A week after wrapping “Minari,” the movie that would cement his leading-man status, the actor Steven Yeun found himself in New York, to film a different family drama. “Minari” had been shot in the wide-open spaces of Oklahoma—a stand-in for Arkansas, where Yeun’s character, a Korean immigrant, attempts to establish a new, agricultural life for his young family. For “The Humans,” an adaptation of Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play of the same name, he would spend twenty-eight days inside a grotty Chinatown duplex, reconstructed on a Brooklyn soundstage. “The dripping paint, the water stains, just the patina of the place—we were gawking at it the whole first week,” he recalled the other day. “The apartment itself is obviously its own character.”
In the film, Richard and Brigid (Yeun and Beanie Feldstein) have just moved into the dank and under-furnished prewar, where flickering lights and ominous noises from upstairs add to the anxieties of Thanksgiving with Brigid’s parents and sister. (The mother, visiting from Scranton, frets about the view of a dingy alleyway; Brigid, versed in the patois of city real estate, dubs it an “interior courtyard.”) “The Humans”—a study in cramped quarters, failing health, and financial precarity—was shot in late 2019, but, when it premièred at the Toronto film festival this fall, it was hailed as a COVID-era horror story.
Yeun, who had on half-rim glasses and a gray sweater, was Zooming from his house in Pasadena—a locale reassuringly free from sweating walls and sickly lighting. Early in the pandemic, he had turned a corner of his bedroom into a makeshift office, with books stacked high on a desk and plants on a windowsill; the closet doubles as a recording studio for voice-over work. He has an easy charisma, apparent in his portrayal of loyal boyfriends and disarming sociopaths alike. His approach to character, he said, is always to “talk the shit out of it.” In rehearsal for “The Humans,” he and Feldstein discussed “the things that they find attractive about each other, the things that they need from each other,” and the gulf between their characters in terms of age, race, and class. “Minari” and “The Humans” are both about families on the brink—one struggling to gain a foothold in America, the other beginning to lose its grip—and Yeun was struck by “playing the patriarch in one and then the outsider in the other.” Richard, a grad student with a trust fund, is the newcomer to whom old grievances and in-jokes are explained, but his fresh eyes give him insight into unspoken dynamics.
Yeun was born in Seoul and raised primarily in Michigan, where his own experience of the holiday was less fraught. “I’m chillin’ during Thanksgiving,” he said with a grin, noting that the dishes at his parents’ table ranged from cranberry sauce to kimchi. “Korean American Thanksgiving is the best one!” He came to acting after catching an improv show in college, and found sketch comedy unexpectedly liberating: “That’s the medium where physical limitations aren’t as big of a deal, you know? If you’re an Asian American actor, you can play anyone.” At twenty-three, he moved to Chicago and auditioned for Second City, with an old Steve Carell sketch. He performed with the company for a few years (including a stint on a Norwegian cruise liner), moved to L.A., and was cast in “The Walking Dead,” a ratings juggernaut in which he would star for six seasons. After his departure, in 2016, he began to attract critical attention for his work with such auteurs as Bong Joon-ho, Boots Riley, and Lee Chang-dong.
“Minari,” the culmination of that run, premièred in January, 2020. “We got back from Sundance, and then the world just broke,” Yeun said. The film had won a Grand Jury Prize, and would receive six Oscar nominations, including one for Yeun, as Best Actor. “All that happened under the cover of night,” he said. “The Oscars were, like, this thing that I had to do while the pandemic was happening.” His focus was on fatherhood: one child had remote learning to contend with, the other was still a toddler.
He has also begun producing, in the hope of opening the door to unknown actors and directors from marginalized backgrounds. “The Walking Dead” remains the most-watched scripted show on cable, but Yeun has noticed a growing openness to eclectic material. “It feels nice that you can watch ‘Dragon Ball Z’ and then a P. T. Anderson film in the same day,” he said. Last month, he wrapped his first live-action project since the pandemic, a horror movie directed by Jordan Peele. The partnership, he said, was “kismet.” He’d seen the same quality in Peele’s script as he had in Karam’s: “I’m looking for the ones that are speaking human.” ♦
