Bowen Yang finds his balance

Yang's next big role is, in a way, another full-circle moment. In November he will play the role of Pfannee in the blockbuster musical Evil with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. The character is a sassy best friend of Grande's Glinda and is usually portrayed as a woman, but director Jon M. Chu of Crazy rich Asians Fame rewrote the role as a gay man specifically for Yang to play. The enthusiasm was mutual. When Chu called Yang about the role, Yang was up at 5 a.m. for a shoot, he remembers. Chu asked what Yang is SNL The schedule was for the year, and Yang told him it didn't matter because he would “move heaven and earth” to work together. “I would lie on train tracks for this man,” says Chu’s Yang. “One of our best straights.”

Yang had seen it Crazy rich Asians He says he went to the cinema four times and cried every time. The film came out the same summer Yang wrapped its first season Noraand just a few months before he was hired as a writer SNL. “This was a significant shift in Asian representation,” he says, noting that the box office success proves there is a real demand for more Asian stories. “Honestly, without this film, my theory is that Lorne Michaels probably wouldn't have been as motivated to add an Asian person to the cast SNL.”

Willy Chavarria coat and trousers, Hermes shirt and boots, Gucci glovesOscar Ouk

Once Yang was announced as a cast member SNLhe felt like he was being watched on a “microscopic level.” The day after the announcement, homophobic and anti-Asian comments that fellow freshman cast member Shane Gillis had made in the past resurfaced in multiple media outlets. There were calls for Gillis to respond, which he did, and for him to be fired, which he did. But now eyes were on Yang to react. Although he chose not to address the matter publicly, coverage of the incident inevitably positioned Yang as part of a comedy culture war.

This dynamic was on display last January when Dave Chappelle, whose Netflix specials were peppered with transphobic jokes, made a surprise appearance on stage at the end of a show on “Goodnights.” Viewers noticed Yang standing tensely on the opposite side of the stage, and some X users stood up for him in what was perceived as a subtle protest. In fact, as he has since clarified, he wasn't intentionally demeaning Chappelle so much as making him “feel uncomfortable on behalf of other people.”

Yang compares the attention paid to his movements to that of a referee watching an Olympic athlete. “You know what a gymnastics event they are The “Close, so close to someone’s face,” he says, mimicking a camera and holding it close to my nose. “And you say, 'Get out of there.' Leave them alone!'” The feeling of surveillance has given him an hyperawareness of how he might be perceived. When he first started SNLhe even read tweets about the sketches during the costume change.

This hypervigilance caught up with Yang as he worked on it Evil. Lorne Michaels had warned him that filming weekly between New York and London would be too strenuous, but Yang went ahead anyway. The result was that he was so overworked and so sleep deprived that he lost all sense of who he was. “I thought, What is life? Is it worth it?“, he remembers. “There were dark thoughts.”