STEVEN YEUN ON THE BRINK
From The Walking Dead to Minari + Upcoming Roles
You’ve seen Steven Yeun’s face before, but this might be the first time you’re connecting a name to the face. The 37-year-old actor has been performing for more than 10 years, but it was a role in The Walking Dead that catapulted him into mainstream success. Now, he could be on his way to an Oscar nomination.
On the long-running show — one of the most popular, too, in terms of ratings — Yeun played Glenn Rhee from 2010-2016. As he told The New York Times, that visibility put him on a shortlist of recognizable Asian-American actors. Throughout the years, Yeun has held steady TV roles, mostly doing voice work. Sprinkled in there, though, are some of the best films made in the last decade.
After The Walking Dead, one of his first roles paired him with the most popular Korean director in the U.S. right now: Bong Joon-ho. Yeun was cast as K in the film Okja. His character is part of the group trying to retrieve Okja from an evil corporation run by Tilda Swinton. Yeun is just one face among many famous others: Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, and more. It was one of two famous films he would shoot with a Korean director.
That second film is Chang-dong Lee’s Burning, a movie about a woman who takes a trip to Africa and comes back with Ben (Yeun), a mysterious man with a less than an ideal hobby (the clue is based on the title.) Yeun, who grew up speaking Korean but with an American twist, had to be fully immersed in the language and culture that he grew up removed from, but that ultimately prepared him for his current role.
Yeun is the lead star in Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, an immigrant’s tale about a family that moves to Arkansas to farm. Yeun says he can relate to the situation. His family moved to Detroit when Yeun was young to start their own business. He used his dad as inspiration for an integral part of the character.
“I’m still justifying the accent in my own head,” Yeun told The New York Times. “I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of people giving me [expletive] about it, saying, ‘That’s not what a Korean dad accent sounds like.’ But the accent I did is how I remember my dad talking. It’s nuanced; it’s a little different, and it has its own twang and inflections. At the start, I kept trying to mimic the standard Korean ahjussi accent, and it felt fraudulent. And I’m OK with it, because this was the accent I chose for this character as opposed to servicing this collective understanding of what a Korean accent is traditionally supposed to sound like.”
Minari debuted with Oscar buzz after winning both the Audience Award and Grand Jury Award at Sundance Film Festival in 2020. Now, it has six BAFTAs and three SAG award nominations. Yeun was nominated by the Screen Actors’ Guild for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role. It increases his chances for an Oscar nomination because that same group votes for Best Actor nominees.
Yeun is on the brink of movie stardom. He’s proven he has the chops and the range, but an Oscar nod would solidify his place in Hollywood. We can’t wait to see what he does next.
