Growing up, Steven Yeun had two personalities. At school, he says, he was subdued, but at home, or the Korean church his family attended, he was more assertive. Seeking a kindred spirit for this sense of dislocation, he found one on TV, sat on a throne as the Prince of Bel-Air. “I was really drawn to Will Smith,” Yeun remembers. “When you think about the Fresh Prince, it was kind of that concept. He’s caught between places, just trying to be himself.”
These days Yeun sees his own kind of duality differently, as a “source of my own truth and power”. The 37-year-old actor has channeled it into a thrilling career, one full of inspired left turns into different genres and across borders: from Bong Joon Ho’s eco action film Okja to Boots Riley’s anticapitalist comedy Sorry to Bother You, and Lee Chang-dong’s enigmatic thriller Burning. In the process he has created a “unique space I inhabit”, he says. “Where I try and speak from as an actor is always feeling, I guess, isolated. I warred with that for a lot of my life – of feeling disconnected from a system, a majority, or a group. I deeply wanted to connect, so I would bend and twist and break myself to try and conform.”
In 2021, the multifaceted – or, as he puts it, “liminal” – place Yeun occupies in cinema is being rightfully celebrated, with growing awards season buzz for the actor. There’s talk of an Oscar nomination for his role in Lee Isaac Chung’s tender immigrant saga Minari. It would make Yeun the first Asian-American star to be nominated for best actor, yet he’s torn about the prospect of being labelled in this way, feeling “caught between a lot of things … We’re at a moment where life and society move because of things like [award nominations]”, he says. “So I’m happy to be part of a process. But the last thing I want to be is defined by one portion of who I am.”
On the day we speak, Yeun is, above all else, patient: we have been forced to take to our phones after I realise my laptop microphone has packed up. (“Oh, God bless!” he pipes up in relief when we finally establish proper communication.) Before those technical difficulties, there is the quickest of glimpses of his face in Los Angeles as we briefly speak on Zoom, a thin moustache giving him the air of a cool postgrad lecturer. Ever since emerging as the selfless zombie apocalypse survivor Glenn Rhee in The Walking Dead, Yeun has attained a heart-throb status among a generation of fans, with social media accounts springing up to document his handsomeness. Yeun hasn’t always been sold on the idea, telling Slate in 2018: “[Once] I was like, ‘Why not me, why can’t an Asian man be this? Then you try to find that through systems that aren’t native to you. You’re like: ‘I know what it means to be hot. It means you work out. It means you drink a ton of milk, so you get huge. It means you’re mean to people. Toxic masculinity.’”
In Minari, Yeun evokes a more grounded form of masculinity. As careworn farmer dad Jacob Yi, he must persuade his family to acclimatise to 1980s Arkansas while he attempts to set up a farm after moving there from California. His wife Monica (Yeri Han) is only reluctantly on board, their two children more enthusiastic – until their tough-talking grandmother’s arrival throws them off-balance. Gravitas pools steadily in Yeun’s performance, as Jacob’s pioneer zeal starts to endanger the family unity.
There are some minor parallels with Yeun’s own background: his architect father uprooted his family from Seoul in 1988, when he was five. But after a short spell in Canada – its influence still audible in his vowels – his family ended up in the less rural setting of Detroit.
All Yeun’s roles – from his firebrand union organiser in Sorry to Bother You, to Ben, the sociopathic playboy and part-time greenhouse immolator in Burning – pick at the seams of identity; whether that means race or class, or some swirling combination of both. Yeun chose Minari for similar reasons. It was quite different to scripts he is sent that address the “Asian-American experience” head-on, he says: “It’s hard to find ones that didn’t end up being very explanatory, or needing white America to be present in the story to be justified.” But with Minari, “not only was it something I could deeply relate to, it was told really confidently from its own point of view. It wasn’t compromised by needing to explain itself.”
