At some point last summer, Bowen Yang lost his grip on who he was. For months, he’d been flying back and forth between New York, where he’s in the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” and London, where he was shooting the movie musical “Wicked,” playing a snarky schoolmate of Glinda the Good Witch. Lorne Michaels, his boss at “S.
N.L.,” had warned him about the exhausting schedule.
“I have my nootropics for focus, and I have my CBD oils for sleep. I can really overcome this,” Yang recalled thinking. “And I didn’t, and I couldn’t.
” During “Wicked,” he’d spend hours getting into his elaborate costume, makeup, and toupee. Sometimes he’d sit in his trailer all day without being called to set once—standard procedure for a big-budget movie, but the jet lag and the tedium wore him down. “It was a gradual accumulation of idling, getting dressed up with nowhere to go, feeling like it was sanding down whatever I had preserved from the week before at ‘S.
N.L.’—whatever was left over of my psychic tolerance,” he said.
He started telling himself that the good things in his life had been flukes, that his success had all been a terrible mistake. He wondered whether residual trauma was surfacing from his teen years, when his parents sent him to gay-conversion therapy. In London, he was staying in King’s Cross, isolated in a hotel without his castmates.
“This cannot sound anything but name-droppy,” he told me, “but Ariana Grande”—who plays Glinda—“was reaching out and going, ‘Are you O.K.? Come over! Let’s just watch a movie.
Let’s get you better.’ She was there for me in a true way.” Grande told me that although she found Yang’s double duty “badass and incredible,” it was “also a little worrisome.
I understand what it feels like to travel back and forth so often and then have to perform the next day, with no time for your body or mind to figure out what’s going on, and it is incredibly hard and unusual. So I just wanted to make sure he had an ear and a hug and the support he needed.” It was not lost on Yang that the Good Witch of the North was trying to guide him home, showing him that he had the power he needed within himself all along.
But he kept feeling worse. “I was so stitched together at that point with spit and tape,” he said. On a break from filming, he flew to Amsterdam, and his friend Cole Escola, now the writer and star of the Broadway comedy “Oh, Mary!,” came to meet him.
“He just seemed a little down and embarrassed about feeling down, in this way that I really relate to,” Escola said. “Like, ‘Sorry I’m not your clown today.’ ” They walked around Amsterdam and saw “Les Misérables” in Dutch.
(“It’s a very phlegm-forward language,” Escola said. “An ugly language for song.”) Yang’s low point was in June, back in New York, where his funk turned nightmarish.
He was at a Pride party at a Brooklyn club, on Ecstasy and cocaine. “The chemical-neurological things that were going on in the biomass of a gay crowd were just out of a horror movie,” he recalled. Fans mobbed him on the way to the men’s room, and to him they looked like marauding zombies.
“It was beyond being recognized—that’s something I can handle,” he said. “It was the enclosure of people not letting me get to the place I needed to go. I felt terrified.
” He was losing track of time and space, stuck in a disorienting dream world. Back in London, he’d Google himself and feel like he was reading about someone else. “I was having dissociative episodes, completely detached from any sense of self,” he said.
Finally, while searching his symptoms online, he came across the term “depersonalization,” a condition in which you feel unmoored from your body and psyche. He Zoomed with his shrink, who said that sounded about right. He binged self-help books; one had a line about how “we stare out at reality through a highly unreliable and distorted pane of glass,” which he copied into his phone.
“I was, like, I really need to get to the root of this problem, which is: Who are you? Really, who are you?” He called Matt Rogers, his best friend since college, and said he needed time off from the hit pop-culture podcast they host together, “Las Culturistas.” “I knew something was not right,” Rogers said. “He didn’t have any objectivity on what was happening.
” Yang announced his hiatus from “Las Culturistas” on Instagram, and suddenly he was reading about his depersonalization on Page Six—which only magnified the problem. In July, the actors’ strike shut down “Wicked,” and Yang returned to New York. With “S.
N.L.” on summer break, he struggled to operate without any structure.
He read more books and switched his anti-anxiety meds to antidepressants. After a few weeks, he was out of the “crucible”; having relocated his “anchor points,” he went back to “Las Culturistas.” In October, he started a new season of “S.
N.L.” “It was a slow dial back to being seen,” he said, nearly a year after his journey to the dark side.
