The Saturday Night Live star, 30, is having a breakout season on the venerable sketch comedy.
We catch him in the middle of the frenzy.
It’s hard to say where it’s possible for you to catchBowen Yangthese days.
Lia Clay Miller for EW
Filming the second season ofAwkwafina Is Nora From Queens?
Recording an episode of his podcastLas Culturistasalongside cohost Matt Rogers?
He’ll do that this week, too.
Lia Clay Miller for EW
And what of his biggest ongoing project,Saturday Night Live?
Deep breath: He’s nearing the end of an intensive three-week stretch of shows.
For Yang, this is what busy looks like comfortable.
It’s also rather revolutionary.
“If it’s not going to be us, then who will it be?”
he recalls them thinking.
“It was a very emotional experience to write.
I had spent seven hours on that first draft.
It was really hard….
I had never been that microscopic with a piece more than I [was] with this.”
That the piece generated such a passionate, lasting response taught Yang some lessons about his public-facing role.
“The whole point of the piece was we have to move past cursory acknowledgment of the problem.
And that was the only thing I was in in the whole show.
That messed with me.
I just had a million different thoughts swirling around.”
He continues, “That was my distance that I knew I had to create.
Normally I’m all about wanting to know what people thought about a sketch that I was in.
There was a shift, and I think it was a healthy one.”
(Over a month later, Yang’s Twitter account remains inactive.)
(The Iceberg booked this interview to promote his new EDM fantasia album,notto rehash old news.)
By the next morning, the sketch would trend on Twitter from coast to coast, a smash hit.
(He joined the series in 2018 as a writer before shifting to the cast the next year.)
“The fact that Kristen Wiig is telling me that she also had bad weeks is crazy!
She didn’t have to ask me, ‘Are you having a good time?'”
He’s already holding on to special memories, from his earliest days on the show.
Yang proudly describes it as “about the intersection of being horny and sad.”
“You’re currently talking to me as I mourn that loss,” he’d said.
As fate would have it: Yes, they do.
