Steven Yeuns New Movie Proves The Walking Deads Glenn Mistake

Steven Yeun’s New Movie Proves The Walking Dead’s Glenn Mistake

Steven Yeun delivered a commanding performance in Minari, proving that his Walking Dead character Glenn’s two shocking deaths badly wasted his talent.



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Steven Yeuns New Movie Proves The Walking Deads Glenn Mistake

Steven Yeun is the star of the critically lauded new film Minari, and his performance proves that The Walking Dead misused the talented actor. The AMC show gave Yeun his breakout role as Glenn Rhee back in its first season. The zombie apocalypse molded the pizza delivery boy into a quick-thinking survivalist scavenger, but he never became callous or cruel. In spite of the sorry state of humanity, Glenn never lost his love of life, nor his compassion for others, making him a favorite character of the show’s audience.

Throughout The Walking Dead, Glenn brought a sense of humanity to the often bleak series. His Walking Dead romance with Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan), which led to the pair getting married and even conceiving a child together, provided a glimmer of hope for The Walking Dead’s desolate world. However, Glenn’s story started to meander. Season 6, Episode 3, “Thank You,” ended with Glenn seemingly being devoured by walkers, but Steven Yeun’s name was missing from the credits. The storyline was left hanging for several episodes before it was confirmed that Glenn actually survived, and the organs the walkers feasted on actually belonged to another survivor.

Leaving Glenn’s fake-out death unanswered for so long effectively killed any tension it may have caused, and reduced what should have been a devastating character death to a tawdry gory moment. To make matters worse, Glenn’s real demise was equally divisive. In Season 7, the core group of survivors found themselves in the clutches of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who brutally beat Glenn to death. Glenn’s death was extremely graphic, even by The Walking Dead’s standards, and cut off any character development he could have possibly undergone as a husband and father. The show wasted not only Glenn’s potential but also Steven Yeun’s talent on two cheap, shocking scenes. The high praise for his performance in Minari makes this blunder painfully obvious.

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Outside of The Walking Dead, Steven Yeun’s career has spanned genres and mediums, from the horror action-comedy Mayhem to the animated mecha series Voltron: Legendary Defender, proving his versatility. Yeun emerged as a critical darling after his turn in the 2018 South Korean psychological thriller Burning received near-universal acclaim. In Minari, Steven Yeun knocked it out of the park as Jacob Yi, a Korean immigrant trying to make it as a farmer in Arkansas. His performance was truthful and moving without crossing into melodrama. The American immigrant narrative is a familiar one, but Yeun avoided painting with overly broad strokes. Now, Minari is being applauded for its intimate portrait of a family chasing the American Dream, and Yeun has already been nominated for a SAG Award for his role.

Despite Glenn being one of The Walking Dead’s most beloved characters, he has perpetually pigeonholed as simply “the good guy.” By contrast, Jacob Yi was far more layered, and Yeun portrayed his intricacies masterfully. This proves Glenn could have been much more, but he was killed off before his own inner conflicts could be explored. By letting go of Glenn, The Walking Dead failed to realize what a star they had on their hands in Steven Yeun, and all of the possible directions he could have taken the character in.

As 2021’s award season has yet to completely kick into gear, it is unlikely that the accolades for Minari and Steven Yeun will stop coming anytime soon. It is up for a 2021 Golden Globe in the Best Foreign Language Film category, a move that garnered controversy. Although its main characters speak Korean, its story and production is distinctly American. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s decision was yet another example of Asian stories being sidelined in Hollywood, but Yeun himself is no stranger to these barriers. On The Walking Dead, Glenn Rhee was a brave action hero who defied stereotypical portrayals of Asian-American men in media. Losing him also meant Asian-American audiences lost a character they saw in themselves.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/minari-steven-yeun-walking-dead-glenn-death-bad/

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