Bowen Yang and Wedding Banquet team talk Fire Island reunions, Vancouver bonding and the Lady Gaga effect (EXCLUSIVE)

From the outside looking in, you would be forgiven for assuming that Bowen Yang has been on top of the world these past few years. Since being promoted from the writing team to the on-air cast of Saturday Night Live in 2019, the comedian and actor’s career has gone from strength to strength. Yang fast became a fan favourite on the legendary live comedy hit and has been credited with bringing a new, decidedly queer flavour to it. Then, in 2021, he made history as the first cast member to land an Emmy nomination for his work on the show.

Parallel to his SNL success, his weekly pop-culture podcast Las Culturistas with best friend and fellow comedian Matt Rogers grew exponentially in popularity. What began as something of a lark, recorded in his producer’s apartment with a mattress over the window for better sound, metamorphosed into one of the biggest entertainment podcasts in the world, landing exclusive guest appearances by everyone from Mariah Carey to Cate Blanchett to Dua Lipa.

And then came the big screen. A memorable supporting role in Billy Eichner’s ill-fated but underrated gay romcom Bros was swiftly followed by a lead part in the Andrew Ahn-directed Pride & Prejudice interpolation, Fire Island. In the latter, he starred opposite real-life pal Joel Kim Booster as the insecure, lovelorn friend struggling to find an identity for himself in the sex-fuelled, image-obsessed landscape of the eponymous queer utopia.

Yang’s turns in these films transpired, in some ways, to be just practice runs for his most recent big-screen outing, playing sidekick to Ariana Grande in the blockbuster musical Wicked. Yang’s performance as the gender-swapped bitchy friend Pfannee was undoubtedly his biggest gig to date, making him instantly recognisable all over the world, if not due to the film’s massive box-office run, then thanks to its extensive press tour.

And so, it came as quite a surprise to many when, last September, in a lengthy, candid interview with The New Yorker ahead of promotion for Wicked kicking off, Yang revealed that he had suffered some sort of mental breakdown in 2023 while trying to balance the towering workload that required him to fly back and forth between New York, for SNL duties, and London, where Wicked was shooting, for months on end. The actor spoke of suffering dissociative episodes and experiencing a condition called “depersonalisation”, when a person feels unmoored from their body and mind. He contemplated whether repressed trauma he experienced after being forced to undergo so-called ‘conversion therapy’ as a teen was rising to the surface. He considered quitting Las Culturistas due to his mental state, and tortured himself by periodically Googling his name, only to find he didn’t recognise the person he was reading about. It’s a far cry from how you might imagine a bona-fide comedy and theatre nerd who’s landed the ultimate roles in both mediums might be feeling at this juncture.

Thankfully, a writers’ strike-enforced break from filming allowed Yang some time to slowly recuperate, so that when the time came to shoot his next silver-screen gig, as part of the queer ensemble fronting The Wedding Banquet, he was in significantly better shape.

The film, a remake of the 1993 Ang Lee classic, sees Yang reunite with Fire Island director Andrew Ahn. In it, Yang plays Chris, the aimless boyfriend of Min (played by Han Gi-chan), a wealthy but closeted-to-his-family South Korean student, who is desperate to remain in the US so that the couple can stay together. In an act of desperation, Min strikes a deal with Chris’s lesbian best friend Angela and her partner Lee (played by Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone respectively): he will cover the costs of the couple’s IVF treatment in exchange for Angela marrying him so that he can appease his family and obtain a green card. This already complicated arrangement is made even more hectic when Min’s grandmother arrives in town, insisting the pair must partake in a traditional Korean wedding, which leads to, you guessed it, total mayhem.

The movie, by all accounts, was a joy to shoot, with filming taking place in Vancouver, and the all-queer principal cast gelling from the get-go. In comparison to his time on Wicked, it sounds like a walk in the park, though Yang explains that he feels grateful for both experiences. “I would not have had the time I had in Vancouver without the Wicked back-and-forth,” he tells me. “That really made this idea of staying in one place very appealing. I was cooking my meals at home, going on hikes over the weekend, and we had these wonderful group events as a set on days off.”

