James Harden had come under fire in recent days after a video showed him maskless at some sort of event in Houston. While initial reports claimed he was at a strip club, Harden claimed that was not the case, and he was at a venue celebrating the business successes of a friend.
Of course, while some people were hung up on the strip club element of this, the real issue was that Harden went somewhere without a mask. Even though he had previously tested positive for and beaten COVID-19, the league announced on Wednesday that The Beard was, indeed, in violation of its health and safety protocols put forth for the upcoming season.
It had previously been announced that both the NBA and the Rockets would investigate the video of Harden, which popped up on the site Black Sports Online. It is unclear what role Harden played in incriminating himself here — he posted a statement to his Instagram account explaining what happened and gave away that he did, indeed, go out maskless — nor is it clear if he will face any sort of punishment. As Steve Aschburner of NBA.com wrote out after the protocols were released, “Players violating the safety guidelines may face a loss of pay proportionate to any lost availability due to quarantines or reinstatement steps. Other penalties may include formal warnings, fines, suspensions or educational sessions.”
There was almost never a believable scenario in which the NBA would get through the 2020-21 season without postponements due to COVID-19 testing and contact tracing protocols, but the league certainly was hoping their first postponed game would not happen on the first full night of the season.
However, that’s exactly the case for the Houston Rockets, as their opening night game with the Oklahoma City Thunder is having to be postponed to a later date due to a positive test on the Rockets and contact tracing that has ruled out half of the team for Wednesday night’s game.
Houston is the first NBA team unable to field a roster. Their opener against OKC is postponed, NBA says pic.twitter.com/4SruDxf4v9
The hope, of course, is that the positive/inconclusive test results are limited to the three from Wednesday, because a positive test rules a player out for 10 days at minimum with no exercise, with two days of individual workouts following that are required to be supervised after. The Rockets next game on the schedule is not until Saturday in Denver to face the Nuggets, and the testing results over the next few days will be critical to whether they can field a team for that game.
It’s dusk, cumulonimbus clouds drowsily piled along the horizon in a foaming rush and backlit by the sun sliding behind downtown Miami’s tidy snarl of green glass towers. A wall of living humidity waiting to violently split but for now lulled in the heat and tiered in periwinkle, electric coral, creamy bronze. Or else it’s a dawn breaking early and easy across South Beach, light trickling over the palms, early risers lifting their bodies in supplication to the clammy chin-up bars of beach gyms, the chipping Deco pastels, sun spreading slow and sure across the interminably cerulean Biscayne Bay. It could be afternoon, too, light so concentrated that the sky feels like one giant sun reflector folded up around the edges of Little Haiti and Coconut Grove, the air so hot, holding so much moisture, that it shimmers and slinks. Whatever the time, there’s a car, maybe convertible, easing out across the MacArthur Causeway where it curves like an arm at the elbow and speeds west, toward the city.
The highway hopscotches through manmade islands plunked in well-tended clusters, leisure boats dwarfed by the idling behemoths of cruise ships sitting empty and eerie along the Port of Miami. A neat line of royal palms dotting the median strip sends down splashes of intermittent shade in lazy Morse onto the driver, who blinks dreamily and hugs the car close to the low wall dividing asphalt and an undulating expanse of chalky turquoise water.
In this pleasant daze, as traffic loosens and slows, the driver drifts. Maybe to his first game in late October, a debut that felt, as long in the making as it was, markedly unhurried — 21 points, five rebounds, three grinning steals. An easy unfurling of expectation. It’s possible that here the driver chuckles for how Bam Adebayo and Derrick Jones Jr., smirking and sly, crept up behind him, Jimmy Butler, as he matter-of-factly explained to a national broadcaster about team will, a collective sense of “want to.” It showed the initial encapsulation of Butler in Miami: a person made to slip between a relentless, single-minded drive to work, to win, to always do more, and the easy charm of making it look like less. He was the incandescent hum of South Beach neons as much as he was the gauzy churn of the city on the other side of the water.
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“He’s a steamroller tonight,” was the color commentary line early last February, as Butler burned down the middle of the paint. He split Shake Milton and Joel Embiid by turning his whole body, coming at them sideways, taking two steps to the basket on tip-toes and still sinking the shot, gaining the foul. But the line was all wrong because he’s never so brutish, his footwork not the flattening kind. Butler picks the tightest spots because he can split them wide open, pressing the defender to stand where he wants them, like the mark on a theatre stage put there by a finicky director.
