Bowen Yang Is Number One

Bowen Yang can hardly remember the last time he was able to spend an entire month in New York City, and, God, it feels good to be home. “I’m such an asshole here,” he says, grinning. No need to be a curious tourist or a patient guest: Now, surrounded by fast-walkers, sh*t-talkers, and $12 eggs, he can get back to being himself. The way you know that you’re home, after all, is when you’re comfortable complaining. “There’s just something in the air here.”

All of this is in opposition to Vancouver Bowen, a man who has time to hike and cook and take things slowly. Last summer, Yang spent a month in Canada filming The Wedding Banquet, director Andrew Ahn’s remake of the 1993 film about queer secrets and chosen family, out later this week. “I really liked the version of myself that I was for shooting,” he says.

We’re meeting for a meal only available to creative types — Tuesday brunch — in a Manhattan restaurant across the street from 30 Rock, where Saturday Night Live is filmed and where Yang and his castmates practically live during the show’s all-consuming, six-days-a-week production schedule. Unsurprisingly, Yang is no asshole: He’s down-to-earth, inquisitive, and self-reflective, and like any good celebrity, he smells great. (Aesop Gloam.) Perhaps because he’s always popping up next to the world’s biggest stars — through SNL, blockbusters like Wicked, and his hit podcast Las Culturistas, where he and bestie co-host Matt Rogers have recently entertained the likes of Lady Gaga and Cate Blanchett — Yang inspires the warm familiarity you might associate with your friend’s favorite coworker, the one you don’t really know but are always delighted to see show up to the house party.

While he was in Canada, Yang spent a lot of time in these “beautiful, earnest, but still sexy queer spaces.” Any public queer place outside of the United States, he jokes, always has someone at the door saying something like: Just know that it’s Neurodivergent Night here at the club, so please, if you want to touch someone, ask for consent. “It’s so earnest and pure,” he laughs. “But if that happens here, at Under the K Bridge” — the park/nightlife venue beneath the Kosciuszko Bridge, which links northern Brooklyn and Queens — “I’m just like, whatever.”

Even though he's not a New Yorker in the from-here sense — Yang was born in Brisbane, Australia, and grew up between Montreal and Colorado — the 34-year-old is one in a been-here way. He moved to New York 17 years ago to attend New York University. “As long as I can remember, it was always about going to the East Coast,” he tells me, sipping a green tea and picking into the apples and plums on our fruit plate. “I was romanticizing this idea of being here for so long, and now I’m like, ‘I’ve collected every New Yorker badge.’”

We brainstorm a list of what those badges could be: making an appointment at the DMV and still waiting for eight hours; doing karaoke at The Duplex; discovering your new roommate is a mouse; walking through Crown Heights and being asked by the Hasidim if you’re Jewish; throwing up on the subway; going to a party between the years of 2012 and 2014 and being, like, very chill about the fact that there were actors from HBO’s Girls in attendance; having an emotional response to in-unit amenities. (He just got a new washer-dryer in his apartment: “I felt like I was at the f*ckin’ Ritz.”)

“I am someone who craves steadiness in a world where it’s not really an option.”

The first time he saw the original Wedding Banquet was at NYU, rented on DVD from the campus library. At the time, he was (mostly) closeted, and the story of an Asian man hiding his sexual orientation from his family was particularly resonant. When he was in high school, his parents discovered he was gay; confused and distraught, they cut him a deal for college: He could either stay in Colorado and live at home, or go to either UCLA or NYU if he agreed to go to conversion therapy, which he did. Yang ended up at “the gayest school in the country” living with his older sister, also an NYU student, in an apartment next door to a gay bar.

Needless to say, the original film stuck with him. “It ends on this very uncertain tone, where he says bye to his parents, who know who he is now,” he says. The film fades out on the family hugging. “There’s a moment of affection, then it’s awkward. And that was something I had to be in bed with, because I was just like, ‘See, this is my life. I love my parents, I know that to be true, but I also can’t extrapolate what the future’s going to be with me and them about this.’” Today, he says, his parents are pretty much on board with his sexuality. “They don’t want to hear all the nitty gritty sh*t, but they’re asking if I’m dating anybody. I never thought it would get to that point.”

