Steven Yeun: ​‘I have a desire to play a human­i­ty we can all access’

LWLies: You lived in Korea and then Cana­da before com­ing to the States. What were your first Thanks­giv­ings like?

Yeun: I just remem­ber my aunt’s house in Grosse Isle. They were the most well-off in our fam­i­ly by leaps and bounds at the time, and they’d become this cen­tral hub for a lot of fam­i­ly mem­bers to run through. We were there, my cousins, my oth­er cousins, my grand­ma would come, and I remem­ber their din­ing room filled with both Amer­i­can Thanks­giv­ing food and Kore­an food. I think a lot of Kore­an-Amer­i­can fam­i­lies have a Kore­an Thanks­giv­ing like this. And it was deli­cious, so that’s most­ly what I remem­ber. Deli­cious­ness, watch­ing Friends, and get­ting beat up by my cousins. Nor­mal shit.

You grew up in a Chris­t­ian fam­i­ly. What do you make of the reli­gious aspect of this film?

The title says it all: it’s about being human. It’s about the con­structs we attach our­selves to in order to not feel like we’re float­ing in chaos. It’s about iso­la­tion and con­nec­tion, want­i­ng to be loved but not know­ing the lan­guage of how to do that or receive it. It’s about sep­a­rate people’s real­i­ties clash­ing with each oth­er. It’s about expec­ta­tions about pro­jec­tions. It’s the full Thanks­giv­ing din­ner, com­ing home with your own inte­ri­or life and then being force to come back to a func­tion and a role in this oth­er life, and the frus­tra­tions with that.

You got your start on stage doing sketch com­e­dy. Did you feel like doing an adap­ta­tion of this play brought you back to that?

It real­ly did. Because not only was the process real­ly the­atre-based, with sev­en or eight days of rehearsals and decon­struc­tion togeth­er, the way the set was arranged real­ly felt like a the­atri­cal stage. It was an apart­ment built in a sound­stage in Brook­lyn, with mov­able walls that would give you escapes and ways to leave that weren’t real­ly tra­di­tion­al exits. You’re in a play, so you’ve got to cheat around the cam­era to be where you need to be to deliv­er your next line. The block­ing was com­plex, but it wasn’t fixed. We were sup­posed to float in the space and just live it, because the cam­era wasn’t on a fixed point either. You some­times have to slide around this giant machine in an awk­ward way. But the immer­sion could be real­ly trip­py. It still felt like a play.

In the orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion, your role was played by Ari­an Moayed. How did you inter­pret the sig­nif­i­cance of your char­ac­ter being the only non­white per­son at this dinner?

What’s cool about this role is that [Stephen Karam] doesn’t flat­ten this role to be an exten­sion of the fam­i­ly. He’s got his own life. Who­ev­er the actor is that’s play­ing this role has to bring his own truth to it. The orig­i­nal actor who was cast, he was rep­re­sent­ing – maybe pur­pose­ful­ly, maybe not – the ten­sions of ⁹⁄₁₁. What’s been cool is hear­ing about this, espe­cial­ly from Jayne Houdyshell’s per­spec­tive, hav­ing been with this the whole time from stage to film, she’s said that people’s recep­tion of the sto­ry has mutat­ed over time. At first it was about ⁹⁄₁₁, then it was about Trump, now it feels maybe pandemic‑y – or East-meets-West with my being in the cast. We can play in this what-is-it-about tier, but it comes down to people’s humanity.

How did you and Beanie Feld­stein map out the rela­tion­ship between your char­ac­ters, and fig­ure out what kind of life you’d have together?

We talked about phys­i­cal com­mon­al­i­ties. Everyone’s try­ing to search for a spe­cif­ic kind of life, they’re all adults, they’re try­ing to feel old­er than they. And Richard is old­er, but why? Why’s he with a younger woman, and what’s that do for her? Is it that she feels more cul­tured and mature, as some­one who’s been the baby of the fam­i­ly the whole time? I thought my char­ac­ter might also be the youngest of the fam­i­ly or maybe an only child, and he likes feel­ing like an adult, so he’s with some­one younger. We held some of that stuff to our­selves, too. it felt very real.

When you were younger, what was the worst apart­ment you had?

Oh, it was pret­ty bad. I lived in a rear coach house as my first apart­ment, so there was bare­ly any light. I lived in an upstairs crevice that had been split into two bed­rooms, so I had a room and my friend had a room. But the ceil­ing was vault­ed, so if you went to one side of the room, you couldn’t stand. Luck­i­ly, the Mid­west isn’t as expen­sive as New York.