His head and chest fakes, the shimmy of his shoulders, are often imperceptible unless you’re a foot away and staring hard, which hapless defenders usually are, losing him in the lulling seconds it takes for them to lock on. Butler invites contact if only so he can spring away from it at the precise moment it will play in his favor, lithe and fluid as water dripping down tangles of palm fronds when the South Florida sky finally breaks. Butler took 69.3 free throws per 100 shots from the field last season, dipping to 66.0 per 100 in the playoffs, presumably because he was busy creating critical moments for his team. It is a draining and smart disruption, getting in the way of an opposing team’s budding rhythm at either end of the floor.
In the car, Jimmy Butler is maybe struck by how he’s suddenly hovering high over the Bay, floating toward the city, so imperceptible is the lifting incline of the freeway. This is the feeling opponents have, of suddenly being in over their heads against a disciplined, grinding Heat team that will outwork any inch they are allowed. Butler’s trips to the line punctuate a larger point, just how careful he can be on the floor. Committing only 1.6 fouls per 36 minutes, the light work of Butler’s bodying comes more as a spectral possession than an overpowering by force. Still, 2019-2020 was the most physical of his career, with 4.8 defensive rebounds and 6.7 total rebounds per game, he was seeing reflections of himself in the glass he was up against more than any other year before it. It was the same apparitional sense Butler left players with, of seeing something there, then gone, in the corners of their eyes after the ball, once on the way to their waiting hands, was halfway down the floor and about to be dunked by an already airborne Butler.
Fifth in the league in steals, his first run with the Heat was a season of ransacking. He deflected it from Giannis Antetokounmpo’s impossibly long reach, poked it away from Embiid, lifted it from Zach LaVine once while he was mid-spin under the rim, chased down Norman Powell to tip it toward Miami’s basket and Adebayo, waiting to catch the ball and volley it back to Butler, turning on a dime to sprint for the slam.
Not to put too fine a point on it but the way Butler moves in Miami is it’s own small wonder. Freed from so many mental and physical limitations — the heft of likability, of trying to convince every front office before Pat Riley’s that he was someone to place their trust firmly in and now, against the Heat’s exacting physical system, Butler’s own unrelenting routines are just status quo — he plays with the kind of grace and ease that comes after years of understanding that while there’s everything to lose he was the only person who could opt to fold, and he’d never let himself do that. Butler’s long-held loner persona made for a good villain, and on court it kept opponents guessing, but it was a necessary measure of self-control as much as protection. To watch his warmth now, that coy smirk smoldering in a climate where hurricane season lets up as soon as basketball starts, is the attrition of so many years spent steeling himself for the next sloughed away by sun, salt and moisture, given the same treatment as every other monument in Miami.
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Atmospheric considerations extend to the teammates Butler’s now surrounded by. Frenetic and obsessive as him, enamored with the leader they’ve, it must seem at times, divined in Butler. Erik Spoelstra said he used to imagine what it would be like to coach Jimmy Butler, and now he has Butler’s voice barking back at him almost every day of the week. The joy his teammates took in lobbing him half court passes, in looking for Butler knowing they could hardly remember a time when his eyes weren’t on them, too, even if it had only been a few months, was palpable. His first with the Heat was the most generous season of Butler’s career, points per game hanging around 19.9 but assists at a career-high of six per game. He was the benevolent moment maker, urging his teammates on as best he knew how, relentless heckling off the court and hurling the ball at them in the brightest slice of a second on it.
“What surprised me the most were his intentions,” Duncan Robinson told SI this preseason on the way Butler arrived in Miami last year, not so much testing as already at work, “It wasn’t coming from a malicious place. It was coming from a place of, ‘Let me see what we got here.’”
Asked about his teammates after the Heat’s first practice clear of the preseason, Butler smiled, “The guys look real comfortable.” Asked specifically about Adebayo’s growth as a leader and Butler relaxed more than he tends to when talking about himself, “He’s more comfortable getting on people because he realizes that he can do it, and everybody’s looking at him because he cares that much.”
While true, it also sounded like the way Butler’s been described. The difference being that in Miami, finally, it’s a compliment.
“I love to see it,” he continued, “I love his competitive edge, the way he’s going at myself, the way he’s going at anybody in practice. It’s huge. It’s been a big part of his growth. And he’s going to continue to do that,” he pauses, his voice perceptibly softens, “he will.”
