386 minutes with... Steven Yeun

The Okja star on life after The Walking Dead (R.I.P., Glenn).

- E Alex Jung

YOU CAUGHT ME at a better time,” the actor Steven Yeun says as we sit down for eggs and potatoes one morning at Locanda Verde. Last fall, Yeun’s Walking Dead character, Glenn Rhee, erstwhile pizza-delivery boy and Everyman, met a violent end in the season-seven premiere. Glenn was one of the few characters to have survived since the first season, and his death triggered mass hysteria among viewers. (Many vowed to quit the show entirely, and ratings have slipped considerably since his exit.) Yeun, however, is proud his character went out with a bang. “If Glenn had continued on, knowing how things usually shake out, I could totally foresee a situation where he just slowly, quietly disappears into the background,” he says. “But in this way, it was like holding up a battered skull to the world to be like, Don’t forget, this Asian person existed in this medium, and now he’s fucking dead. Like, he is fucking dead. That’s cool!”

In some ways, the collective grief is a direct rebuke to Yeun’s own feeling that Glenn was underutilized. “I truly feel like people didn’t know what to do with Glenn. They liked him, they had no problems with him, and people enjoyed him. But they didn’t acknowledge the connection people had with the character until he was gone,” says Yeun. “Only in his death did they realize, Oh, that’s the connection I had, and that’s why it hurts me so much to see him die.” What made Glenn unique wasn’t the fact that he was aspirational: He didn’t shoot a crossbow like Daryl or wield a katana like Michonne. He wasn’t the hero in the zombie apocalypse you wanted to be, but rather the one you were. “With Glenn it was, I think I’m like that guy.”