"I wanted to experience what it was like to film a horror movie."
Steven Yeun has discussed his upcoming horror film Mayhem.
Since being killed off in The Walking Dead in 2016, Steven Yeun has been involved in a variety of exciting new projects. The Korean American actor lent his voice to TV series Trollhunters and Voltron, featured in Korean Netflix film Okja and will appear in Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ and comic book animated film Chew.
Yeun’s next upcoming film is American horror movie Mayhem. Speaking to NBC News, Yeun discussed exploring different acting opportunities.
“I’m just trying to understand who I am,” Yeun said. “So while this is available to me, I’ll keep doing as many different things as I can.”
“I think inherently, I won’t want to do something that isn’t true to me,” Yeun said about his his diverse choice of roles. “If it seems like it’s a clichéd role that has me being the model minority or a weak character, then I might look at that and think, ‘is it even saying something that I want to say?’ If not, then I don’t feel like doing it, ‘cause I would not want to live as that character for a while.”
Discussing his new horror film, Yeun said, “With Mayhem, there’s a thing I want to say. Every kind of film that I’ve been a part of, I’ve been lucky that it says what I kind of want to say — and that is lot of different things.”
“I wanted to experience what it was like to film a horror movie,” Yeun said. “Doing a TV show for seven years is wonderful, it brings you the beauty of structure that I love, but it was fun to just jump into something I had no idea how it was going to be.”
In the film, Yeun plays Derek Cho, a corporate attorney who loses his job but must fight through a quarantined building of virus-infected employees to exit the building. According to Yeun, his character is the most “real” part of the film, reflecting how a real person would respond in such a situation.
“I’m glad that Derek Cho gets to exist,” he said. “In all of his ugliness, all of his beauty, all of his weakness, and all of his best moments — I wanted to render a full character who was equally good as he was sh*t.”
In other news, Yeun is set to star in a film based on Haruki Murakami’s novel ‘Norwegian Wood’.