Oscar Nominee for Best Actor Stephen Yeon “It feels really surreal”

Korean-American actor Steven Yeon (38, Korean name Yeon Sang-yeop) of the movie’Minari’ was nominated for the 93rd Academy Award for Best Actor. It is the first of’Asian Americans’. Local media such as the New York Times (NYT) and Variety reported on the 15th (local time) that’Steven Yeon made the history of the Oscars’ when the candidate was announced. If he wins the award, he will be the third Asian winner after Mongolian Yul Brinner (‘The King and I’, 1956) and Indian-British Ben Kingsley (‘Gandhi’, 1982). The Asian Best Actor nomination itself has been 17 years since Kingsley was called for the second time in 2004 as’House of Sand and Fog’ (2003).

In a phone call with NYT right after the nomination was announced, Stephen Yeon said, “I don’t know what’s going on right now. It feels really surreal.” When asked, “What does it feel like to make history when you think of Oscar’s overlooked Asian actors in recent years?” If the culture and identity I carry on my shoulders challenge and break through something, it’s just wonderful.”

Stephen Yeon was born in Seoul, moved to Canada with his family at the age of four, and lived in the United States the following year. For him, who is also the father of two children,’Minari’, who also produced, was special.

In’Buttercup’, Steven Yeon played Jacob the most who moves with his family to a remote trailer house on wheels to open a Korean vegetable farm. It was an opportunity for him to understand his father. At a video conference with Korean reporters last month, he said, “I also grew up in an immigrant family.” “There is always a generation gap between the first and second generations of immigrants. When I saw my father, I couldn’t see it as a single person. Because of the cultural and linguistic differences between us, I looked at my father conceptually and abstractly, but through the movie, I understood and got to know the person who is the father.” In an interview with the LA Times last month, he said that at the first premiere of’Minari’ at the Sundance Film Festival last January, he sat side by side with his father and watched the movie.

He also said, “I often see scripts dealing with ethnic minorities in the United States explaining the culture of the race through the gaze of the main white audience. This work (‘Minari’) is a story about a family, and a very Korean story written by Koreans. It was,” he revealed the reason for choosing the work. At last year’s Busan International Film Festival, “From an American point of view, Koreans are very different from the Koreans we see. He revealed the reason for participating in the production, saying, “I thought that (Koreans) were necessary in all the process of making the film in order to convey the true image of Koreans.”

In college, he majored in psychology and fell into acting. After getting off to season 7 in 2017, I made a relationship with Korean coaches. In Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix movie’Okja’ (2017), he played a member of a radical animal protection group, and in Lee Chang-dong’s’Burning’ (2019), he played an unidentified male Ben, and was invited to the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival one after another.

Director Bong Joon-ho said about the possibility of an Oscar for Stephen Yeon in a variety article in the American entertainment media in December last year. Acting) actors with scope. Sometimes it feels like the man next door, but sometimes it has enormous mysteries and secrets.”

‘Buttercup’ has so far swept 91 trophies both inside and outside the United States, of which Stephen Yeon has won the Denver Film Festival Best Actor Award and the North Texas Critics Association Best Supporting Actor Award. On the 4th of next month, he is also nominated for the Best Actor Award along with Yoon Yeo-jung in the Best Supporting Actor Award at the American Actor Association (SAG) Award.

Reporter Na Won-jeong [email protected]