“We can win,” Butler went on to say, faint remnants of his Texan drawl stretching the “i” in win so it became “we.”
“I don’t know if too many people are listening or hearing me, but we can.”
When Butler says win he means everything. A championship, to get back to where they had it in reach is what he’s more interested in. When asked about this season he appears bored already. Not that he’s over it, that a season, however untraditional this one will be, isn’t a necessary part of the process, but that the regular season is merely the mechanism, something so familiar to him that its rhythms come as easily as slipping into the driver’s seat and pulling onto the road. Because the Finals, for Butler, were not the final picture. They were the frame. When he talks about that six game fight against the Lakers, he is already looking through these months ahead toward what he sees there so clearly at the end — another shot at it.
“In the end, we get another crack at it now. That’s what I’m locked in on,” Butler says, “I didn’t have to make it to the Finals and lose it, to realize how bad I wanted to win it.”
What that performance meant for Butler’s career, securing his spot as a superstar caliber player with the prowess to back it up was a culmination for any who still doubted what he was capable of. In some ways, Butler’s ascension last season eclipsed the Lakers title, became the bigger, more compelling story. But not for Butler, because it also left him bereft of the only thing he wanted.
Asked if he rewatched any of those Finals games and he almost seems offended. “No,” he says firmly, adding, “And if I was to rewatch, I wouldn’t rewatch the games that we won. I would look at the ones that we didn’t.”
What discourse and analysis misses with the steady climb of Butler’s career is that he revels in working, methodically, toward what he wants. It took eight years for him to get here, at the crest of the road offering the highest vantage point. There’s no reason for him to rev the engine for optics, for bravado, when every mile but that very last one is so familiar. Whether or not he really ripped the rearview mirror out of his car years ago hardly matters because from this point, with the team he has, career he’s built and the fuel to finally get what he’s always wanted. All it takes quick glance cast over a shoulder, out the driver’s side window rolled down for the breeze off Biscayne, or ahead at the short distance Butler has left to go, and all of it, the thousand precise points of memory, are lit up like sun spooling out across clear water.
It’s been pretty firmly established by now that 50 Cent has little to no interest in participating in a Verzuz battle. He’s already turned down a challenge from his number one foe Ja Rule repeatedly and resorted to outright mocking T.I. for throwing down the gauntlet. It’s safe to say fans can likely give up any hopes of seeing him play his hits across from any other challengers as well. However, that hasn’t stopped him from chiming in on battles he’d like to watch — especially when he’s asked.
During a recent live stream to promote his Branson Cognac on Instagram, he was asked which artists would make ideal matchups for either Drake or Lil Wayne. Rather than positing other artists to go against either rapper, he explained why he thinks they would actually make the perfect matchup for each other. “The best thing would probably be Lil Wayne vs. Drake,” he opined. “Because it’s two styles, two different styles in the same period so it will be entertaining enough to watch both of them.”
However, “It won’t be negative, so it won’t get the same attention as ‘I’m smoking on Pookie Loc,’” he warned, referencing an attention-grabbing moment from the Gucci Mane vs. Jeezy matchup that saw Gucci taunt his opponent with a reminder that Gucci had shot and killed one of Jeezy’s friends in self-defense during a home invasion. Charges against Gucci were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Drake vs. Wayne would have the potential to be an interesting matchup — they’re already planning a possible sequel to their joint tour — but 50 may be reckoning their respective eras inaccurately. Wayne had a solid decade of monstrous hits before he ever unleashed Drake on the world and while the two easily have way more than 20 tracks between them for a face-off, many of their fan-favorite songs are collaborations between the two, while Drake has clearly had way more impactful songs in the past 10 years. Would “Drop It Like It’s Hot” compare to “In My Feelings?”
Actually… now I do want to see this one. Swizz, set it up.
The Midnight Sky (Netflix flm) — George Clooney’s got a Netflix movie coming, y’all. He’s also got a David Letterman beard while playing a cancer-afflicted, lonely scientist in the Arctic who’s also struggling to survive on post-apocalyptic Earth while attempting to help save some astronauts. The screenplay hails from The Revenant‘s Mark L. Smith, so The Revenant + Gravity? That sounds epic, Oscar-y, and like a different kind of late-December movie than we’re used to from Netflix (Bright, Bird Box, 6 Underground). Let’s hope we don’t see any angry (polar) bears entering the equation.