The Wedding Banquet is blessedly light on the sort of cultural superlatives that we’ve come to expect. This isn’t the first film to feature three Asian leads, or the first rom-com to bravely exclude white people, or the first gay Asian to deadpan on Splash Mountain, none of that. Yang says he never fully bought into the whole idea that there’s always been a dearth of Asian representation in media. Great work was always around, even if it wasn’t mass. Now, juggernauts like Crazy Rich Asians and Everything Everywhere All At Once have only broadened the field. “I still haven’t quite made up my mind on what the agreed-upon history of representation has been for Asian people and queer people,” he says. “I don’t know if I necessarily like the current state of queer storytelling over the way it was 20 years ago. They’re all valid.” It’s affirming to see films like Fire Island (which Ahn also directed) and Bros — Yang’s in both — be considered solidly mainstream, but “with ’90s cinema, with indie cinema being so splendid, you could turn over every rock and find something.”

“I’ve never nipped so many things in the bud romantically just because I’m like, ‘I’m not going to have time to see you.’”

Ahn’s version of The Wedding Banquet — which, like the original, is co-written by James Schamus — centers on two same-sex couples. Yang plays Chris, a commitment-phobe who turns down a proposal from his boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-chan), a scion of a wealthy Korean family with a soon-to-expire visa. To stay in the country and placate his conservative family, Min makes a deal with two lesbian friends (Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran): He’ll cover their pricey IVF treatments in exchange for a green-card marriage.

Once the plan is underway, Chris realizes that he’s not needed in this arrangement. “I relate to this character in the way that he is decision paralyzed,” Yang says. Chris spends the majority of the film unable to figure out how he matters to other people. "I think this is a question that everyone can ask themselves. Why am I needed? Am I needed? Why do I need other people? It’s very abstract and cloying, but it’s also something that fast-tracks you to answer this question for yourself.” Lately, they’re questions Yang has been asking himself, too.

A few years after he became an on-air cast member of Saturday Night Live — the third openly gay man and the first Chinese American actor to do so in the show’s history — a local pride event asked Yang to be their grand marshal. He turned it down. “It was a lot of my own personal inadequacy and my own inferiority complex,” he tells me. “I was like, give it to the elders. I think the year before it was, like, Miss Major,” he adds, referring to the legendary trans activist and author. At just 31, he didn’t think he should be in that upper echelon. “I’m not ever going to be on that kind of pedestal. Someone like her is, was, and always will be.”

Sure, he concedes, it could have inspired someone out there to see Yang be guest of honor. But representation has never been a driving force in his professional choices. “If that’s purely the motivating thing, then I don’t know — it literally is disembodying,” he says. “Then it’s not about me. It’s like when you can’t fall asleep because you're so out of your own symbiotic reality.”

He speaks from experience. Two years ago, Yang spent roughly eight months regularly flying between London (to film Wicked) and New York (for SNL). The pace was unmanageable, and the public-facing nature of it all made it worse. The flood of feedback available to him through the internet is more than one human brain is designed to deal with. “That eats away at your soulfulness, and then you lose that,” he says.

Yang ultimately had a dissociative breakdown. He’d wake up in London and not know what he was doing there. What was his life, actually? “I’m not here to talk about how fame is hard or something,” he says, “but I’m saying we’ve never been more aware, as late millennials to older Gen Zers, of how to protect yourself because you know exactly how dangerous and noxious and horrible it is to be regarded in any capacity. There’s a latent sort of dysphoria that you just have to get over, no matter who you are.”

He felt completely stripped for parts and had to put the pieces back together. How’d he do it? “I had to bottom out in a way,” he says, laughing. “Please have that be the pull quote.” OK, a serious answer: “It was just knowing that there are things you have to know about yourself. I think the thing about your 30s is that you have to start facing yourself. It’s such an eye rolly thing to say. But I think that’s what The White Lotus was about.”

Workaholism, overachievement — these are classic strategies for queer people who spend much of their formative years running from themselves. Now, having pieced himself back together, he’s been rethinking the ways he spends his time, and places where he can scale back. “I’m just revisiting this notion of, ‘This is not what I want anymore,” he says, referring to a nonstop life. “I am someone who craves steadiness in a world where it's not really an option.”

“The thing about your 30s is that you have to start facing yourself. It’s such an eye rolly thing to say. But that’s what The White Lotus was about.”

Of course, it’s all easier said than done. “Right now, you’re catching me in somewhat of a perturbed state, just because everything feels dovetailed into the last thing, into the next thing, in a way that I don’t love,” Yang says. It’s April, so people are starting to ask about summer plans, but he’s still got movie promo, SNL duties, and Las Culturistas obligations on the calendar (in addition to their annual Culture Awards, he and Rogers are also working on a book). “I’m like, I both don’t know and I do, because it’s already booked up all the way through August.”