We are speaking today at the scene of the crime, so to speak, as Yang is back in London for The Wedding Banquet’s premiere at BFI Flare. When I ask whether it’s nice to be back or if it is perhaps a bit triggering, Yang laughs and says: “It would be triggering if I was in the same hotel room at King’s Cross, spinning out, waking up and not knowing where I was, but this…” he says, gesturing at the view of the Thames we are overlooking from this hotel room on the Southbank, “…this is nice.”

Although not comparable to the gargantuan affair of shooting a blockbuster musical, The Wedding Banquet offered its own firsts for the burgeoning actor. It is by far his most dramatic work to date, providing many emotional scenes for Yang to flex his acting muscles in ways we’ve not witnessed in any of his previous roles. Although the movie provides plenty of laughs, this is a dramedy with more emphasis on the drama than both the trailer and the screwball premise might suggest. I am curious to know whether this slight departure from his previous roles is indicative of a broader desire to pivot into more serious projects. “I would like it to be,” he says, “but that’s not totally in my control.”

His ongoing working relationship with Ahn seems to provide fertile ground for him to experiment. “Anytime I work with Andrew, it feels like the growth edges teem out and your parameters kind of shift in this nice way,” he explains. “I mean, I love doing comedy. It’s something that I find very collaborative on its own, but I also loved the way I was able to work with Gi-chan to make this relationship feel very grounded and real, and I loved working with Andrew to make Chris’s journey seem very palpable too.”

“This time there were no gay men doing push-ups in between takes” – Bowen Yang

Gi-chan explains how the pair established the foundations of their characters’ relationship behind their director’s back. “Andrew gave us a little time to connect before filming, about two or three days, and we were imagining the things that are not in the script – like what happened Chris and Min [before this], what what they are attracted to, what their first meeting looked like, all without telling Andrew,” the actor recalled. “It was our secret, and that made it show up naturally on screen.”

Ahn is similarly positive about the creatively fruitful relationship he shares with Yang, explaining to me: “There’s a process we share, it’s a lot of conversation and joy of discovery and playing and trying things.” An open dialogue between the director and the actor seems to have played an important part in the shaping of Yang’s interpretation of Chris. “I told a lot of stories about my relationship and about my boyfriend, and I think Bowen, having met my boyfriend, maybe took some things from him,” Ahn tells me with a chuckle.

Although they share a director and a star, Fire Island and The Wedding Banquet really couldn’t be more different, in both tone and subject matter. The ensemble cast, which, as well as Tran and Gladstone, also included Joan Chen and Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung, also helps to differentiate the projects. “It’s a hugely different cast makeup,” Yang agrees. “This time there were no gay men doing push-ups in between takes.”

Another factor which separates the projects is the worlds they were born into. Fire Island, which is, at its heart, a feelgood romcom, was released in 2022, just months before President Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act, which ensured national recognition of same-sex marriages. The Wedding Banquet, however, arrives in a distinctly different social and political climate, one in which LGBTQ+ rights to marry and start families, both central to the film’s plot, are looking terrifyingly precarious under the Trump administration. “It puts a new filter on the film, I think, in terms of these things like marriage and parenthood for queer people being not as given as they were six months ago, which is so alarming,” Yang reflects. “But I think it also gives [these issues] this visual that I think people might find helpful,” he concludes, with a note of optimism.

Indeed, an air of optimism prevails over the entire course of our conversation. It would seem that Yang has emerged from whatever cloud of darkness he found himself under during his last stint in the UK. Just two weeks before we speak, he enjoyed a pinch-me moment when he worked with Lady Gaga when she guest-hosted Saturday Night Live, after which she also stopped by the Las Culturistas studio for a chat with Yang and Rogers about all things Mayhem.

Before we wrap up, I have to ask what it was like to work with Mother Monster herself. “It was amazing,” he gushes. “That’s someone who helps upload certain ideas into our minds and culture that cannot be taken away. That’s like, the most extreme version of what hopefully this movie can do, which is just an idea of what’s possible.” It must, I suggest, be very surreal to be sat opposite this titan of pop culture in a slick, professional podcast studio, considering the podcast’s modest beginnings. “It’s very surreal,” Yang agrees. “That gives me some semblance of like, ‘OK, this is not the ceiling. This is not the limit. We can just keep pushing.’”

The Wedding Banquet is released in cinemas on 9 May.