Industry (HBO Max) — Two episodes are on tap for the Succession-esque series for the younger crowd, and everything’s coming to a boil with a Reduction in Force Day looming toward the graduates, who are all attempting to prove that they’ve got what it takes to become a permanent asset to Pierpoint. There’s a passive-aggressive dinner party, an unexpected meeting, and all manner of drama. In other words, sit back and enjoy all the resentment and jealousy and be happy that (at least) this stress isn’t your own. It’s the small mercies in 2020 that go a long way.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix film) — Chadwick Boseman left this world far too soon, but before he departed, he left us a lasting performance alongside Oscar winner Viola Davis. She portrays the legendary “Mother of the Blues,” and he’s her ambitious trumpeteer, Levee. Together with his fellow musicians, they will conquer a blazing hot 1920s Chicago recording session, and Levee will help inspire his colleagues to unleash truth-revealing stories that will alter their lives and, possibly, history itself. It’s a testament to the blues’ transformative power and adapted from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson’s play of the same name with Denzel Washington onboard as producer.
The Mandalorian: Chapter 11 (Disney+ series) — The season finale arrives with Baby Yoda meeting an iconic character from the Star Wars universe and a post-credits scene that’s causing some panic in the fandom. However, Baby Yoda still has a Christmas Day present, so check in for that as well.
The Stand: Premiere (CBS All Access) — Constant Readers will appreciate this fresh take on Stephen King’s epic novel, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest post-apocalyptic works of fiction. Those who are afraid of checking into pandemic land can rest assured that the show feels like an unlikely antidote to the hellish things that humanity has seen this year. The show also goes non-linear in order to avoid wading through the superflu like the book did, since this isn’t really a “pandemic” story but one about the rebuilding of society and the archetypal battle between good and evil.
The Flight Attendant (HBO Max series) — It’s Season 1 finale time, y’all, so who’s the murderer? Kaley Cuoco busts away from the The Big Bang Theory with a fun flight of (darkly comedic) fancy. She plays portrays an airline stewardess whose international jet-setting lifestyle includes falling into bed in various countries with various handsome men. During the course of one particularly fateful encounter, Cassie wakes up next to the dead body of a one-night stand. She spends the rest of the series attempting to clean sh*t up. It is such a blast, truly.
I Used to Go Here (HBO Max) — Gillian Jacobs and Jemaine Clement star in this Andy Samberg-produced movie about a 30-something novelist (Kate Conklin) who may be a one-hit wonder. Following a traumatic breakup, she ends up heading back to her alma mater, where she finds herself entrenched in all kinds of college-age drama after an old professor invites her for a homecoming.
Poster debuts tend to not be that thrilling, except to maybe die-hardiest fans and industry types. But on Wednesday, there was one that sent social media into a frenzy. Variety meant to publish an awards-themed ad for Cherry, the new crime drama starring Tom Holland as an opioid-addicted vet-turned-thief, and which is also the Russo Brothers’ gritty follow-up to no less than Avengers: Endgame. There was just one problem: The title was inexplicably illegible.
It’s admittedly an otherwise eye-catching poster — minimalist and bold, comprised of a close-up of its buzz-cutted star looking ragged, caked in crimson red. But below the words “Best Picture” were an abstract array of what looked vaguely like English letters, forming what may or may not be a word. Did it say “Cherk”? Maybe it’s our hero’s name? Or if you squint hard did it in deed say “Cherry”? It seemed like the kind of stylized silliness dreamt up by a fearless graphic designer, hoping to get our attention.
The truth was far more bizarre than the image itself: According to Apple, who are releasing the film on their streamer in February, there was a glitch in viewing the PDF of the poster that warped the text, but only when viewed in Chrome. Variety was quick to put out an explanation as well.
Variety apologizes for our mistake in the digital misprint of the ad for the film “Cherry.” This is not up to our standards. Here is the corrected version of the ad pic.twitter.com/yRr1uEfMNo
Kudos, by the way, to the devoted cinephile who took the time to go into Photoshop and make a Cherry gag involving Abbas Kiarostami’s great A Taste of Cherry.
Rap pioneer John “Ecstasy” Fletcher, of the seminal hip-hop trio Whodini, has reportedly died at the age of 56, according to The Roots drummer Questlove, who posted a fond farewell to the iconic rapper on Instagram. “One love to Ecstasy of the legendary Whodini,” wrote Questlove, who did not cite a news source, but is well-connected in the music business and is usually among the first to react to news involving old-school rap heroes. “This man was legendary and a pivotal member of one of the most legendary groups in hip-hop.”
