Steven Yeun might be the first Asian American Best Actor nominee, but in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Wednesday, the “Minari” star said that while the honor was a step forward for Asian representation on screen, he wasn’t letting it go to his head.
“If I step out of myself and see what that moment might mean beyond just me,” Yeun said, “it’s cool that we get to establish new ground and that young Asian American kids can feel like this is possible for them, too.”
Regarding his nomination on a personal note, however, Yeun said that he was “just not reactive to it in any direction,” and was in fact cautious that the recognition would pigeonhole him as an “Asian American actor” first and an “actor second.”
In an interview with Conan O’Brien on Monday, Yeun expressed a similar view, mentioning that the ongoing stress of the COVID-19 pandemic had forced award shows to the back of his mind and made it a “bizarre and strange” victory.
“Sometimes a narrative around [identity] ensnares [you] and places [you] in a weird box that we have to then crawl back out of,” Yeun told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that it was important to note that “Minari” represented only “one facet of Asian America” and should not be taken as a story representing the universal experience of America’s Asian immigrants.
The 2020 film — a moving tale in which Yeun plays Jacob, a Korean immigrant father who hopes to settle his young family on a farm in rural Arkansas — earned six nominations at the 93rd Academy Awards and won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes in February due to the fact that much of its dialogue is in Korean.
Its Golden Globes categorization garnered controversy considering that the film was made in America and tells the story of an immigrant family seeking their version of the American dream. Lee Isaac Chung, writer and director of the film, said that the movie “goes deeper than any American language and any foreign language.”
To the Korean American Yeun, who won global recognition on “The Walking Dead” playing fan-favorite character Glenn Rhee, “Minari” was his most personal project yet.
The star said that the film’s scripts struck a personal chord and made him consider the experiences of his own immigrant parents. He said he had alternated between “lionizing them for their sacrifice or infantilizing them for what I perceived as their inability to navigate [America].”
“To seek our generation’s liberation,” Yeun said, “we need to liberate our parents’ generation first from our own minds.”
Read the full interview here.