The movie Steven Yeun is ashamed to love: “I’m gonna be so judged for this”
When a meek delivery boy character first turned up in AMC’s The Walking Dead, nobody could have predicted the insane career he would go on to have. Steven Yeun, who played Glen Rhee across six seasons of the zombie show, is a phenomenal talent.
He became the first East Asian-American actor to be nominated for a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar, thanks to his exceptional performance in Minari. Now, he’s a bona fide superstar. Not bad for a guy who made his TV debut on The Big Bang Theory.
The South Korean-born star has spoken many times about his all-time favourite films, and during an interview with Rotten Tomatoes in 2017, he ran down five of his most beloved choices. Instead of the usual fare that these countdowns throw up – The Godfather, Goodfellas, Citizen Kane, etc – Yeun provided some very unique options. He went for the cult classic comedy Office Space, the animated Transformers movie from the 1980s, and Memories of Murder, a film from his frequent collaborator Bong Joon Ho.
For his most outlandish pick, however, he opted for a film that nobody in a million years would call ‘one of the greats’. By Yeun’s own admission, however, he watched it at a very pivotal time in his life.
“I’m gonna be so judged for this, but The Sandlot is a pick for me,” he revealed. “You can watch that movie again, and that movie is perfect. I mean, it gets trashed on, maybe, by adults because people think it’s for kids, but that movie’s amazing. Every single one of those child actors were incredible in it, the narration was awesome, Denis Leary’s in that movie… There’s so many amazing people that were part of it, and it was just a rinky-dink kids’ baseball movie, but it meant so much.”
Released in 1993, The Sandlot is a sports comedy set in the world of youth baseball, which follows a new kid in town (Tom Guiry) who joins a ragtag group of kids who form their own team, and instead of a traditional ‘shambolic team goes on to win the big game’ narrative, a staple of this sort of film, this one has a much looser structure. The kids are more focused on having fun and adventures than progressing through a tournament or a league. There’s a subplot involving a massive dog that keeps eating all of their balls, owned by a character played by the late, great James Earl Jones.
Despite Yeun’s protestations, The Sandlot actually did ok for itself. It wasn’t a runaway critical success, but it certainly didn’t embarrass itself. The biggest problem it ran into was a defamation lawsuit. A childhood friend of director David Mickey Evans claimed that an embarrassing character in the movie was based on him. Unfortunately for that guy, the court found in favour of the filmmakers.
Yeun first saw The Sandlot when he was a kid, which stuck with him for the rest of his life, and we’ve all got movies like that, ones that nobody else has even heard of, yet, because we watched them as children, they mean the world to us.