Then he added, “Maybe I’m still in it.” Yang, who is thirty-three, was telling this story in a hotel lobby in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, not far from his apartment. He wore a denim jacket adorned with the Hello Kitty frog character Keroppi, a gift from his “S.
N.L.” castmate Sarah Sherman.
It was April, an off week at “S.N.L.
,” and Yang was practicing self-care: taking bubble baths, listening to music, and playing a soothing video game called Unpacking, in which you unbox a character’s belongings into different homes. “I’m really trying to not lean on weed,” he said. Yang has a laid-back, vocal-fried cool that belies his capacity for both self-implosion and comic exuberance.
As a guest at “S.N.L.
” ’s “Weekend Update” desk, he’s played a string of ranting, cranky characters: a preening Chinese trade minister (“I’m the top tariff taskmaster”), a queeny Jafar (“Of course I’m gay, you petulant fool!”), and a “proud gay Oompa Loompa.” “You watch him and you don’t know quite what he’s going to do,” Lorne Michaels told me, comparing Yang’s take on the ex-congressman George Santos to Dana Carvey’s impression of George H. W.
Bush: “There’s a point where it becomes officially recognized as how that person talks and thinks.” This year, Yang was the sole member of the company to be nominated for an Emmy. He was cast on “S.
N.L.” in 2019, after a year in the writers’ room, and became the show’s first Chinese American performer and its third out gay man.
The fun-house effects of fame came instantaneously. Hours after the announcement, old footage circulated of another new cast member, Shane Gillis, making homophobic jokes and using an Asian slur on a podcast. Gillis issued a quasi-apology (“I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I said”) and was fired within days.
Yang watched himself become part of the online discourse, feeling “incidental to this big national story about cancel culture,” he said. Then, when his first season as a cast member started, he became a breakout star. There were the inevitable Asian-in-the-news roles (Andrew Yang, Kim Jong Un), but Yang, with his resting glower and pop-diva flair, brought a new flavor to the show.
“ ‘S.N.L.
’ really leans into the idea of types,” the comedian and former “S.N.L.
” writer Julio Torres said. “But every now and then someone who is not one of the existing types comes along, and that is Bowen.” In 2021, Yang played the iceberg that sank the Titanic, anthropomorphized as a scandal-plagued pop star trying to promote an album.
(“I think my publicist was very clear: I’m not here to talk about the sinking.”) “After a while, you forget that it’s an iceberg talking, because it’s all so personal to him,” Michaels said. When I met Yang, he was feeling good about his fifth season on air.
After years of working within a “queer sensibility,” he said, “I realized that I built the wheelhouse in the beginning, and this was going to be the perfect time to raze it.” He pointed to a sketch from March, called “Bowen’s Straight,” in which Yang reveals that he only plays gay for laughs and is in fact a womanizer, who seduces that week’s host, Sydney Sweeney. “I hope this is not the Stockholm syndrome talking,” he said, of the show, “but it is still a great place to work.
” The season had had its thorny moments. In January, Dave Chappelle, under fire for telling transphobic jokes on his Netflix special, leaped onstage as the cast was waving good night. Yang lurked on the far end of the set, looking surly.
“I was just uncomfortable on other people’s behalf,” he said. “It wasn’t this big protest.” The next month, Gillis, who has acquired an anti-P.
C. following since he was fired, returned to “S.N.
L.” as a host. Both times, social media dissected Yang’s body language and extrapolated his discomfort.
Again, he felt like a character in a culture-war pageant: the “woke scold.” “It’s taught me about my place on the show being kind of strange and unique,” he said. “I never expected to be a Nora Dunn being furious that an Andrew Dice Clay is there.
” (In 1990, Dunn, a cast member, left the show after Clay, a comic with the persona of a misogynist lout, hosted.) He said that he’s learned to distinguish between the show and “what people say about the show.” Link copied Meanwhile, he’d been reckoning with the impact of his newfound fame on “Las Culturistas.
” When the podcast began, in 2016, he and Rogers were unknowns expounding on pop stars, Real Housewives, and Grindr hookups. In their signature segment, “I Don’t Think So, Honey,” each would vent for a minute about something bugging him: chatty Lyft drivers, Mark Wahlberg. As both rose from obscure culture vultures to industry players, their gripes turned to more rarefied subjects, like red-carpet anxiety.
In February, after they shared their unvarnished opinions of Oscar-season films, Tina Fey came on as a guest and dropped a truth bomb: “I don’t think so, honey: Bowen Yang giving his real opinions about movies on this podcast. I regret to inform you that you are too famous now, sir. What’s going to happen? Are you having a problem with ‘Saltburn’? Sh-h-h.
