, where they throw a shoe on stage and expect you to pour a beer into it and then drink out of it, which is… unhygienic. [both laugh] I’d been strong-armed into doing it by an Australian friend of ours. They were like, “You have to do it, it’s a whole Australian rite-of-passage. They will love it if you do it, and they’ll boo you if you don’t” – which is true. My friend was like, “I’ll just throw a new shoe on stage, you won’t have to drink out of an old boot.” So I was looking in the crowd like, where’s this new shoe? And my friend was nowhere to be seen. I was getting thrown old Converse and stuff. Then a girl threw a big white boot, and I was like, “Fair enough,” and chugged this beer. Again, I’m such a lightweight, so I chug the beer and the next couple of songs were new, and I was like, “Whoa, I’m buzzed suddenly playing these songs.” [both laugh] You know what made me really nervous? I did this thing for Beef the other day where we performed some music live. That made me nervous.

CM: Really?
FO: Yeah, because I was playing piano, and there’s an orchestra up there, and the orchestra is really good, so I didn’t want to mess up.

CM: I mean, playing with an orchestra is terrifying.
FO: Also, when I record for score, I cheat a little – I’ll play the left hand and just plunk around, and then I do an overdub and play the melody. Then live, there’s just one of me, so I’m doing this kind of Cat in the Hat thing. That made me nervous, but it was. I did, in my opinion, totally fuck it up, but then I walked off stage and everyone was like, “Nice!” and I was like, “No it wasn’t.” [laughs] I knew that I’d made a mistake.

CM: I always say to Marcus, I think there’s nothing more thrilling than when people fuck up.
FO: Agreed.

“I do love that about [scoring] – you’re very much for hire… If sometbody’s in charge and I can pass, fail or be graded.”

CM: Once or twice I’ve seen them have to start again or whatever, and I’m always like, “That’s the best bit, everyone loves that bit!” I don’t think it’s the same in theatre – it’s awful. I’ve been in the audience where someone’s gone up badly, and I’ve also been on stage when someone’s gone up badly, and it’s excruciating. I actually did go up once… It was a monologue, and I did an almost ten-second pause whilst I tried to remember what the line was, and then I carried on talking, not knowing if I’d found the right place in the script at all. I just kept talking. Then I came off stage and was like, “Oh fuck,” and a person who was in that night was like, “I’ve got to tell you, that pause you took was unbelievable.” When musicians do it, I find it so charming.
FM: Forgive me for asking a question I should know the answer to, but is this your first series?

CM: It almost is. Well, no. I did a lot of TV when I was coming up. I did TV adaptations of Austen novels and things like that, and then lots of episodes of TV, all the rite-of-passage things that you do, like Miss Marple and Trial & Retribution. But then I did a series called Collateral when I was pregnant, in 2018. But since then, I haven’t done a series, and this was the longest time I’ve spent shooting anything for a long time.
FO: It was a heavy, heavy shoot. One of the things I was curious about – I assume most movies you shoot are not in chronological order. What an ordeal to do that. But on a TV series, they’re shooting episodes, you’re in your little block of episode one. But I remember hearing from Oscar that they were crossboarding.

CM: Yeah, we went all over the place. I actually didn’t mind that. What I liked was that all of Oscar and my stuff was in one go. Everything in our house was in a three-week block, which was great because it was just the two of us, and we had a lot of time to work together. I guess on Maestro we were fairly chronological – we started as the young couple, and then we dotted around a little bit. But the series thing is a different beast completely, and the experience of being directed by multiple different people is something new – that was unusual to me. But Marcus sometimes works with multiple producers on the same thing, and it interests me how that works. Do you always do your own production?
FO: I’ve predominantly been the producer guy in the [project], but I’ve worked with people that I am an admirer of, and like you’re talking about, I like getting kind of, graded. If somebody’s in charge and I can pass, fail or be graded. I’ve not done much scoring, but I do love that about it – you’re very much for hire. I don’t have a combative relationship with Billie or any of the other artists I work with. We disagree, but when you watch a documentary about an album in the 90s and everyone’s screaming at each other – that’s not how I like to live. Also, the volume [of music for Beef] was so high. On episode eight alone, I had to make like, 40 minutes of music, so it just shakes off the preciousness that sometimes you’re guilty of, sitting at the piano and being like, “Is this good?” You’re like, “Too late, deadline is two days from now.” Then invariably, the other thing that would happen is that I’d be feeling pretty good about a piece and Sonny would be like, “Yeah… it’s OK.” And then a piece that I was like, “I don’t really like this piece,” he’d be like, “This is perfect. This is awesome.”

CM: That’s so funny. My impression of the whole thing was that we were just getting these drops of genius from you all the time and being like, “Oh, good, Finneas sent us another genius thing.” The idea of it having this back and forth is so interesting to me.
FO: Such a back and forth. Sonny, and every other filmmaker I’ve worked with so far – tonnes and tonnes of back and forth. What it does to me at the beginning is – probably because I’m a novice and I haven’t scored that many things – the first round of negative feedback, I’m like, “I can’t do this!” [both laugh] And not because I’m mad, but I’m like, “They clearly hired the wrong guy. I’m failing.” Then once you take their note, you do their change and they like it more, then you’re like, “Oh, well now I feel so relieved that I was able to do that.” Then the spotlight gets more focused, and eventually you start sending stuff that gets through on a first or second pass. To Sonny’s credit, I really liked his language of feedback. I’ve had people in the pop space where you’re like, “Check this out,” and they’re like, “Bad!” It’s so clear-cut. Sonny was very good at being like, “I actually really like this, but here’s what’s not working about it in the scene…”

CM: He has a good bedside manner.
FO: He has a good bedside manner, which I was grateful for, because you’re only fragile by way of feeling like you’re failing.

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