﻿Steven Yeun became an overnight star after his role in ‘The Walking Dead.’
Since he left the show, the actor did some deep soul-searching. He
decided to portray a different narrative for Korean-Americans — one that encompasses the
depth of emotions that Asian families feel when they experience the West.
Steven Yeun was born to a Christian household in South Korea. His father was an architect
at a big firm, who uprooted the family when Steven was five years old. They first moved
to Saskatchewan, Canada, before settling in Michigan, where the actor was raised.
Steven’s dad started over after he moved his family to the West. He
went from architecture to owning beauty-supply stores in Detroit. “Mom and Dad's first job in
the States was stuffing chopsticks into paper sleeves,” the dreamboat shared.
Yeun explained that his father was distraught when his family first settled in. “He said he
was so angry because he realized that he threw away all the safety of everything and had to
start back up from zero,” the actor said. After having to build up, once again,
from a modest background, the actor’s parents encouraged their children to pursue law or
medicine — something highly specialized, so the children could have a secure future.
Yeun received a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration on
neuroscience from Kalamazoo College in 2005. He tried his best to listen to his parents,
but deep down, the young man knew that the field of Psychology was not his calling.
Steven feels that he had two personalities growing up, saying he was subdued at school
but was more assertive at home or the Korean church his family attended. These two clashing
personalities created a sensation that no matter where he was, the actor felt he didn’t belong.
Seeking a companion for this sense of dislocation, Steven found one on
TV — sitting on a throne as the Prince of Bel-Air. He was really drawn to Will Smith.
“When you think about the Fresh Prince, it was kind of that concept. He’s caught between places,
just trying to be himself,” the actor reflected. Yeun said that he struggled to adjust and settle
into Western society, having been born in Seoul and raised in a Korean home. He just sort of
winged his way into learning English and was often the only Asian kid in school, so he kept
to himself and described himself as an isolated child. “I think immigration, if I'm going to be
honest, it fucked me up a little bit,” he said. So Steven retreated into himself. He found some
comfort in Nintendo and X-Men cards and befriended “other weird gap-life kids,” who were inclined to
sit alone at the lunch table. “I realized I did a lot of things to look smart,” he said.
For example, if someone asked Yeun what his favorite type of music was, he'd blurt out,
“Classical! — But I don't know anything about classical music. I would just say shit.” He
played in the school orchestra but felt like the most realized version of himself at his Korean
church, where he didn't have to code-switch. In his youth group, everyone could move through
their little contained world in the fullness of who they were — Immigrant children learning
how to adapt to their Western environments. Yeun finally began to break out of his shell as a
teenager when he got himself a guitar. The guitar quickly unlocked something in Yeun, who would
transform himself into the band leader of his praise group. He had grown to love singing, and
the guitar, by extension, made singing easier. After high school, while at Kalamazoo,
the rising star fell into improv comedy, which gave him a new medium to express himself. Steven
later moved to Chicago to join the Second City comedy club, the improv incubator
that launched the careers of Amy Poehler, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, and generations of other stars.
In Chicago, Steve met Joana Pak, who would become his second-ever girlfriend and eventually his
wife. One day, he was walking down the street with a friend when he saw a girl smoking a cigarette
under a streetlight on Milwaukee Avenue. “I just tapped my friend, and I was like, ‘Yooooooooo,
look at that girl.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, shit. I know her!’ “ the actor recalled.
Such was Steven Yeun's luck. He asked for an introduction and got one, but, unfortunately
for him, she had a boyfriend at the time. It wasn't until he ran into her a year later,
when she unexpectedly walked into the café where he was bartending, that Yeun finally asked her
out on a date. Since 2016, the couple have been happily married and share a 6-year-old son.
However, after spending some time in Chicago, the heartthrob realized that
comedy wasn’t really his thing either and he should try more serious acting,
so Steven decided to move to Los Angeles. In 2009, he drove across the country and tried
out for a handful of acting gigs, including one he didn't get. Then, just five months after crossing
the county line, Yeun was cast on AMC's The Walking Dead and became an overnight success.