Quiet luxury.” She concluded, “Authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” The admonition went viral.
Months later, Yang was still grappling with it. “To hear that from her directly—and to hear that directed at me , was so jarring, in the best way,” he said. On a recent episode, he’d raved about Taylor Swift’s tepidly received new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” and listeners were accusing him of boosterism.
Was it possible to critique pop culture while being a fixture in it? “For some reason, we’re trying to have it both ways,” he said. “And maybe we can’t.” An hour before airtime one Saturday night, Yang sat in his dressing room at “S.
N.L.,” a takeout container of half-eaten sushi by the mirror, a “Female Trouble” poster on the wall.
It was the Mother’s Day episode, and Yang’s mother, Meng, was there to join him for the traditional cold-open promenade of performers and their moms. At dress rehearsal, she’d stumbled over a joke about Tom Brady being her “hall pass.” “They gave me more lines than last time,” she fretted.
“You’ll do a great job,” Yang reassured her. “We’ll practice it.” Meng, who worked in medical diagnostics until she retired, was unfamiliar with “S.
N.L.” when Yang started there, but her colleagues informed her that it was a huge deal.
“I learned from them how big this production is, and how popular,” she said, as Yang texted with a writer about a soon to be axed sketch. “He never gave up. Very proud of him.
” The Yang family’s journey from China to 30 Rock is a tale of generational whiplash. Yang’s father, Ruilin, comes from an area of Inner Mongolia so remote that it didn’t get electricity until the nineties. Ruilin’s mother had bound feet; the custom had been banned ten years before her birth, but the news hadn’t reached her rural location.
“Even in China, people would stop and stare at my grandmother,” Yang’s older sister, whose first name is also Yang, told me. “My dad’s parents died not knowing how to write their own names.” Bowen and his sister grew up inundated with tales of their father’s determination.
“He would read by candlelight every single night and almost went blind from the strain, or whatever,” Bowen said. Meng grew up in Shenyang, the provincial capital of Liaoning, in northeast China. As a teen-ager during the Cultural Revolution, she was relocated to the countryside for two and a half years of physical labor, then went to medical school and returned to her home town to become an obstetrician.
There she met Ruilin, who was training as an engineer. In 1986, they moved to Brisbane, Australia, where Ruilin got a doctorate in explosives engineering. Yang Yang was born there two years later, and Bowen in 1990; his birth would have been barred under China’s one-child policy.
“Every now and then, my mom would bring up the idea that I wouldn’t have been born had they not moved out of China,” he said. Like many children of immigrants, he had to square his artistic inclinations with his parents’ narrative of sacrifice and hard work. “I don’t think they had the intention of making us feel guilty,” he said.
“It was just their way of being, like, Look, there’s a lot that went into you being here and doing, like, improv comedy.” When Bowen was an infant, the family followed Ruilin’s career to Canada, and settled in Montreal. At four years old, Bowen scandalized them by doing a striptease to Céline Dion in the living room.
“Bowen, at this one climactic point in the song, jumped out and pulled his pants down and flashed us to the beat of the music,” Yang Yang recalled. Looking back, Bowen considers it “a first moment of queer discovery, revelry, joy.” In kindergarten, he won an award for a pastel drawing of a circus clown, and Meng arranged private lessons in illustration.
“I thought he could be an artist or work for Disney,” she said, in her son’s dressing room. His sister remembered a more theatrical bent: he would sketch the most “high-drama, intense moments” of Disney movies and then act out what he’d drawn. “He did this with ‘Snow White,’ and we went through so many apples,” she said.
In 1999, Ruilin’s job brought the family to suburban Denver. “Everywhere we moved, one of the first things that my parents always did was find the Chinatown,” Yang Yang said. The children were sent to Chinese school on Sundays, and Meng would drill them on their Mandarin characters.
But Bowen gravitated toward Western pop culture: the Spice Girls, Broadway musicals. After his sister told him what “Saturday Night Live” was, he’d watch it in the basement—with effort, since they didn’t have a cable box and reception came through the antennas. “This was a huge part of my Saturday, just adjusting the bunny ears,” he said.