Quest isn’t exaggerating. Formed in 1982, Whodini was one of the early hip-hop groups that emerged during the nascent genre’s initial explosion of well-known hits. Along with Jalil Hutchins and DJ Drew Carter (aka Grandmaster Dee), Fletcher’s foundational contributions to the culture included the hit records “Friends” and “Freaks Come Out at Night.” They were among the first groups to add R&B to their songs, as well as the first to release a music video, which was for their song “Magic’s Wand.” They also pioneered the incorporation of dancers to their live shows — dancers who would later go on to form the group UTFO. They were honored in 2007 at the fourth Vh1 Hip Hop Honors.
Rest In Peace “Ecstasy” – John Fletcher – of WHODINI .
Another blow in a bad year. John Fletcher aka Ex of #whodini has just passed. The trio, along with producer Larry Smith, made the first hip-hop records that black radio embraced. Personality, humor and hooks.
Whodini carried the flag for the genre of Rap and were dominant between the years of 1983 and 1987. That’s 5 straight years. By 1988, it was clear they were going to have a tough time competing against Golden Era artists & groups. Without Whodini, we never MAKE IT to a Golden Era
I say this a lot about Whodini, but they don’t get the props they deserve because Sugar Hill (1979-1982) and Def Jam (1984-) mythology sucks up all the air. Never forget they were *second billed* on the Raising Hell ’86 tour over both LL Cool J *and* Beastie Boys #RIPEcstasypic.twitter.com/pNEw5sVyzZ
Ecstasy’s death is being mourned by some of hip-hop’s most prominent voices, including historians Nelson George and Dart Adams. His contributions to the culture will be remembered fondly and he will be missed.
News of a mutated version of COVID-19 in Britain and South Africa is causing alarm across the world. It’s believed the new version is twice as infectious as previous strains.
News of the new strain caused France to ban travelers and freight from the UK earlier this week unless they could provide results of a negative COVID-19 test conducted in the previous 72 hours.
This resulted in a massive backup of trucks at the crossing between Dover and the French city of Calais while drivers waited for their tests to come back. The UK deployed 170 military officials to test the truckers as they waited at the port.
UK: More than 2,800 trucks stranded in Kent amid COVID border chaos https://t.co/rmHzbHNVig
“We see no tests coming, no water, no food, (and) we are crammed on top of each other,” Vanessa Ibarlucea, spokeswoman for the French National Road Haulage Federation, told CNN.
“We are expecting some drivers to be stuck on the other side for the holidays,” she said.
The unexpected back up caused many truckers to blow through their provisions in an area where there are no easily accessible grocery stores or restaurants. So two groups of Sikhs, the Sikh community at the Guru Nanak Darbar temple in Gravesend, Kent, and NGO Khalsa Aid, jumped into action to feed the hungry truckers.
800 Hot meals ready for the truckers stranded in #Kent due to #OperationStack !
Our thx to the #Kent Sikh commun… https://t.co/UaOZjaFo6E
“It’s horrible for [the drivers], there’s nothing here – no food, no shops – it’s like a prison for them. We can’t sit back and do nothing,” Ravinder Singh, founder of Khalsa Aid, which helped coordinate the deliveries, told the BBC.
The response was an expression of the second golden rule of Sikhism, “sharing one’s things with everyone including the less fortunate.” Sikh’s have a long-standing tradition of feeding the hungry regardless of their caste, creed, race, or religion.
“We in Sikhism, we have the concept of langar, which means community kitchen,” Singh told Reuters. “We are British Sikhs and the least we can do is to practice our seasonal goodwill: two days from Christmas we have people on our soil who are homeward bound and do not know what is happening.”
“How did the UK’s Sikh community respond after hundreds of transport trucks were stranded on the roadway due to bor… https://t.co/osC8nIgrpN
“To see a solitary truck driver in his cabin on a horrible wet evening on the side of the motorway, it drives you to do more for them,” Singh said. “They were very appreciative but you could see they were down as they were unsure if they would get home for Christmas.”
All in all, the communities delivered 500 chickpea curries and 300 mushroom and pasta dishes to the hungry drivers on Tuesday.
Late Tuesday night, France and the UK struck a deal to allow truck drivers and French citizens to cross the border. The move comes after the border chaos sparked panic over food and medicine shortages in the UK.