With your char­ac­ter being at an uncom­fort­able din­ner gath­er­ing, reluc­tant­ly accept­ing a gift, there’s a sim­i­lar­i­ty to your sketch from I Think You Should Leave.

The receipt! I’ve heard that a cou­ple times. That sketch has real­ly had a life of its own. I love Tim Robin­son, knew him from doing Sec­ond City. Tim and Sam Richard­son are my heroes. But I won­der, what is it about that sketch that gets people?

There are these minute social codes which we’re expect­ed to fol­low, and that sketch imag­ines what it would be like if we didn’t have to.

Like on Curb Your Enthu­si­asm! He gets to com­plain about all the shit we wish we could. But I love the new sea­son of I Think You Should Leave, I love the rub­ber suit guy. ​‘I don’t feel good! There’s too much shit on me!’ Tim’s a genius, man.

Over the past five years, you’ve worked with Bong Joon-ho and Lee Chang-dong; as titans of Kore­an cin­e­ma go, have you ever met Park Chan-wook?

I have, yeah! I’d love to work with him, I’ve just nev­er got­ten that call. I met him the same year I met direc­tor Bong, which was very lucky; a friend acquaint­ed us all while I was still on Walk­ing Dead. I remem­ber tak­ing a stroll around the streets with him, Park walk­ing with his hands clasped behind his back. I do that myself now. He took me to eat Pyongyang noo­dles – Naengmyeon, this real­ly deli­cious dish – and that was the last time I saw him before the pre­mière of The Hand­maid­en in Korea, which was a great expe­ri­ence. Get­ting to watch some­thing so intense with him and his wife sit­ting behind me, that was real­ly wild.

When doing a tight-knit ensem­ble piece like this, is there a trag­ic sense to the way you form an inti­mate fam­i­ly while work­ing only for it to break apart?

I don’t know how to artic­u­late it, because this might not be what peo­ple expect, but I find a com­fort in leav­ing it all on the court. All the peo­ple involved here and in oth­er projects I’ve done, there’s always an aware­ness that you might not see some­one for a while, but you’ll know them for­ev­er. I haven’t seen a lot of my friends from Walk­ing Dead in a minute, but I know we’ve still got it. Act­ing is a weird busi­ness. It’s a strange task. It can cost you, but it doesn’t have to. There’s a method of pro­tect­ing your­self from that cost.

The Kore­an film indus­try has a greater pres­ence in Amer­i­ca than ever; have you found that this is a ​‘ris­ing tide lifts all boats’ sit­u­a­tion? Are there more oppor­tu­ni­ties and inter­est in Kore­an-Amer­i­can stories?

There are a lot of things hap­pen­ing at the same time. One dan­ger of that is that Kore­an-Amer­i­can, or third cul­ture sto­ries in gen­er­al, those are large­ly being gen­tri­fied because of the pow­er of the nation-state itself. When Amer­i­ca ingests Kore­an cin­e­ma and applies that to things that exist in Amer­i­ca, it flat­tens them. The conun­drum is that a lot of Asian-Amer­i­cans are put in this weird bina­ry where to gain access and make their sto­ries, they need to co-opt the pow­er of the indus­try. You’re gen­tri­fy­ing your­self, to some degree. There’s a push and pull about it. I’ve been try­ing float in this space of not nec­es­sar­i­ly iden­ti­fy­ing with ori­en­tal, occi­den­tal, East-West Korea-Amer­i­ca. I’m try­ing to get to – what I deem as tru­ly glob­al – is humanity.

As obvi­ous and lit­er­al as that is, that’s what drew me to this project, the desire to play a human­i­ty we can all access. Cul­ture and bound­aries, regions and eth­nic­i­ties, these are beau­ti­ful but they’re also con­struc­tions. There was an expres­sion going around Hol­ly­wood for a while, that ​‘speci­fici­ty is uni­ver­sal­i­ty’. And that’s true, I get what you’re say­ing, but I didn’t like that adage. I always want­ed to say, ​‘Who’s ask­ing for more spe­cif­ic?’ The peo­ple ask­ing are usu­al­ly pow­er­ful exec­u­tives rep­re­sent­ing the major­i­ty, ask­ing a minor­i­ty per­son to give them some­thing more relat­able and eas­i­ly under­stood. It shouldn’t be that speci­fici­ty is uni­ver­sal­i­ty, but that human­i­ty is uni­ver­sal­i­ty. Per­son­al­i­ty. Can we remove all these struc­tures and get to the thing, and maybe then start putting them back? That’s a dif­fi­cult nee­dle to thread.

The Humans is released in cin­e­mas 31 Decem­ber. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.