He later learned that many of his favorite sketches, like the Destiny’s Child parody Gemini’s Twin, were the work of the gay writer James Anderson—a forebear in an underground queer lineage. At fifteen, Yang became obsessed with the hospital drama “Grey’s Anatomy” and decided that he would pursue medicine. He later realized that his interest had more to do with Sandra Oh than with healing the sick, but it was a convenient way to satisfy his parents.
“I think I just did the drag of saying, ‘Well, maybe I’ll be a doctor,’ ” he told me. He joined the high-school improv team, Spontaneous Combustion, which was run by his calculus teacher and did sets in a Denver comedy club. “Improv was my only waypoint for rebellion,” he said.
“We were all fifteen-year-olds performing with beer-drinking thirty-year-olds.” One day during his senior year, Yang came home from school and found his mother sitting alone, with the curtains drawn. He’d been visiting gay chat rooms, having cybersex with strangers and sometimes posting personal ads under phony adult identities.
He’d left the AOL window open, and his parents had found it. “They had printed out the entire log of that conversation, and they had earmarked and circled specific things,” he recalled. “It was like Alexis Colby Dexter throwing the receipts off the bannister in ‘Dynasty.
’ I had never felt more terror in my life.” Meng read aloud the illicit phrases, each hurled at her son like a dagger, and told him, “Where your dad and I come from, this doesn’t happen.” “There was a period of, like, three weeks where I would come home every day to my parents sobbing,” Yang said.
“I had never seen my dad cry before, except when his father died.” His parents, he recalled, gave him an ultimatum: he could stay in Colorado for college and live at home, or he could choose between U.C.
L.A. and N.
Y.U. (where his sister was enrolled) if he agreed to see a specialist.
“My dad had printed out the Web site for this conversion therapist in Colorado Springs, and immediately I could tell it was quackery,” Yang said. “But I did not have the conviction of thinking, I’m going to be a gay man and suffer through that. I was, like, You know what? Sure.
Maybe I am this malleable thing.” Part of him just wanted to make his parents stop crying. He agreed to go.
Matt Rogers, the chatty, handsome son of a Long Island hairdresser, met Yang when both were freshmen at N.Y.U.
, in 2008. Yang was premed but had joined the student improv group Dangerbox. His parents had enlisted his sister to keep an eye on him, and the siblings lived in an apartment on East Sixth Street—next to the gay bar Eastern Bloc.
Rogers, a dramatic-writing student, lived in a dorm and, like Yang, was in the closet. “I was trying to be known as the funny guy on the floor so that no one could call me the gay guy,” Rogers said. A mutual female friend invited them both to see the campus sketch group Hammerkatz.
Yang, trying to will himself to be straight, had convinced himself that he was “madly in love” with her, and he gave Rogers a dirty look when they met. “That was my test run of heterosexuality,” he said. “I felt threatened.
Like, Who is this guy?” They didn’t cross paths again until sophomore year, when Rogers auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Dangerbox. But he did get into Hammerkatz, whose members included the future stars Rachel Bloom, Jack Quaid, and Stephanie Hsu. By then, Yang and Rogers were each tentatively out, especially after Yang’s sister graduated and he was unsupervised at last.
Both felt pigeonholed as each troupe’s token gay. “The elders of the groups kind of said, ‘Oh, that’s funny, we both have one,’ and would put us together and assume that we’d be friends,” Rogers said. “Like, Dance for us, gay monkeys!” Nonetheless, the two became fast friends.
Yang and Rogers shared a pop-culture language. They both loved “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” especially the Season 2 contestant Jujubee. “We were both off book on Nicki Minaj’s entire ‘Pink Friday’ album,” Rogers said.
At parties, they’d clear the floor and rap along to the track “Roman’s Revenge,” which features Eminem reciting the line “All you li’l faggots can suck it!” “Bowen and I would just let it rip on that word,” Rogers said. “There was something to this rapport that we knew that we had with each other that gave us a dangerous edge.” At one point, some seniors in their comedy groups decided to stage a mock wedding for them.
When the hostess asked what the theme should be, Rogers deadpanned, “ ‘Jurassic Park.’ ” Years before same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, the idea of a “gay wedding”—especially one thrust on two friends as a party stunt—was still a punch line; at least, that’s how Rogers and Yang perceived it. But, heeding the “yes, and” rule of improv, they went along with the joke.
“You’re already a minority in the group. You don’t want to say, ‘Hey, I think what you guys are doing is fucked up and makes us uncomfortable,’ ” Rogers said. He called the event a “gross, exorbitant display that came at our homophobic expense.