At its peak, the show was the most watched on television, trouncing Game of Thrones and The
Big Bang Theory. His role as Glenn Rhee, a Korean American pizza-delivery guy with
great hair and a big heart, quickly transformed Yeun into an object of fan obsession — like,
people would get his face tattooed on their chests and live-action roleplay as him in forums.
In 2017, a year after he left the show, the actor was filming a night scene for the movie
‘Sorry to Bother You’ in Oakland, scrunched inside a Toyota Tercel with Lakeith Stanfield
and Tessa Thompson. Steven was the first one to get recognized… from the back seat. People
waiting in line outside a bar were like, “Hey! It's the Asian guy from The Walking Dead!”
The instant fame was surreal — and slightly dehumanizing. The actor had to stop leading
worship at his church after other churchgoers began asking for selfies. Making up the chaos
was that Glenn was romantically paired up with Maggie, a brave and unswerving white woman,
played by Lauren Cohan. Steven’s role in ‘The Walking
Dead’ sparked deep thought into how the actor understands what it means to be Korean-American,
and ended up being why he left the show. He wanted his character to be “more conflicted”
and have the same opportunities for inner life or substance as other characters.
“Glenn has evil thoughts, I'm sure,” said Yeun, reflecting on season three when his
character thought that the governor had assaulted Maggie. The actor campaigned
hard to get a storyline where Glen gets to kill the governor, but that never happened.
Steven soon grew restless with the role because he was portraying an idea that Korean-Americans
are one-dimensional when showing emotion. “To be quite honest, as an Asian person, sometimes
accessing your own humanity when you're outside in the world is not that easy,” Steven once shared.
Not having a sense of humanity in his real life and show life was frustrating.
As was feeling that Asian people are usually just shrunken down into their labels. “And so
I think it just started this journey of just, like…dude, I can't. I've got to feel full.
I've got to feel real,” he added. Even after scoring his hit role,
the actor still felt that he was code-switching and not being himself.
“You're constantly trying to fit into a situation so that you don't disturb it,” Yeun said.
However, with ‘The Walking Dead,’ he felt tired of not letting people know he could have dark
thoughts and get angry. He feels that Asian people are usually just shrunken down into their labels.
According to Steven, he would hear his whole life what a nice guy he was because he would
always control his emotions. Initially, it felt like a compliment, but as he got older,
the actor realized: “‘Fuck that, man. That's an insult.’ And that's what I mean
about my humanity. We all feel human. But I just wanted to feel all the feelings.”
So he leaped into roles that allowed for space to feel those emotions and to find answers to
the question of who Steven Yeun could become. From acting as a union organizer in ‘Sorry to Bother
You,’ to the sociopathic playboy and part-time greenhouse immolator in ‘Burning.’ According to
the Guardian Newspaper, all of Yeun’s roles pick at the seams of identity, whether that means race
or class, or some swirling combination of both. In 2020, the actor starred in the drama, ‘Minari’
about a Korean American family that moves to Arkansas in search of the American dream. He
chose to play this role for the same opportunity to deconstruct notions of identity. Steven felt it
was difficult to find scripts that didn’t end up being very explanatory or needed white America to
be present in the story for it to be justified. However, 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,” he said.
Even though the film was excluded from the Golden Globes as an American film, Yeun was unfazed.
If anything, it just provided an opportunity for the actor to
dissect what it means to qualify as ‘American,’ being labeled as ‘Korean-American’ himself.
“It really just comes down to the idea that rules and institutions can never capture real
life. And it can never really understand that what builds a place like America and
what makes it great is all the people that are contributing to it,” he explained.
Steven now feels that his work as an actor helps to expand those institutions and
rules. “That's why we make this stuff,” he said about the complex identities he aims to show.
According to GQ magazine, only some people have considered being a voice for representation with
as much care and attention as Steven Yeun. This is mainly because the actor spent most
of his life trying to find a middle ground to exist in. After searching for all those years,
he decided to help create that safe space for others like him and his family — people
of color chasing their American dream. That's all we have for you today! As always,
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