I think we know him. The sketch is called The Humidifier, and this was tough to track down. Oh, man, got what but we reached out to the second city archivist who was generous enough to supply us with a copy of the sketch if you want to yeah

do it for the listeners love that sketch it's not me though right we're gonna do it oh we're gonna to do the sketch. Oh my God. This is so cool. All right. Oh my God. Holy smokes. Wow. All right. Cold reading. This is fantastic. No world did you think? No, no, no, no. This is a dream. Why don't you

set it up for people? Cool.

It's a Christmas. This is from a great, great review called Take Me Out to the Balkans. It says Christmas lights up on Fran

and Steve. Now, just for context, Steve and Fran are boyfriend, girlfriend, and they're exchanging gifts or something like that?

Yeah, Steve is coming over to his girlfriend's house to exchange gifts

for Christmas. I'll play the girlfriend. All right. I'm not going to do a voice. Okay, yeah. It's going to sound like this.

I haven't really

rehearsed this, but okay. Neither have I.

Merry Christmas. I can't stay too long. I got to go over to my parents, but I just wanted to stop by and say Merry Christmas and give you my present. I brought a little something. I

love you. Take off your coat. I want you to open your presents. Okay. Okay. What do I go for first? The green one with the holly. You're going to love this. Okay.

Let's see. You got me tickets to the Super Bowl? Super Bowl tickets? Oh, God, honey. These are Skybox. You got me Skybox Super Bowl tickets? And

you want to hear the best part? You don't even have to go with me. Oh, God, thank you. Oh, my God. It's in New Orleans. I got you a hotel room. You can take your brother. You like it, right? Yeah, I love it. You always said women don't know what to get men. Yes. No, it's perfect. This is perfect. I love you. In parentheses, it says they kiss. We're not doing that. Open up the red one. Oh, my God. You didn't have to get me anything else. Just open it. It's Michael Jordan's jersey? I got it at the muscular dystrophy silent auction. I won the silent auction. My God, look, he

signed it. To Steve, my best friend in the world. This must have cost a lot of money. I am on a five-year payment plan. Oh, God, no. Yes,

remember when you said you were a kid and you always wanted an autographed baseball and then you got one, but it fell out under the car and your dad wouldn't go back to get it for you? It just made me so sad. Thank you. Do you love it? Yeah, I... Open the white one, open the white one. Oh my god, no, you've done too much. This one's just for fun, this is just for fun. Oh

man, uh...

I had this first, actually this is the first gift I got you. A Blaupunkt

CD player?

Is it the right one?

Yeah, it's the

best. I read the Playboy Advisor, and you know what? I got it at the Fretters, and if you spend more than $1,000, you get a free 10-speed bike. And it's—well, that's in my bedroom, too. You can have that, and I'm not

even going to— No, no, no, no. Okay, do this for me. Keep the bike. Please do this. Please, please keep

the bike. We can share it. Okay. Okay. Do you like it? Thank you so much. I, I, um, okay. My turn. This is, I'm so, okay. Do you want to tell me anything about the gift first or?

Wow.

humidifier it's

a panasonic 2000 these are great uh i checked around and this is the best one they had you know you're gonna have so much fun with this you put the uh you put the water in here and and you have the variable control knob and and and this is great uh a timer so you can set it to like 2 a.m at at 2 in the morning so you can just get you know this blast of moist air merry christmas

tell me the truth you don't like it did you get this yesterday no I got it on the way over here today. Did you know before you went to the store that you were going to get me a humidifier? I had no fucking idea.

It was the first thing I saw when I walked in the store. It was I

spent four thousand dollars on your gifts. It's not the money. That's not even the point. I just I worked so hard and I planned for so long. No, sorry. I'm sorry. Oh my God, this sucks. This fucking sucks. I didn't mean to make you feel bad. I love it. I really do, Steve. No, it sucks.

Okay, it sucks. This is a really sucky gift. I'm going to go home and show my family all these great things you got me. You'll go home and... What did Steve give you? He gave me a humidifier. Everybody gather around Steve's humidifier. Well,

Merry Christmas, asshole. I really thought you were gonna buy me a fur coat. I mean, that's why I bought all this stuff. That's what I wanted to get you. Hey, this is my

Visa Gold card, okay? I want you to take it. You can charge up to $5,000 on that. I want you to go and get the nicest fur coat that you think I can handle financially. The good ones

cost like $3,000, $4,000. Is that okay? Okay, that's

what I want you to do. Okay, do that. I

love you. And I'm sorry. That just sucks. Now you'll be able to keep your new fur all nice and moist? You know what? I can't take it. What? I know you don't have the money for that, but the fact that you were willing and that you wanted to, that's my present. I

love you so much right now. You

know what? We're going to have such a great time at the Super Bowl.

Wow. Holy smokes. That was cool. I biffed it, but that was cool.