With its Terrence Malick-type grace notes, there is something classically American about Minari, which makes it all the more galling that it was ineligible for the best film category at this year’s Golden Globes. Because its script is predominantly in Korean, it was only eligible for best foreign film, which it won. Hollywood figures such as The Farewell director Lulu Wang and 21 Jump Street director Phil Lord have criticised the small-mindedness that forced Minari into the category, adding more fuel – given how the awards also ignored many of the year’s biggest films and TV shows by black creators – to the accusation that the Globes are failing when it comes to diversity. (Minari fared much better at last year’s Sundance film festival, where it won the two top gongs: the US Dramatic Grand Jury prize and the US Dramatic Audience award.)
Yeun seems unfazed by the Globes exclusion. “Our story is valid in and of itself, we don’t need validation from the outside,” he says with cool firmness. “Us not being eligible, that’s just us butting up against institutions and rules that fail all of us, all of the time. I’m just glad I’m part of something that gets to challenge these notions.”
Still, barring Minari seems retrograde after the best picture win for Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s effortlessly universal class satire, at the Oscars last year (to which a delighted Yeun tweeted: “BONGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!”). “A win for that was a win for humanity,” says Yeun. “We got to break through the limitations of how we get to see cinema in America and what gets to be recognised as good film.” In any case, Minari got the validation that counted. His mother (“The hardest critic”) gave it the ultimate accolade: a straight-shooting “It was good”.
Yeun began acting at college in Kalamazoo, Michigan, against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to become a doctor or a lawyer. After graduating, he joined Chicago’s improv comedy institution The Second City, whose alumni include everyone from Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Cognisant of his own “limitations of not being the funniest person in the room”, he abandoned comedy and went to LA, where he was quickly hired for The Walking Dead. Six seasons of heroism followed, with his character Glenn’s altruism and MacGyver-like handiness making him a beacon amid the series’ grimness. So beloved was he that there was outrage when – even though he suffered the same fate in the show’s comic-book source material – his character had his skull pulped by resident warlord Negan. No one so nice should die so nastily.
It was this niceness that Bong Joon Ho would later weaponise in Okja. Bong deployed Yeun as K, a conniving translator who sells out a group of animal-rights activists helping a young Korean girl try to save the title creature, a genetically modified “super pig”, from the slaughterhouse.
“Though he does a very bad thing, Steven is so charming and cute, the audience can quickly forgive him,” Bong tells the Guide during a pause from working on two upcoming sequels to Parasite. “That duality is such a delicate balance, something only Steven could have pulled off … Steven is always trying to be sweet, but he has this other side that’s hard to predict.”
Hard to predict too is Ben in Burning; a gilded business scion and inscrutable globetrotter who likes to relax by torching plastic greenhouses. Director Lee Chang-dong knitted Yeun’s international status into the character of Ben – sprinkling his dialogue with English, a marker of cosmopolitanism among Korean elites. Yeun says the five-month shoot was “profound” for him, “just [by] being in a country that allows you to not have to explain yourself. Being in a system that services people who look like you – the lighting, the makeup, the hair. Not having to advocate for yourself at every single turn to make sure that you retain the truth of yourself.”
Beyond the working conditions, playing this affectless drifter awakened something in him. “He is a character that was empowered in non-traditional American ways,” he says. “I think America’s power is connected to either whiteness, or physical power. It was really fascinating to play someone who had their own intrinsic power. It allowed me to touch something that I had suppressed in America.”
Yeun says he feels freer these days. He would be happy to make films anywhere “as long as what we’re trying to access is this larger human thing. I’m not specifically trying to escape any gaze. I’m trying to speak from my own place. Even if it’s a production written by someone not like me, I’m happy to engage, always.”
In the meantime, there is Minari. Irrespective of how it fares in awards season, it is a film that is digging American cinema towards healthier terrain. “Hopefully we can get to a place where we connect to each other on a human level, so we can see each other, and that an actor’s job can be to play someone outside of themselves,” Yeun says. “That’s a thing we’ll constantly navigate.”
Minari is released digitally on 2 April and in select cinemas when they reopen