” He remembered looking at Yang during the “vows”: “It was one of the first of many times where I was, like, I think you’re the only person that gets it.” (The wedding planners have since apologized.) Stephanie Hsu remembered Yang as having “incredibly funny hands,” but said that being premed put him at a remove from the comedy scene: “He sort of had one foot in and one foot out.
” At his commencement, in 2012, he watched other students collect academic awards and wondered why he’d invested all his passion in an extracurricular activity. He took the MCAT twice, and during the second time he thought about a story that Steve Carell had told in an interview: “He was just out of college and starting an application to law school, and then he got to the personal-essay portion and was, like, I can’t do this. That anecdote enveloped the whole testing center for me, and I was, like, I have to go.
” He burst out of the exam room, called his parents, and informed them that, instead of med school, he was going to temp and take improv classes. They were perplexed, but their relationship with their son was already rocky. That year, he had come out to his family, on his own terms.
“There was this emergency family meeting, where I flew home to Colorado, my sister flew home from D.C. The four of us just convened, and it didn’t go great,” he said.
“My parents kept trying to push these pamphlets on me, and I was just, like, ‘No, I will not read this.’ ” It wasn’t until Yang became famous that his parents put aside their fears that being gay was a road to ruin. “Now they ask me if I’m dating anybody, and I say no,” he said, with a self-effacing laugh.
A few months after graduation, Rogers heard that Yang was considering moving back to Denver. “I was just, like, That can’t happen,” he recalled. He and some friends had started a new comedy group, Pop Roulette.
He met Yang for lunch and implored him to join. “That was this huge life preserver that was thrown at me,” Yang said. Rogers wrote the first sketch in which Yang appeared, a “Mad Men” spoof about a gay millennial who is anachronistically employed at Sterling Cooper and worships Joan.
(One of his lines: “Um, obsessed with her?”) The group performed regularly at the Peoples Improv Theater, in the Flatiron district, specializing in tightly choreographed songs that lampooned contemporary culture, like a rewrite of “Leader of the Pack” about Grindr. Yang worked survival jobs in graphic design, eventually landing in the offices of the luxury-furniture firm One Kings Lane. As his performance footprint expanded, he became part of the city’s emerging queer comedy scene, an alternative to the flannel-wearing standup dudes.
Cole Escola first noticed him at the variety series “Showgasm,” at Ars Nova, telling a story about how he’d accidentally tried meth. Julio Torres saw him perform a solo show about his conversion-therapy nightmare, titled “FAG: Fight Against Gayness.” “It was unlike anything I’ve seen Bowen do since,” Torres said.
“It was very vulnerable.” (“Oh, my God, it was so bad,” Yang insisted.) With the comedian Sam Taggart, Yang created a series called “Live on Broadgay,” in which gay comics staged episodes of “Sex and the City.
” Torres played Miranda; his friend Joel Kim Booster was Samantha. Yang mostly stayed behind the scenes, because he didn’t want to be “too front-facing.” But he gained notoriety by posting videos online—his Instagram handle is @fayedunaway—in which he lip-synched sacred gay texts, such as Miranda Priestly’s “cerulean” monologue, from “The Devil Wears Prada,” and Tyra Banks’s scolding of a contestant on “America’s Next Top Model.
” “It was the closest thing I could do to visualizing myself on camera,” he said. In 2016, the podcast network Forever Dog approached him about creating a show, and he recruited Rogers as co-host. Yang’s initial ideas were high-concept, such as a choose-your-own-adventure format, but Rogers convinced him that they’d be better off just riffing on pop culture, as they did in their everyday lives.
That March, they recorded the first “Las Culturistas” episode, a recap of that year’s Grammy Awards, at their producer’s apartment, with a mattress shoved against the window as a sound baffle. Rogers recalled, “In the beginning, I would look at our analytics, and it was, like, Oh, my God! This week, sixty-five people listened to the episode!” The show now gets more than a million downloads a month. Casting themselves as high priests of pop culture, the duo encapsulated gay-millennial preoccupations and patois.
Occasionally, they’d interrupt themselves to repeat a stray musing, in unison, as a new “Rule of Culture.” (Rule of Culture No. 90: “ Catherine Keener is underrated .
” No. 106: “ There’s only one Dianne Wiest, and that’s Dianne Fucking Wiest .”) At the core of the podcast was the hosts’ friendship, which was tested as their professional fates began to diverge.
