I Followed Actor Steven Yeun on Twitter and Here's What Happened

Some time in the pre-pandemic era of social media, my friend Tim decided he was going to follow actor Armie Hammer on Twitter. He liked the handsome young actor from The Social Network and Call Me By Your Name and he thought it might be fun to see what the actor revealed about himself on Social Media. It turned out to be a lot. Though what Hammer was doing to the women he encountered was done in DM's and not open to the public at that time, Tim still found himself in a weird rabbit hole as Armie Hammer, even before his being outed as a sexual predator, is pretty weird.

That got me thinking, maybe if I found a celebrity I might find my own bizarre rabbit hole of weird behavior. Thus, I decided to follow the first random celebrity that the Twitter algorithms would recommend to me. The first name on the list was the former co-star of The Walking Dead and the recent co-star of the Oscar winning film, Minari. I am a big fan of Steven Yeun, aware of him despite not having watched a single moment of his television breakthrough in The Walking Dead. So, where did this rabbit hole take me? Read along to find out the terrifying but true details of Steven Yuen on Twitter.

Steven Yeun Spends Very Little Time Tweeting

If you were to tell me that Steven Yeun's Twitter was unquestionably a Bot, I would believe you. Yeah, Steven Yeun, it turns out, doesn't do much on social media. Though he allegedly was an early adopter to Twitter, his bio indicates that Yeun joined the platform in 2008, Yuen did not send his first tweet until January of 2021. That first Tweet was a random and slightly insufferable Retweet of the Kurt Vonnegut Quote bot: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Often, individuals trying out social media for the first time will use a quote from a famous intellectual as a way of setting expectations for those who choose to follow them. People like Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Gandhi, are still represented on Twitter despite their lives pre-dating the launch of the site. Associating yourself with "famous author A" looks good on Social Media, doesn't require vetting by your publicist, and, hopefully, creates an association between you-the Re-Tweeter- and the highly respected and well thought of author portrayed in the ReTweet. I know this because it's what I did as well.

Nope!

Though he's not great for someone looking for a weird insight into a celebrity, Steven Yeun appears to be a publicists' dream. After retweeting that Kurt Vonnegut quote on January 31st, 2021, Yeun didn't Tweet again until more than a year later. That Tweet was another Retweet, this time of a Tweet by Jordan Peele, the man who directed Steven Yuen in the ingenious horror thriller, Nope which was released this year. Yeun's social media seems like it is being run from a basement at his agent's office because everything Yeun Tweets or Retweets these days is a marketing Tweet for whatever he's working on.

Yeun's few Tweets in 2022 came before the release of Nope and were entirely about promoting the movie and urging people to see it. Yuen co-stars in Nope as a former child star with a deeply scarred back story who finds himself thriving as the operator of a strange and eerie amusement park. Yuen is terrific in the role and leveraging his more than 1 million followers to drum up interest in Nope was a both a good idea from a marketing standpoint and further evidence that Yuen is not likely to be running his own Twitter account given his penchant for Retweets over any Tweet of his own origin.

On the Bright Side

Steven Yeun can be commended for not being a person who is Very Online, social media can be a cesspool even for the most beloved of stars. If he's got an intern Retweeting his projects into eternity while he makes better use of his time, good for him. We should all have such discipline. It's a positive as well as because of these promotional, marketing Tweets, I learned quite excitedly, that Yuen's Nope character is getting his own origin series with the blessing of creator Jordan Peele and the backing of the brilliant content house A24. It gets better, Yeun's series, Jupiter's Claim, named for Yuen's character, Jupe, will be over seen by The Daniels, the team behind my all time favorite movie, Everything Everytwhere All at Once.

And, in another example of Yeun's efficient approach to social media, I learned that Yuen helped to produce a new and very intriguing documentary called Free Chol Soo Lee. In his pinned Tweet from August of this year, Yuen shared that the documentary about an unfairly imprisoned man named Chol Soo Lee would be released via the streaming service Mubi. Free Chol Soo Lee is a fascinating and horrifying story of the failure of our justice system and what it took to try and correct the injustice. You can see it now via Mubi and I would not have noticed it without the banal Pinned marketing tweet of Steven Yeun. Yuen may not be a fascinating rabbit hole of celebrity dysfunction but he's efficient in his promotional efforts. I can admire that.

Find my archive of more than 20 years and nearly 2000 movie reviews at SeanattheMovies.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter at PodcastSean. Follow the archive blog for daily reviews of the movies of the 2000s at SeanattheMovies on Twitter. You can listen to me interview directors on my YouTube channel, Sean at the Movies on YouTube and listen to me talk about movies on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast. If you've enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to my work here on Vocal. And, if you'd like to support my work you can make a monthly pledge or leave a one tip here on Vocal. Thanks!