TV & Beyond on 2025-06-10 17:10:00

by | Jun 10, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles | 0 comments

TV & Beyond on 2025-06-10 17:10:00

you may have forgotten his cameo on “The Big Bang Theory” – it was his breakout role, immediately endearing the performer to a wide audience and opening the doors on his career.

Since then, Yeun has played a rich and varied slate of roles in a wide variety of genres and tones while simultaneously seeming like a kind-hearted, self-effacing, and easily funny hang, thanks to a series of viral appearances with Conan O’Brien and a post-fame uncovered Second City sketch. He strikes one as an unpretentious actor who can do it all, and his body of work supports this thesis with aplomb.

In celebration of the versatile, engaging, and not-to-be-weird-but-very handsome performer, we’ve gathered and ranked the 12 best Steven Yeun movies and TV shows to give you a primer on what’s shaping up to be an enviable career.

12. Mayhem

Derek (Steven Yeun) and Melanie (Samara Weaving) stand blood-splattered in Mayhem.

RLJE Films

Joe Lynch’s “Mayhem” is pretty edge-lordy. It’s a relentlessly brutal and violent picture, playing a little like a darkly comedic take on that other edge-lordy Shudder original “The Sadness.” It concerns a white collar office overtaken by a virus that makes people lose inhibitions and let their base instincts rise to the surface. And that results in all hell breaking loose, lensed with low-budget vitality and scripted with mildly Tarantinoian flair by Matias Caruso in his feature debut.

For some readers, I’m sure these caveats play like ringing endorsements. For anyone else intuiting my eye-rolling skepticism, I encourage you to give “Mayhem” a chance anyway, at the very least for the endearing badassery of its two leads, Steven Yeun and Samara Weaving. These two genre stalwarts give their characters genuine investment and pathos, allowing us to understand their heightening to abject violence.

Also, like, I’m not over here watching Andrei Tarkovsky opuses all day. I love a great piece of bone-crunching mayhem, and if I put myself in the right headspace, Lynch’s flick delivers pretty entertainingly.

11. The Twilight Zone – A Traveler

A Traveler (Steven Yeun) charms in The Twilight Zone episode A Traveler.

CBS All Access

I never felt like Jordan Peele’s “Twilight Zone” reboot found a consistent groove the way Rod Serling’s original series did. But at the very least, the two-season experiment gives interesting combinations of creatives room to engage in flights of genre-tinged fancy they wouldn’t be able to in any other mass media landscape, and that juice is often worth the squeeze, even in parts rather than the whole.

Take “A Traveler,” written by “X-Files” scribe Glen Morgan and directed by “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” auteur Ana Lily Amirpour — you’re already intrigued, right? Well, add Steven Yeun as our title character, a handsomely dressed figure of increasingly menacing mystery who knows way too much about everyone at a police station Christmas party, and you really start to cook.

One of Yeun’s great performance energies is “charming with some kind of tense edge,” and “A Traveler” gives him ample room to explore this intriguing space. Some of the other performances aren’t pitched as precisely as his, and the ending resolution may strike some as too silly, but as a short story starring an impeccable performer, “A Traveler” is a zone you can happily spend a twilight in.

10. Tuca & Bertie

Speckle (Steven Yeun) holds a picture of himself in Tuca & Bertie

Adult Swim

“Tuca & Bertie” is one of the best adult animated shows on Netflix that never found the audience it deserved, as evidenced by its hopping from Netflix to Adult Swim over its three-season run. Created by Lisa Hanawalt, an executive producer and production designer of “Bojack Horseman,” the animated comedy takes a lot of the latter’s worldbuilding and penchant for exploring complicated issues and ramps up the raucous energy; the mania to “Bojack Horseman’s” depression, if you will.

Yeun stars as Speckle, a robin dating Bertie, a thrush played by Ali Wong. Yeun’s character is positioned at the series’ start as the show’s voice of reason, a comedically functional character type that reminds the audience how reality is supposed to work in comparison to our unusual, absurd characters. Sometimes this is a thankless role, but Yeun, a trained comedian, takes the room to explore and expand the character’s boundaries into some delightfully unexpected places. It’s a burst of energy, this show, and it’s satisfying to see how Yeun either grounds that energy or, occasionally, ramps it up himself.

9. Sorry to Bother You

Squeeze (Steven Yeun) looking a little smug in Sorry to Bother You.

Annapurna Pictures

Speaking of chaotic bursts of energy: Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” is a contemporary, iconoclastic cult classic crammed with visual invention, surrealistic discursions, biting satire, and one of the wildest plot twists I’ve ever seen in any movie. The pitfalls of capitalism, race relations, the traditional boundaries and forms of cinema – nothing is sacred in this delirious fever dream.