In 2017, Rogers was invited to be a “new face” at the Just for Laughs festival, in Montreal, which is often a gateway to “S.N.L.
” Yang was not. “That was the first time we were a little bit separated in terms of career trajectory,” Rogers said. “It started to become apparent to me that we could have real conflict.
” In a twist, Rogers didn’t get the call from “S.N.L.
,” but Yang did. At his manager’s suggestion, Yang had sent in an audition tape, performing characters that included an aggro version of the Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. “I was, like, They’re never going to hire an effeminate Asian man,” he said.
To his surprise, he was brought in for a live showcase, then for a screen test. “I went back to Colorado and feverishly typed on a computer in my parents’ room for two days and came up with these new silly ideas, like George Takei talking from the Singularity, because he’s merged his body with Facebook,” he recalled. After an awkward meeting with Lorne Michaels, at which Yang tried to win points as a fellow-Canadian, he returned to his day job, defeated.
The next spring, he was invited to test again—and so was Rogers, who had fantasized about being on “S.N.L.
” since childhood. Rogers auditioned by impersonating Antoni Porowski, from “Queer Eye.” Yang did Elaine Chao, Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary and the wife of Mitch McConnell.
(He got a big—and rare—laugh from Michaels with the line “Once this term is over, I’ll return to my wonderful life living as an Asian woman in Kentucky.”) Both were given holding deals with NBC, meaning that they couldn’t take other TV offers. “That was a really hard year for us personally,” Rogers told me.
They stopped speaking for months—except when recording “Las Culturistas.” Yang said, “I’ve never felt I was performing my friendship with Matt, except for that period.” That August, they were summoned to audition again and put in the same dressing room.
Afterward, the auditioners all went out to a bar, where Yang and Chloe Fineman both received calls to go right back to 30 Rock, having made it to the next round. “That was . .
. an intense moment,” Rogers said, growing quiet. “Because it felt like the first sign that we were really going to be separated, and that potentially, if it went one way, he would really skyrocket.
I was afraid he would outgrow me, and I would lose him.” Yang was flown to L.A.
to meet again with Michaels, who told him that he’d “been getting better every time.” He could taste victory—but he was offered a job as a writer, not as a performer. Yang was conflicted, but his friends Torres and Sudi Green, who were already “S.
N.L.” writers, urged him to accept.
“I said that, even if he did it for a year, it would be such an incredible comedy education,” Green, whose mother is Iranian, said. “I knew, as an immigrant kid, that the idea of it being a good school was going to appeal to him.” His first fall as a writer, Yang got practically nothing on the air.
A rare exception was the opening monologue for the host Awkwafina, who had cast him as her cousin Edmund on her sitcom, “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens.” She’d originally imagined Edmund as a “Silicon Valley tech bro,” she told me, but tweaked the character for Yang, making him a neurotic gay man. “Bowen as an institution is really important for Asian American culture, because he does kind of represent an Asian American person that you’d meet,” Awkwafina said.
“He has a smart exterior. He does not seem like someone who is going to do the insane physical comedy that he will do.” In early 2019, Torres returned to “S.
N.L.” after filming the series “Los Espookys.
” Yang, who’d been trying to ape such standard “S.N.L.
” formulas as parody commercials and game shows, credits Torres with inspiring him to find his own voice. Together, they wrote a string of sketches that slipped a stealth gay humor into the show. “Cheques,” featuring Yang’s beloved Sandra Oh, was about how writing checks is the preferred payment method for scheming femme fatales.
In “The Actress,” Emma Stone played an earnest thespian cast as the woman who gets cheated on in gay porn. “We like the same trashy, campy acting tropes,” Torres said, adding that he was impressed with Yang’s workplace skills: “He knew what the extension numbers were for the different people, which I know sounds stupid, but I never figured that out.” That summer, while Yang was shooting “Nora” at a Russian night club in Queens, Michaels called to offer him a spot in the cast.
“He was, like, There are going to be a lot of eyes on you, and I had to make sure you knew how the show worked before I put you on camera,” Yang said. Amped up about his new gig, he couldn’t sleep that night, so he walked to Prospect Park at sunrise, savoring the quiet. That afternoon, he took a nap and woke up to frantic texts from his agent: “I’m so sorry .
. . Are you awake? .
. . I’m so sorry.
