Steven Yeun
Steven Yeun
Sang-yeop Yeun, known professionally as Steven Yeun, is an American actor. He rose to prominence for playing Glenn Rhee in the television series The Walking Dead (2010–2016). He earned critical acclaim for the films Burning (2018) and Minari (2020). For the latter, he became the first East Asian-American nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most in
"Here’s what an Asian person looks like to a majority white audience…But if you go to Korea, the characters are just humans because they’re not thinking about it like that. That’s something that I was made aware of [with Burning], which was really wonderful for me to know. I didn’t have to represent all Asians. I could just represent myself."
"Lets not mess with your Americana thats kind of embedded into your body. The food that youve eaten, the choices that youve made, the way that you think - dont alter those things. Instead, just - lets work on the language so that you can be unequivocally Korean. But lets leave these mysterious Western encodings in your body alone. And I think that created its inherent kind of, like, dissonance with that character where you dont know who or what and where hes from."
"You know, the concept of even an Asian-American person and a man has morphed and changed even in the last decade by a lot. You know, theres moments where people were super psyched that an Asian man was in a relationship with a white woman. And that was, like, a big point of victory for a moment…"
"These days I feel my otherness in every situation…If I go to Korea, there are reminders that I’m not fully Korean. I can speak it – and I look it there – but there are cultural and historical things that I don’t have because I wasn’t necessarily raised there. They really form the identity of being Korean and I’m missing parts of those…a man with no country…That’s the kind of place I’m operating from."