Once again, Yeun is positioned as a bit of a grounding force, playing a character called Squeeze who represents a form of opposition politics and labor-focused philosophy that our lead character Cash (LaKeith Stanfield) is tempted to sway away from. And once again, Yeun plays this type of character beyond its function, giving Squeeze drive, verve, and care.

But Riley is a mischievous filmmaker, one rarely interested in pure grounding forces. Thus, Squeeze gets into some absurd shenanigans himself, and to watch Yeun play these scenarios with commitment and emotional engagement is instantly funny and calamitous to poor Cash’s predicaments. “Sorry to Bother You” is an essential screed against our casually surreal American existence, and Yeun is an essential piece of the puzzle.

8. Mickey 17

Timo (Steven Yeun) looks down in a tundra in Mickey 17

Warner Bros.

Here’s yet another borderline chaotic black comedy from an imaginative and acclaimed auteur; if you judge the merits of an actor based on the caliber of filmmaker who wants to work with him, Steven Yeun’s collaborators speak for themselves.

Bong Joon Ho’s uncompromising “Mickey 17” uses the ideas of science fiction and action to explore and satirize financial exploitation, neo-fascism, and, uh, polyamorous sexuality. Robert Pattinson plays our hero, Mickey, who signed himself up to get continuously cloned and killed so he can do the most dangerous jobs. In other words: what if Michael Fassbinder’s David from the late-period “Alien” franchise starred in “Sorry to Bother You”?

Yeun plays Timo, who starts as an ally to Mickey but soon morphs into something more complicated and menacing, a perfect arc for the particular talents of Yeun. And, pleasingly, Bong requires no sense of grounding in reason from Yeun, who gets to join his scene partner in borderline slapstick sequences of violence and scheming, even when the stakes are high.

Yeun also appeared in Bong’s “Okja,” which I felt had trouble with inconsistency in tone. Here, the two collaborators strike a unique piece of audience-pulverizing gold.

7. The Walking Dead

Glenn (Steven Yeun) holds a shotgun, concerned, in The Walking Dead

AMC

If you know Steven Yeun, it’s thanks to his seven-season run as Glenn on AMC’s zombie opera “The Walking Dead.” It’s his breakout role for good reason; Yeun is charming, funny, sensitive, emotional, and versatile. His understanding of texture, of what’s needed scene-by-scene as a member of a vast ensemble cast on an expensive machine like “Walking Dead” is inspiring. His knack for offering a kind of foil to the dominating energy of a project – in this case, lightness grounding the show’s grimness – is well-trained here.

And — spoilers incoming — when Glenn meets his abrupt, gruesome end at the hands of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), it truly wrenches the guts of the audience, potentially unmooring the entire thing.

Herein lies the challenge of reckoning with “The Walking Dead” as a whole. It’s an uneven ride full of stellar episodes, awkwardly rendered duds, and some middling filler. At times it’s the obvious predecessor of “The Last of Us” first season; at times it’s the obvious predecessor of “Game of Thrones” last season. But through his run, Yeun is undeniable. It’s a calling card any actor would want, a perfect display of his talents on an inherently imperfect show.

6. The Humans

Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Blake (Steven Yeun) sit on a coach and contemplate in The Humans

A24/Showtime

Stephen Karam adapted his Tony-winning play “The Humans” into an underseen 2021 film of the same name. In it, a gripping and eclectic ensemble cast, with performers as wide-ranging as Richard Jenkins and Amy Schumer, tackles one of the 21st century’s most acclaimed scripts. It’s a simple narrative where people sit around a dinner table and talk, talk, talk, reminding one of theater’s history from Arthur Miller to Tracy Letts. None of these are criticisms; the film is quietly searing and gripping, a horror movie disguised as a family drama, a great testament to the idea that art is just humans trying to make sense of being humans.

In the middle of it all is Steven Yeun, playing Beanie Feldstein’s romantic partner, a technical outsider to the family unit. It’s such a treat to see Yeun play traditional drama without sacrificing any of his unique qualities; he makes the text his, rather than letting it overwhelm him. And when the film gives Yeun room to explore his character’s peculiar experiences, struggles, and nightmares openly, it soars — quietly but effectively. I think he should’ve gotten a Best Supporting Actor nod and I’m not afraid to say it!

5. Beef

Danny (Steven Yeun) and Amy (Ali Wong) consider each other in Beef.

Netflix

The bold and funny “Beef” plays a little like “Mayhem” combined with “The Humans” stretched out into an agonizing yet entertaining slow-to-fast-to-slow-again pace. It’s a phenomenal season of television, a tone-blending work of incendiary power that Yeun leads with all the tools at his disposal. It uses elements of genre to make gut-churning points about the thousand paper cuts we accept every day. It’s the remake of “Falling Down” I never knew I needed.