” The news about Shane Gillis’s offensive material had broken. Michaels called to assure him, “I don’t need you to be the poster child for racial harmony.” Yang texted Gillis, who called back and apologized for the mess.
“I ended the call by saying, ‘I guess I’ll just see you at work,’ ” Yang recalled. “He laughed and said, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. Then they announced that he was fired.
” In the time between the media blitz and the new season, Yang booked a trip to Turks and Caicos. He had talked himself down from the idea that he was a diversity hire who hadn’t earned his way into the cast. But he still couldn’t picture himself on the show.
“It made no visual sense for me to see myself on camera, under the glare of the studio lights,” he said. He dropped acid and sat on a beach for hours, bingeing old “S.N.
L.” sketches. He’d watch Stefon and hallucinate his own face swapped in for Bill Hader’s.
“It was this cascade of imagery that washed over, and suddenly something clicked,” he said. “I was, like, Oh, this makes sense. I think I can do this.
” In June, Yang and Rogers were in a midtown rehearsal studio, belting out the Selena Gomez song “Single Soon.” It was the opening number of the third annual “Culture Awards,” a live outgrowth of “Las Culturistas” which spoofs the gaudy self-seriousness of awards shows. They’d announced a flurry of categories on the podcast, among them the Tina Turner Legend Award (nominees included Paula Abdul and Miss Piggy), the Daddy Award (Pedro Pascal, “the sad Sylvia Plath poem”), Best Word to Whisper (“Fuck”), and Best Word to Scream (“Diva!!!!!!!”).
After working with the pianist, they high-fived and moved on to a dance rehearsal, with four male backup dancers. “We’re very much singers who stand and deliver, and the minimal choreo is better,” Rogers told the choreographer. They would make their grand entrance at the Kings Theatre, in Flatbush, riding electric kiddie trikes down the aisles.
“It’s based on the Lana Del Rey entrance at Coachella this year, when she was on the back of a motorcycle, arms draped over some guy,” Yang explained. The next night, the two were in tuxes, posing on a red carpet. Throngs of spectators—mostly women and gay men—streamed in.
The dress code was “awards gold.” On the podcast, Yang and Rogers have divided their fans into hazily defined subgroups: Readers, Publicists, Finalists, and Kayteighs. “We’re Publicists,” Robbie Bartels, an entertainment lawyer who’d come with a friend, said.
He had seen a Publicist mood board on Instagram. “I put my Doc Martens on, because I saw leather as an element for Publicists,” Bartels said. Publicists, he and his friend theorized, tend to be “business-minded.
” Readers are like sponges, “just soaking in the information.” Finalists are “your favorite person at any event.” And Kayteighs are “that bitch.
” “Las Culturistas” fans have a more parasocial bond with Yang than casual “S.N.L.
” viewers do. But, when Yang was cast on “S.N.
L.,” he had to negotiate for permission to continue the podcast. “They were, like, Wait, we haven’t encountered this in the past, where a cast member has had a weekly outlet to express themselves,” he said.
“But we got it into the contract.” That was a touchy time in his relationship with Rogers, who fell into a depression after he wasn’t hired. “I felt like my career was over, because my best friend had succeeded,” Rogers said.
Looking for a change, he moved to L.A., where he got a job writing for the sitcom “The Other Two,” and the podcast went bicoastal.
Rogers has since acted regularly on TV and released a Showtime special, but the friends’ lopsided levels of fame can cause tension. “I don’t care about anything more than I care about the sanctity of our friendship,” Rogers told me. “We probably have a big blowout fight once a year, and then we figure it out.
” One of those fights happened during Yang’s breakdown last summer, when he threatened to quit the podcast. Yang told Rogers that he’d been feeling like a sidekick, the Robin Quivers to his Howard Stern. Rogers urged Yang to take a hiatus rather than bail.
“He can have anything and anyone he wants in this industry. I can’t,” Rogers told me. “If at any point he wanted to just toss me aside, I felt like he could.
And, in that moment, it felt like he was.” They had just had Kelly Clarkson, Rogers’s idol, on as a guest. “We had just done this amazing episode with her,” Rogers said.
“And then he called to say that he had only bad feelings about the podcast? That’s when I realized that his mental-health condition must be really dire.” By the time they tricycled into Kings Theatre, a year later, they were united in irreverence. The evening featured appearances by Julia Fox, the Real Housewife Meredith Marks, and the pop singer Mandy Moore, who received the Lifetime of Culture Award.
