We take a look at the career of Steven Yeun, the supporting actor who is suddenly blooming as a leading man and proving to be one of the best in the business…
Listen up, people. If you don’t think Steven Yeun is one of the best actors in the business right now, then you and me are gonna have some serious beef. If you’ve watched his barnstorming performance in Beef (Netflix’s show to beat in 2023), you’ll know how quickly beef can escalate into craziness.
Yeun is well known to audiences across the world, probably as Glenn in The Walking Dead, more than being recognised by his own name. It’s occasionally the curse of being a strong supporting artist in a hit show that you become identified more as your character when people point at you in the street. It could also be one of the frustrating aspects of trying to forge a career blended of success, profile and respect when you are a minority actor. Times, thankfully, appear to be changing in the wake of so much success lately for projects championing diversity.
For actors of East Asian descent particularly, we’ve had Crazy Rich Asians, Parasite and Squid Game (among others) really prompting an active push to tell stories with actors of Asian descent or distribute films and shows produced in South Korea, Japan and all across East (and South East) Asia to a wide Western audience (Netflix in particular). People are watching and loving these stories. Thus it’s a good time (at least compared to before) to be an Asian American actor for example, with shows like Beef being made. The boom hasn’t quite happened for British Asians but there’s just generally an all-round lack of investment in film and TV right now in Britain.
So Yeun is emerging at the forefront of a new rise in representation. With Beef, Yeun gets top billing alongside Ali Wong. A word on the Cobra/hard knock wife herself… Ali Wong is also phenomenal in the show, making her recent transition from blazing stand-up comedienne to serious actress highly impressive. Compared to something like the enjoyable Always Be My Maybe, Beef required Wong to get very serious and delve into dark spaces (albeit with black comedy always enveloping the show). It was a near-revelatory shift. Yeun of course, is no stranger to dramatic acting. He’s worked steadily since 2010, bounding from The Walking Dead regular to popping up in guest spots on other shows and the occasional indie film.
In 2020, probably buoyed by the Oscar-sweeping (and wholly deserved Mr Trump) success of Parasite, Minari, an indie drama about a Korean American family settling in Arkansas, caught the eye of the Academy. In spite of that, it’s a film that is still a little under the radar and unheralded. However, for those who have seen it, the touching and life-affirming film has some great performances.
Yuh-jung Youn is phenomenal as the family matriarch and won an Oscar for her role. Of course, to Western media and some audiences, it’ll have felt like she came from nowhere making an auspicious debut, but she’s a seasoned actress with decades of experience. Yeun meanwhile, as the leading man is fantastic, imbuing his character with a complex range of emotions built on occasionally blind hope. If the film proved anything, it’s that he’s as compelling as a leading man as he is as a supporting actor.
In Beef, as Danny Cho, Yeun has to delve into that innate ability to hold conflicting emotions beneath the surface, and then release the pent-up emotions like a purging dam. The show is great. It’s a brilliant example of escalating drama and cringe. It’s as funny as it is almost painful to watch at times and thanks to Yeun (and Wong and a fine support cast) it’s bingeably compelling. As a fan of Yeun, it was a delight to see him as a lead and he’s magnetic in this show. Being given great writing and direction always helps of course, but Yeun lifts words from the page and portrays Cho as enthrallingly flawed.
Once the next round of Emmys and Globes come rolling around he’ll undoubtedly be recognised but moments within Beef step things up from great to stunning, not least Cho’s Church breakdown where his anguish explodes out of him. We’ve seen it all bubbling beneath his eyes up to this point. Cho exists, fuelled on a perpetual sense of desperation. It’s what drives him as much as ails him. Like great anxiety cinema like Uncut Gems, it’s this constant headlong crash into bad decisions and worse luck that has you watching between your fingers.
Sure, he’s phenomenal in Beef but it’s not a surprise and it’s not even his finest work. For me, it’s the film which introduced me to Yeun and still remains one of the best films of the past 5 years – Lee Chang-dong’s masterpiece Burning. It’s an exceptionally written and mesmerising film which utilises ambiguity as a tool as well as perhaps any film has done in cinema history. It’s an auteur’s film that defies conventions and delivers an unfiltered vision. Most people creating a thriller based on the notion of a character disappearing and the search for them would probably have said disappearance happen in the opening 20 minutes (if not sooner). Not Chang-dong of course who structures his film into three distinct parts, with boy meets girl, boy meets other boy who takes girl, before the disappearance (which happens around halfway into a 2.5 hour movie) and search.
The genius of the film is how Chang-dong layers his script with suggestion, information (that can be manipulated by perspective) and complexity. Haemi, the girl who disappears is a bubbly vivacious character who feels almost forcibly so, until the darkness within escapes her wall (Jong-seo Jeon is incredible). The whole film is pre-emptively surmised perfectly when Haemi demonstrates to Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) her newly learned skills in pantomime. She mesmerically begins peeling and eating segments of an invisible tangerine to the point Jong-su and us as viewer are almost convinced she’s really eating something (you can almost taste it). It’s upon re-watching the first time you suddenly realise, “holy shit, that’s the film right there in one scene.”
Chang-dong then, through everything from his composition to mise-en-scene to dialogue to actors’ performances, plays a progressive game of pantomime. He lays enough suggestions to leave what happened to Haemi totally to your interpretation. Every outcome has evidence, the most immediately obvious one, being driven by the perspective of the lead character, Jong-su who progressively convinces himself that Ben killed Haemi.
That brings us to Yeun who plays Ben. If Ben is one thing, it’s difficult to read. There’s always a feeling of insincerity and dishonesty that lurks beneath the cool facade. Yeun’s performance is mesmeric because it’s simmering with ambiguity. It’s this performance that holds the film’s second half together because Yeun gives us enough to suggest that the protagonist is right in his suspicions that Ben is a sociopathic killer. He’s a character who revels in evasiveness. When asked what he does for a (clearly lucrative) living, he says “I play.” He appears to have an interest in people, to quietly watch and judge, before becoming bored of them. His girlfriends appear disposable and beneath his stratus, occasionally used for the entertainment of his friends.
Ben’s odd admission about a hobby for burning derelict greenhouses is rife with metaphor, and what ultimately infects Jong-su’s mind with the feeling Ben is a killer. He enjoys speaking in riddles, never revealing too much that’s concrete. That’s just his words too. Ben’s facial expressions, thanks to Yeun’s subtlety are a whole other kettle of fish. He can seem charming, enigmatic, creepy, intense or just oddly nihilistic. His final moments also smash any sense of resolution too, where for the first time Ben’s seeming nihilism is broken down to his first human reveal. It really is one of the best performances of recent times, one that also allures repeat viewings to try and deconstruct meaning from every nuanced mannerism.
What is your favourite Steven Yeun performance? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Tom Jolliffe is an award winning screenwriter and passionate cinephile. He has a number of films out around the world, including When Darkness Falls and Renegades (Lee Majors and Danny Trejo) and more coming soon including War of The Worlds: The Attack (Vincent Regan) and The Baby in the Basket. Find more info at the best personal site you’ll ever see here.
Originally published May 7, 2023. Updated October 8, 2023.
