When Steven Yeun, a Korean-American, was nominated for an Oscar on Monday for his performance in “Minari”, The Times and others declared that he made history as the first Asian American nominated in the leading actor category.
Not everyone agreed.
Check the internet and you will find the following people listed along with Yeun among the winners of the Asian Oscar and nominated for best actor: Yul Brynner, Topol, Ben Kingsley and Riz Ahmed, another nominee in 2021.
All of these men have ties to Asia in some way. But as a continent, Asia is so large that it contains China and more than three-quarters of Russia, as well as a myriad of smaller nations, including Japan and the Koreas.
Then there is the South Asian subcontinent, home to Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In addition, there is a caveat that the person is Asian American.
That’s where the confusion lies about whether Yeun, who is a descendant of East Asia and raised in the United States, was actually the first Asian-American lead actor nominated.
Brynner, who took home the best actor trophy in 1957 for his role in “The King and Me”, was born Yuliy Borisovich Briner in the far east of Russia. According to “Yul: The Man Who Would Be King”, a biography written by his son, Rock Brynner, the actor was half Swiss, half Tartar and born in Vladivostok.
Yul Brynner with his 1957 Oscar for best actor for “The King and I.”
(John Malmin / Los Angeles Times)
He had a paternal grandfather who came from Switzerland, a paternal grandmother who was supposedly the daughter of a Mongolian prince – hence Tartar – and a mother who was Russian.
Rock Brynner wrote that, at one point, his father adopted a “public disinformation policy” about his heritage, adding to the confusion – with some of these false details appearing even in The Times’ obituary about the Oscar winner. Yul’s father left his mother when the actor was 4 and moved with his children to China a few years later, wrote Rock Brynner, so it is almost certain that she was not a gypsy who died in childbirth, like the death of 1985 states.
In addition, although he immigrated to America in the 1940s, Brynner eventually moved to his grandfather’s native country, Switzerland, and in 1965 renounced American citizenship after tax disputes with the IRS. So, not very Asian, and not really American a few years after his Oscar victory.
Topol, the Israeli actor nominated for the best actor award for “A Violinist on the Roof” in 1971, is also on an internet list of Asian actors nominated for an Oscar. It turns out that he was born Chaim Topol in Tel Aviv, the son of a father who was of Russian descent. He was technically a descendant of people who lived on the Asian continent, even though they were Russians. He was never an American citizen.
Kingsley, four times nominated as the main actor who won in 1983 for “Gandhi”, had a Kenyan father of South Asian Indian descent and his mother was English. This combination makes the British actor partly Asian, and also non-American. We move on.
What about Riz Ahmed? Like Kingsley, the British actor of “Sound of Metal” also falls into the non-American category, despite his origin in South Asia (Pakistani). He is the first Muslim nominated for a leading actor, however.
Meanwhile, Yeun, previously known for playing Glenn Rhee in AMC’s “The Walking Dead”, was born in South Korea, then immigrated with his family to Saskatchewan in Canada and finally to Troy, Michigan, where he was raised. Asian? Check. American? Check.
So there you have it: Steven Yeun is in fact the first Asian-American actor to be nominated for a leading actor Oscar.
Now, he is the first leading actor nominated to have killed zombies for six seasons before I get a nod from Oscar? You will have to find out for yourself.