The new coronavirus variant has caused British Prime minister Boris Johnson to announce stricter lockdowns in the country starting December 26. London and the south-eastern part of the country will enter “Tier 4” lockdown in which non-essential shops, hairdressers, and entertainment venues will be temporarily closed.
JuJu Smith-Schuster is a budding star in the NFL, both for his on-field production as wide receiver for the Steelers as well as his ever-growing presence on social media and with numerous sponsorship deals. Over the course of this season, Smith-Schuster has been posting TikToks of himself dancing on the midfield logo in pregame warmups, which, for anyone that knows how oddly seriously NFL teams take the sanctity of The Logo, has been made out to be a sign of disrespect.
Smith-Schuster has insisted its not and is just something he’s doing for his fans, but this past week, it all came to a head when the Steelers lost to the Bengals on Monday Night Football and Smith-Schuster’s pregame dancing became a hot topic of conversation. Smith-Schuster had one of many Steelers turnovers on the night, leading directly to a Bengals score when he fumbled after getting lit up by Bengals DB Vonn Bell, who seemed to relish the opportunity to give JuJu the business.
Afterward, his Steelers teammates were asked about the pregame TikToks and what they thought about it, and as it became a story that was impacting his teammates, it became clear to Smith-Schuster that it was time to put a stop to it.
Asked JuJu about the dancing and if things like Vonn Bell’s extra-hard hit on him made him reevaluate the decision to dance on the logo.
He said he’s going to stop for the betterment of the team.
He says he’s not changing who he is and will continue doing his thing on TikTok, but just won’t be doing them in pregame at midfield anymore “for the betterment of myself and the team.” He notes he did it while they were undefeated and while they had some losses, but losing to the Bengals with Ryan Finley at quarterback will always lead to some serious self-reflection and contemplation of how you can change.
As is always the case in sports, what you do off the field only really matters to fans when things are going poorly on the field, and, as such, this was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back in terms of some backlash towards Smith-Schuster. He became the easy scapegoat for Pittsburgh’s swoon, as it’s much easier to say, “hey, his pregame dancing is angering the other team,” than it is to say, “hey, Ben Roethlisberger might not be very good.”
Fans of The Walking Dead might like to think that Steven Yeun — who played Glenn Rhee on the series for seven seasons — basically began his career on the long-running AMC series. A look at his IMDb page, in fact, might suggest as much. Before being cast on The Walking Dead, his biggest screen credit was as a guest star on one episode of Big Bang Theory.
After six years on The Walking Dead, a variety of roles in indie flicks (like Okja and Mayhem), Yeun is getting a lot of attention for his role in Minari, which won both the grand jury and audience prizes at Sundance this year. Yeun is also poised to be nominated for an Oscar for the role, although the movie itself is being unfairly sidelined as a foreign-language film by the Golden Globes.
What many people may not realize, however, is that before landing his gig on The Walking Dead, Yeun’s career path was in comedy. He studied improv in college in Michigan and then moved to Chicago to pursue a career in comedy through Second City, breaking into the troupe after nailing his audition with a sketch written by Steve Carell. Yes, that Steve Carell, from The Office.
The Carell sketch audition got him into Second City, after which he toured the country with the troupe alongside the likes of former SNL star Vanessa Bayer. “What I realize now about Steven is something they used to tell us in Chicago all the time, that the best sketch comics are often just amazing actors. Some of the stuff we were doing was extremely stupid, and he had such great comedic timing,” Bayer told Variety.
Yeun hit a wall at Second City, however, because he didn’t see a way into SNL for Asian men. “I didn’t see a pathway through Second City to get to ‘SNL,’ probably because there was nobody in front of me to lead the way. I was also thinking, who could I even play in popular culture that wasn’t an accented foreigner?” Yeun told Variety.
Yeun, however, has come to appreciate Bowen Yang — SNL’s first Asian American cast member — as much as the rest of us over the past year. “What’s been nice about recontextualizing that moment is to see what Bowen Yang is doing now on ‘SNL.’ He’s not playing a stereotype, he’s owning the multitudes of what Asian Americans can be or how Asian people are seen. I think that’s the thing that I wasn’t aware of or maybe brave enough to contend with at the time.”
The only logical thing for SNL to do at this point, of course, is to ask Yeun to host. He’s got a comedy background; Minari will be released wide in February; and Yeun will almost certainly be a huge topic of conversation around the Oscars. Do it, Lorne. It’d be one hell of a way to kick off the New Year.
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