THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 21
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THEPICTURES
FA M I LY DRAMAS
A
week after wrapping “Minari,” the
movie that would cement his lead-
ing-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 immi-
grant, attempts to establish a new, agri-
cultural life for his young family. For
“The Humans,” an adaptation of Ste-
phen 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 pre-
war, where flickering lights and omi-
nous 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 “in-
terior courtyard.”) “The Humans”—a
study in cramped quarters, failing health,
and financial precarity—was shot in late
2019, but, when it premièred at the To-
ronto 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 reas-
suringly 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 re-
cording studio for voice-over work. He
has an easy charisma, apparent in his
portrayal of loyal boyfriends and dis-
arming 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 Amer-
ica, the other beginning to lose its grip—
and Yeun was struck by “playing the pa-
triarch 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 cran-
berry sauce to kimchi. “Korean Ameri-
can Thanksgiving is the best one!” He
came to acting after catching an improv
show in college, and found sketch com-
edy 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 any-
one.” At twenty-three, he moved to Chi-
cago and auditioned for Second City,
with an old Steve Carell sketch. He per-
formed 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 jugger-
naut in which he would star for six sea-
sons. 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 happen-
ing.” 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” re-
mains the most-watched scripted show
on cable, but Yeun has noticed a grow-
ing 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 di-
rected 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.”
—Alex Barasch“Honestly, we were hoping for solitude up here
after an eternity of solitude down there.”