Dating is out of the question. The tenderness on display in Ahn’s Wedding Banquet “locked me into this notion, finally — not that I was ever a slut — of like, ‘I’ve got to be on the husband search,” he says, sounding almost exasperated. “I can’t suffer these fools anymore.” But again, there’s not quite room. “I’ve never nipped so many things in the bud romantically just because I’m like, ‘I’m not going to have time to see you. I really want to — I just don’t even have time to see my friends.’”

Several years ago, Yang’s family returned to visit Brisbane, where his parents had moved from China in 1976 to further their education. His mother kept pestering him with questions: How did the return make him feel? Nothing, really. They’d left Australia when he was 6 months old, so nostalgia was hard to come by. “She was like, ‘I get it, but look around you. The water is the first water you drank. This food is the first food you ate. You’re made up of this stuff.’” This place — despite its notorious history of racism against Asians — will always be where he comes from.

Yet if there is a thematic throughline to the movies Yang has starred in — from Wicked to Fire Island to The Wedding Banquet to, sure, Dicks: The Musical — it is finding belonging, not in any one destination but in your tribe of people. In high school in Aurora, Colorado, where his family had moved in 1999, Yang was voted both homecoming king and “Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live.” But at home, his parents were wrecked over his sexual orientation. His conversion therapist would try to find physical manifestations of Yang’s apparent shame — if his shoulders drooped, for example, while looking at Prince Eric or Leonardo DiCaprio, that should be an indication that his body knew that what he was doing was wrong. “The gymnastics were f*cking Comăneci level,” he says. “I feel like I am slowly convalescing in retrospect, like, ‘Oh, I can be in touch with those early moments without feeling this level of pathology.’”

At NYU, Yang was a member of improv comedy group Dangerbox, which put him in the same scene as people like Oscar-nominated actor Stephanie Hsu and Rogers (who both were members of the sketch comedy group Hammerkatz). Many of Yang’s closest friends date back to that world. When he first started, queer comedians were “siloed away,” Yang says. “There’d be the one gay guy in improv, one gay guy in a sketch group. You’d have a lesbian stand-up you would run into once a year.” They had to find each other through word-of-mouth: “There was no queer comedy exchange, no dial-up.”

“I had to bottom out in a way. Please have that be the pull quote.”

He used to hang at the now-shuttered Chelsea bar Barracuda, where a new generation of LGBTQ+ comedians — like Julio Torres, Patti Harrison, Sydnee Washington — started to coalesce. Eventually, they started collaborating on shows together, in turn creating a community. “You had these people who had this shorthand with you, that you could drop your shoulders around,” he said. “Like tapping into the same frequency.”

Comedy had always been on Yang’s radar — he was part of his high school improv team, too — but becoming a leading man was hardly a consideration, until he met Ahn, who's directed him both in The Wedding Banquet and 2022's Fire Island. “I’ve had so many lucky moments and breaks in life,” Yang says. “Knowing him, meeting with him, and working with him ranks probably number one.” To have starring roles in movies — to have someone like Ahn approach him and want to work together, was a “completely foreign” blessing for him, like manna from heaven. On the last day of shooting, Ahn gave him a note: I can’t wait for the next one. “And I just melted,” Yang says. “He’s my favorite person, my favorite filmmaker.”

One of Yang’s favorite moments in the film takes place during the wedding event, when everyone is questioning a cultural ritual — not because it’s wrong, but because no one can remember what it means. By the end, the party agrees that it doesn’t really matter. “And yet it does, in the grand scheme of things,” Yang argues. It’s the ritual that matters, the intent — touching and eating and hearing the same things your people have always done on a day like that day, or will do in the future to honor you. It’s commonality made tangible, a lineage in your hands.

Though Yang was number one on the call sheet, he tried not to read into that order of importance. The film was a group effort. “It was just the four of us being really horizontal with each other,” he says, before catching the innuendo. “As in, we’re all going to be equal.” To hasten the intimacy required by the film, he made his costars watch a season of Showtime’s Couples Therapy and turned it into a kind of book club around which they’d discuss their own relationship dynamics. “We got right down to brass tacks about our history and who we are as people,” he says. It was his way of putting his stamp on the whole experience: That’s what it meant for me to be number one — just make it who you are.”

That intimacy — being on the same frequency — is the most powerful currency in his life. Recently, he found himself making a pact with friends to never leave New York. They want to be part of the welcoming committee for anyone who joins them. “I think I’m a lifer,” he says. “It takes time to build that sh*t up anywhere you are, especially here, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give that up. I’m never going to abandon them.”

Top image credits: Brooks Brothers suit, Eton shirt, talent’s own earring, Tie Bar tie, Montblanc pen, Swatch watch