The New Yorker:

Steven Yeun recently made history as the first Asian-American to receive an Oscar nomination in the Best Actor category, for his role as Jacob Yi, a South Korean immigrant who relocates to rural Arkansas in the nineteen-eighties, in “Minari.” Although Yeun’s performance has been described with the strings of praise usually given to Oscar nominees, there is an integral quality to his acting—without which the film would lose its delicate verisimilitude of immigrant life—that has not been widely celebrated: Yeun’s accent, both when he is speaking English and when he is speaking Korean.

One way to look at Yeun’s film career in the U.S. and in South Korea is as a series of meta-castings. The actor was born in Korea but grew up in Michigan, mainly speaking English. He played a Korean-American boyfriend with a knack for malapropisms in the South Korean film “Like a French Film,” in 2015. (“Your Korean is really bad,” one character says to him.) In Bong Joon-ho’s film “Okja,” from 2017, he is a klutzy translator whose deliberate mistranslation provides a key plot point. In “Burning,” from 2018, Yeun is a mysterious character with lethal charm named Ben—a hint of ties to the West—whose voice never rises above the soothing murmurs of a psychopath (which Ben presumably is). Though the role required Yeun to act in Korean, the skill demanded was not so much phonetic expressiveness as an ability to bracket each moment with an unvarying tone that reflects Ben’s muted insanity. “Minari” presented Yeun a dual challenge: speaking Korean with a “perfect” accent, with full tonal shifts, and speaking accented English like a Korean immigrant would.

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