Bowen Yang, 34 has been making us proud ever since he landed himself a full-time cast role on Saturday Night Live back in 2019. However, the last 12 months have seen his profile rise considerably thanks to his role in the blockbuster movie, Wicked.
The screen adaptation of the beloved Broadway show has taken three-quarters of a billion dollars at the box office, with a third of that internationally. Thanks to the land of Oz, viewers previously unfamiliar with Bowen have fallen for his charms. They’ll get a second helping of his character, Pfannee, with the release of Wicked: For Good, later this year.
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Before that, many enjoyed him in the The Wedding Banquet, which hit screens in April. It’s a remake of the 1993 original movie of the same name about a closeted gay man arranging a marriage to a woman to keep his family happy.
Yang and Joel Kim Booster might also star in a rumored sequel to Fire Island, their 2022 movie. Whether that happens or not, Yang shows promising signs of joining those SNL alumni who build successful movie careers alongside their TV work.
Early life
Yang was born in Brisbane, Australia, to a family that had emigrated from China in 1986. They all moved to Montreal, Canada, before Yang turned one. They relocated to Aurora, Colorado, when Yang was six.
He showed an aptitude for comedy from an early age. His high school named him homecoming king and voted him “Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live” in his 2008 yearbook.
Conversion therapy
Yang’s parents accidentally found out about their son’s sexuality when he was 17. His dad saw an open chat window on the family computer. His dad was devastated. The young Yang attended conversion therapy sessions at his parents’ insistence.
“I kind of played along, and I kind of just humored them and myself into seeing what it was,” he recently told NBC’s Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist. “And not knowing that it was ultimately very painful and detrimental and there was a lot of healing that happened after that.”
He wanted his parents’ support to move to New York to attend NYU so attended the sessions to appease them.
“Those poor people did not realize that that’s one of the gayest schools in the country,” he later joked.
However, he still found the sessions shocking in their mixing of pseudo-science and religion.
Yang’s father arranged for a chaperone to accompany his son in New York when he first moved there. However, Yang, obviously, was not for changing. He later said he tried “straightness on for size and fail[ed] miserably.”
“It’s gotten to a much better place,” Yang told NBC about his current relationship with his parents. “There are still obviously things that cannot fully be known in a mutual way. But I give them a lot of grace for just meeting me where I’m at, because that is not something I ever expected.”
Las Culturistas and SNL
Yang went on to use the difficulties of coming out in his early stand-up comedy career.
At New York University, he also met Matt Rogers. The men started their much-loved Las Culturistas podcast, in which they talk candidly about everything queer-related. The long-running show has helped cement Yang as someone unafraid to be authentically himself. It also built him his initial fanbase.
Yang joined SNL as a writer in 2018. He became an on-air cast member in 2019. In doing so, he made history as the show’s first Asian American cast member and only the sixth regular queer performer.
In 2021, he became the first SNL featured cast member to receive a Primetime Emmy nomination (‘Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series’). He’s since received a further two nominations in the same category.
Yang is an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and the issues facing many Asian Americans. He was among those to call out anti-Asia hatred in the wake of the lockdowns in 2020.
He’s also open about dealing with mental health struggles. In the summer of 2023, he briefly stepped away from his podcast due to “bad bouts of depersonalization.” Later in the year, he returned, telling Page Six, “My mental health is great. It’s very good. I had a really rough patch and people were very patient with me. It’s hard but you know, I barreled through. I powered through.”
Talented, funny, open and authentic, Yang’s star looks set to continue to rise. And even he cannot sometimes believe how far he’s come. Watch him recently react with horror to a clip of one of his old stand-up appearances below.
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