The Walking Dead star Steven Yeun told fans what makes his new Marvel role “really interesting” as he prepares to join the MCU.
Yeun became one of The Walking Dead‘s biggest names over its 12-season run, playing the role of Glenn Rhee alongside other future MCU stars like Danai Gurira and Ross Marquand.
He’ll join the cast of 2024’s Thunderbolts as the Phase 5 movie brings together Marvel’s darkest group of heroes to date, with Yeun reported to be playing quite the powerful character himself alongside these MCU mainstays.
Steven Yeun on ‘Interesting’ Marvel Role
Speaking during an actors’ roundtable conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Thunderbolts star Steven Yeun shared how interesting his new role in the MCU is following his long run on The Walking Dead.
Yeun noted how director Jake Schreier “saw [him] for this role” in the new MCU movie, with the actor feeling that it was “actually a really interesting role” in his mind that he wanted to explore further.
“It kind of came together in a weird way. Jake Schreier, who did episodes of ‘Beef,’ he got the gig to direct it and he kinda saw me for this role, and I read the role, and I was like ‘This is actually a really interesting role, I’d be down to explore this.'”
In terms of joining the expanding Marvel Universe, Yeun saw it as an opportunity to experience something new rather than “checking things off a bucket list:”
“I think it’s less about now checking things off a bucket list and more looking at an experience. It’s more like ‘Do I want to experience that?’ Putting it out is a whole nother thing that I’m gonna have to prepare for afterwards, but in the immediate, I’m just down to just experience that experience.”
With Steven Yeun most likely handling on the immense challenge of playing the MCU’s take on the superhero Sentry, he’ll certainly have plenty of interesting experiences embodying one of Marvel’s most powerful characters ever.
This will also be his second time taking on a superhero property after providing the leading voiceover role in Amazon Prime’s Invincible, and he even gets to take on somebody just as intense in terms of personality and powers.
Previously, Yeun explained that the “intentions of the particular character” he was cast as were “very clear,” with those intentions being what drew him to join the MCU in the first place.
And with rumors indicating that his Sentry will actually be the ultimate big bad that the Thunderbolts team up against, he’ll help to send the MCU’s Phase 5 slate out with a bang upon his arrival.
Thunderbolts is currently set to arrive in theaters on July 26, 2024.
