It’s a sunny day in early January, and Steven Yeun is happy to be out of the house. California’s been battered with historic rainstorms for the better part of the past two weeks, and he’s been hunkered down with his wife and their two kids, 6 and 4. “My entire life is Peppa Pig and Pokémon,” he says, squishing through the mud at a nature preserve near his home in Pasadena, California. He’s wearing trail sneakers, brown pants, a shaggy mohair cardigan and sunglasses. With some actors, sunglasses serve as armor when they’re out in public, but Yeun, 39, shows no such guardedness. When some people walking their dogs pass in the other direction, he notices a leash lying behind them on the trail. “Is this yours?” he calls out, scooping it up and trotting back to hand it over.

It’s a sunny day in early January, and Steven Yeun is happy to be out of the house. California’s been battered with historic rainstorms for the better part of the past two weeks, and he’s been hunkered down with his wife and their two kids, 6 and 4. “My entire life is Peppa Pig and Pokémon,” he says, squishing through the mud at a nature preserve near his home in Pasadena, California. He’s wearing trail sneakers, brown pants, a shaggy mohair cardigan and sunglasses. With some actors, sunglasses serve as armor when they’re out in public, but Yeun, 39, shows no such guardedness. When some people walking their dogs pass in the other direction, he notices a leash lying behind them on the trail. “Is this yours?” he calls out, scooping it up and trotting back to hand it over.
Yeun is, in other words, the picture of breezy amiability—and in that respect he couldn’t be more different from Danny Cho, the smolderingly angry, increasingly desperate general contractor he plays in the new Netflix series Beef. A dark comedy that will premiere in April, the show was created by Lee Sung Jin, whose résumé includes writing gigs on off-kilter series like Silicon Valley, Dave and Tuca & Bertie. When Lee first told Yeun about Beef, his pitch was short and, to Yeun, irresistible: “He said, ‘I have this idea about a road-rage incident, where two people get into it, and it spirals, and they kind of destroy each other’s lives,’ ” Yeun recalls. “I was, like, ‘That one! What is that?!’ ”

Beef is, above all else, funny. But deepening the laughs is the show’s sustained dive into themes of profound contemporary loneliness, especially as they interweave with class and American definitions of success. The comedian Ali Wong plays Yeun’s road rage rival–turned–all-consuming nemesis, Amy, a financially thriving yet damaged potted-plant entrepreneur in Los Angeles. What she and Danny have in common is that their intense drive for success only worsens the deep isolation and unhappiness they carry around: Beef‘s grimmest joke—a heightened yet fundamentally believable one—is that Danny’s most passionate relationship is with a woman he doesn’t even know but hates with irrational abandon, all because she flipped him off in a crowded parking lot from the window of her Mercedes SUV. Lee wrote Danny for Yeun, and he says it’s a particularly challenging role: “He has to be this self-destructive, burdened guy with a huge chip on his shoulder—and you have to root for him, and he has to be funny.”

Yeun broke big just over a decade ago, playing the heroic Glenn Rhee on The Walking Dead, the smash-hit postapocalyptic zombie-horror-action series that drew over 17 million viewers to a single episode at its peak. Playing one of the show’s best-loved roles, Yeun was a crucial part of the appeal. And yet the acting jobs he’s taken on since have tended toward the idiosyncratic, artistically ambitious and, frequently, small. Whether he’s playing a charming, possibly sociopathic playboy in the critically acclaimed Korean indie Burning; a first-generation-immigrant ’80s-era dad in Minari, for which Yeun was nominated for best actor for the 2021 Oscars; or a damaged former child actor–turned–theme-park impresario in Jordan Peele’s Nope, Yeun’s choices have been consistently unpredictable. Rather than returning to the action-hero milieu and coasting on familiar waters, he’s set about establishing himself as an actor of extraordinary subtlety and depth. [More at Source]