Yeun once again plays with Ali Wong as his primary scene partner, but instead of enjoying a somewhat healthy romance as in “Tuca & Bertie,” the two are locked in a mythological rivalry of mutually assured destruction spurred by a simple act of road rage. Both players won Emmys for their efforts, and both ground some outrageous decisions with completely understandable humanity. It’s a “frog in a slowly boiling pot” kind of show, and Yeun and Wong are the frog, the heat, and the cook.

4. Nope

Jupe (Steven Yeun) looks up in Nope

Universal Pictures

Jordan Peele’s third film, the wonderfully titled “Nope,” gives Yeun another role I firmly believe should have garnered him a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

In the hilarious and scary blockbuster, Yeun plays a performer who’s undergone outrageous circumstances. As a child actor, his Jupe survived a vicious and bloody attack from — wait for it — a trained monkey on a sitcom. Since then, he’s faded into mild obscurity, using what little fame he has to run a Western-themed attraction with his family. But when — wait for it — a matter-sucking alien appears in the sky, he just might have an opportunity to turn his trauma around.

In this summary, I’m making explicit what Yeun and Peele keep smartly, agonizingly subtextual. “Nope” is a canny and vicious take on how certain people hide any and all vulnerabilities in fear of how it might devalue them to a constantly exploiting society. One scene features Yeun detailing the horrors of his monkey attack, but instead of speaking about it directly, he puts on a rakish smile and details the professionalism and accuracy of the in-universe “SNL” sketch that spoofed the worst day of his life.

With such ability to distort and hide, is it any wonder Jupe thinks he’s a God above it all? Is it any wonder his idea of catharsis is to traumatize others? Is it any wonder he absolutely loses? In a word: nope.

3. Minari

Jacob (Steven Yeun) talks to his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) in Minari

A24

Hey, finally, a film Yeun did get an Oscar nod for!

In this well-deserved Best Actor-nominated role, Yeun centers “Minari” (based on a fascinating true story), as the patriarch of a Korean-American immigrant family who moves to Arkansas in a financially desperate attempt to wrangle some form of the American dream. What ensues is a sensitive, complicated, funny, sad, and joyful study of family dynamics and struggles with identity.

It’s a masterwork from filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, whom I hope works with Yeun again soon, either in another small-scale drama like this or in Chung’s recent predilection for big-budget genre fare like “Twisters” or “The Mandalorian”. Yeun’s work here is rich, well-observed, and sensitive while never descending into navel-gazing or maudlin territory. His Jacob, like many well-written fathers in many great pieces of art examining American entrepreneurship, is a wrecking ball of action, of optimism hiding what might be delusion. It’s a startling performance, always entertaining and always revealing. It’s a clear path to a career that will net him an Oscar sooner rather than later.

2. Invincible

Mark (Steven Yeun) stands near a police car in Invincible

Prime Video

“Invincible” is an animated, ultra-violent, borderline edge-lordy superhero deconstruction action drama from “Walking Dead” co-creator Robert Kirkman (he wrote both at the same time for 15 years, which is nuts). In other words, on paper, to certain potential viewers, it’s got a lot to explain and a lot going against it. But it jumps through all these hoops and then some, turning into what might be the best show currently on television.

It’s also a star-making performance for Steven Yeun — that is, another star-making performance in a career full of them. He plays the lead character Mark Grayson, who discovers his dad (a sensational J.K. Simmons) is the superhero Omni-Man and learns that he has superpowers himself. Thus, he decides to become “Invincible,” a new hero, and like Spider-Man before him, must come of age as a teenager and an unprecedentedly powerful figure of truth and justice.

Unlike Spider-Man, however, Mark’s dad — and spoilers for anyone who hasn’t watched the truly shocking pilot — seems to be a murderous sociopath harboring deep secrets and misanthropy. And Yeun plays these family fissures with heart-wrenching gravitas and sadness, giving the series tons of dramatic juice. It’s almost as if he and Kirkman saw how uneven “Walking Dead” got and thought, “Not this time.”

1. Burning

Ben (Steven Yeun) examines himself in the mirror in Burning

Well Go USA

“Burning” is currently Steven Yeun’s masterpiece of performance, one he easily should’ve been an Oscar nominee for. His Ben is an enigmatic figure that provokes others’ obsessions and concerns. He turns up the temperature every time he’s on screen, even though we’re not sure why — and neither are the other characters.

As such, the simmering, haunting “Burning” makes for another of Yeun’s excellent genre-blenders, an ambiguous melange of the domestic thriller, psychological horror, and understated character study drama. While the other characters never seem sure of which genre they belong in — that is, whether they should love, live, or light each other on fire — Yeun’s Ben exudes a quiet, borderline menacing aura of confidence (even, or especially, as he openly admits to performing unsettling acts).

Among other accolades, Yeun received the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Supporting Actor, and for good reason. It’s the apotheosis of everything we find compelling about the performer – he grounds energy while heightening, plays in an ensemble while captivating, and gives us what we need about the text without being subsumed by it.

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