I sat next to Yang’s parents, who wore confounded smiles. When the hosts sang the Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus duet “II Most Wanted” and mooned the audience in their assless chaps, Meng giggled with what looked like shock. “We’ve come a long way,” Yang told me later.
The duo opened the show with some two-man comedy. “At this point in our lives and careers, we’ve had to really take stock about what we say,” Rogers said. Then Yang asked the audience to stand for the Las Culturistas Pledge of Allegiance, and a screen projected Tina Fey’s warning.
Three thousand people stood and recited: I don’t think so, honey: Bowen Yang giving his real opinions about movies on this podcast. I regret to inform you that you are too famous now, sir. What’s going to happen? It remains to be seen whether Yang’s huge “S.
N.L.” popularity will translate into movie stardom, but directors have been steadily calling him.
Pfannee, the character Yang plays in “Wicked,” which comes out in November, was originally written as a woman. But the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, decided that Yang would be “delicious” in the role.
“There’s a huge sense of pride as he’s become the breakout star of ‘S.N.L.
,’ ” Chu told me. “We Asians can point at him: See, we’re funny! Mom? Dad? See?” Chu was unaware of Yang’s emotional struggles during the shoot. “I wish he could have told me, honestly,” he said.
Yang’s other movie roles have included God, in “Dicks: The Musical.” In 2022, he starred in “Fire Island,” a queer update of “Pride and Prejudice,” alongside Joel Kim Booster, who also wrote the screenplay. (Journalists have repeatedly confused the two gay Asian comedians.
In a racist ouroboros, Out managed to mix them up in an article about how they were getting mixed up.) Yang’s character, a spin on Jane Bennet, was the insecure wingman to Booster’s buff Elizabeth. For one scene, the director, Andrew Ahn, had told Yang to look in the mirror and ask himself, “Am I attractive? Am I worthy of love?” Since his unravelling during “Wicked,” Yang has learned to protect his emotions on set: no vanity searches on social media.
“Why would you touch a hot stove?” he asked me one day, in Vancouver. He was there shooting Ahn’s next film, a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 drama, “The Wedding Banquet.” In the original, a gay Taiwanese man living in New York with his boyfriend marries a Chinese woman in order to placate his parents.
Yang, who’d seen the movie in college, said, “Obviously, I sympathized with the main character, but I found myself sympathizing with the parents, too, who are homophobic and putting all this pressure on their child to live a specific life.” He went on, “It was a nice mini blueprint for understanding my parents.” In Ahn’s reboot, there’s now a gay couple (Yang and the Korean actor Han Gi-chan), a lesbian couple (Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran), and a stony Korean grandmother, played by the Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung.
Yang’s character is a birder in Seattle who, he said, “struggles with feeling worthy of the relationship.” That day, they were shooting in a dingy former municipal building outfitted as a marriage bureau. In the scene, Yang makes a grand rom-com gesture, which culminates in him kissing Han.
An intimacy coördinator advised the two on how to position themselves asymmetrically, to project greater familiarity. “I don’t know if I can pull it off,” Yang confided, before a take. “I’ve never professed that kind of sentiment before in real life.
But we’ll see.” It had been a year since he’d desperately asked himself, “Who are you?” What Yang had been searching for in Oz was objectivity about himself, something that had eluded him since his bout with conversion therapy. Had he found it? Or was he still, like every actor who slips into a role, just a “malleable thing”? Earlier, he mentioned that he’d been thinking a lot about the 1997 anime film “Perfect Blue.
” It centers on a Japanese pop star who quits singing to become a dramatic actress. Visions of her pop-star incarnation continue to terrorize her, and she discovers an online journal written in her voice, with details no one else could possibly know. “She’s not sure what’s real and what’s not,” Yang said.
“By the end of the movie, it’s hopeful, and she overcomes it all. She walks out of a hospital and the nurses are, like, Is that that actress? It must be a fake! And then she says to herself in the rearview mirror, ‘No, I’m the real thing.’ That moment really struck me.
There are things about yourself that you can tell yourself are true and cannot be negotiated by other people.” He went off to shoot his big Hollywood kiss. Afterward, I asked how it went.
He answered by quoting Cher, who once responded to a question about what it feels like to be an icon by saying, “It doesn’t feel like anything.” “I think that applies to most things,” Yang said, with something like relief. “It doesn’t feel like anything.
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