You biffed it? No, we both biffed it. Yeah, thank you. Cold read. That was, when you read that, like when we're doing that now, like thinking back on that time. Yeah. By the way, everyone that just listened, only one of us was nominated for an Oscar, okay? Oh man, I just blew it. Oh, shit. That was Oscar nominated Steven Yeun. Oh, my God. And I did the best I could. We let the words speak. They did. They're great words. We hope they're very loud. Yeah, yeah. When you look back at that time, you're in your mid-20s performing improv with all these people. Do you look back at it fondly? Yeah, that was really fun. I'm sure it was strange to be brought back with this sketch. It

was because it brought me back to the smell of that stage, the lights, Natalie, my scene partner. Yeah, I just remember, you know, that I got to be a part of an incredible institution. I got to walk backstage and be back there in the green room while all these heroes who've passed by those halls got to play in the same place. And even the ones that I was like there with, you know, there's so many people that I just admired and looked up to. That was a really fun time of just like doing something that I really, really, really loved. And

yet there seemed to be some part of you that knew you could only take it so far. Like you didn't have ambitions to be on SNL, right? I

mean, I would have loved that. I would have loved to have been on SNL. That was like the dream that was accessible through that pipeline. But I think for me, what I was conscious of as I looked around the room and all my contemporaries, I was like, I am not the funniest one here. And I am certainly not the best writer here. I don't know if my path is necessarily through this avenue. And I don't know exactly what I was thinking. But one day I just remember waking up and being like, I'm going to move to L.A. And I just told everybody so that I couldn't back out. I told everybody I was like, I'm going to move to L.A. later this year. And that's what I did. I just wake up sometimes and I like make decisions.

That was a morning in 2009 that you woke up and just had this feeling. Yep. You moved to Koreatown

here in the city with your then girlfriend at the time, now your wife. Actually, even earlier, I had met my girlfriend at that time, 2009, in June, before I left in September. We saw each other every day for six months. And then I had to leave. And I remember her dropping me off uh she flew with me to la and then i and then she flew back and i remember her leaving and i was just sobbing in the airport just like so sad like where am i who like you know um who is now my wife and um that you were you were sad because you

had made this big move to Los Angeles, where you already were leaving everyone behind, but now you were leaving her back there in Chicago. Yeah. When you dropped her off at LAX, and she like, you know, walks into the terminal.

Yeah. She walked up the American Airlines escalator, where you kind of look at them through the bridge up at the top. And they can still wave to you because you're just in this, in just like the drop off area. That is, I've

done that.

Yeah. That's

a cruel design. Agonizing. I don't want to see anything. Yeah, dude.

I want closed

doors. We got to close the door here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We do not need a window into my soul through

American Airlines. Just tears. Just openly weeping. Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

So when you drive back to your apartment in Koreatown that you're sharing with a couple buddies from Chicago, what's going through your head?

Well, luckily we had cell phones, so it wasn't too crazy. I think for me, it wasn't that I was like, whatever, I'm fine. It was more like, I'm just used to isolation. And so it wasn't the isolation that was really terrifying. I wonder if it was just the separation that was really painful. And my wife and I, we're married now. And those early years, we just did long distance for a long time. Within the first six months of you living out here,

you book three different ads and then land Glenn on The Walking Dead. The legacy of that show has been like endlessly discussed. So I don't really need to get into that. But I want to understand how you made that character as a young performer. When you were called upon to deliver an emotional moment, much like that moment in Beef that we watched, what would you use to get to that place? I would use praise music or

I would use, there's this one song from Cinematic Orchestra called Home. And that one always took me out. And I would just kind of like go away and listen. And this is something I picked up from my peers, like looking up to Andy Lincoln in his process. And he would just kind of like be in his earbuds and just kind of go away and like come back. And I stole some moves from from these people that I got to work with, these incredible people I got to work with. And I remember doing that. And, you know, what was interesting about it was that it started to wear out. It lost his affect over a while. In the process of

making the walking dead yeah

i couldn't go to that song anymore or those songs at some point like that well dried up because yeah it didn't it didn't work as much anymore do

you think it dried up because in the six seven years of making the show, you probably changed a whole lot. Massively. Yeah. Like, that character, you've often described him as deeply palatable. You have this quote, I felt beige with him. Like I was servicing a concept of goodness as opposed to engaging with Glenn's humanity. And that's a thing I wasn't able to feel for a while because I was holding up this ideal that was bigger than me, way larger than any single human can possibly do. I was tired of not letting people know that I have dark thoughts, that I could also have anger. How do you hold that work and then the move away from Walking Dead now?

I think for me, that experience was one of the most important experiences of my life, clearly. But just the fundamental basics that that experience allowed me to have of seeing how to be a professional seeing how to be an actor seeing how to be in the business itself seeing how to navigate the ups and downs of it being surrounded by Jeffrey DeMond and Scott Wilson the late Scott Wilson like that's a download that like people would dream of ever having, you know, to be able to sit in their presence and like take in their wisdoms. And every single person in that cast for me was so incredibly important to my own growth. Professionally. Professionally. But I think what was the war with me is, you know, Glenn was written in a specific way. But I think also I have to face the fact that like I was presenting in that way, too, on a personal level. I was. That you were complicit. Yeah, I was completely complicit. And so I don't say those things without the awareness of that complicit nature. I think for me, in hindsight, I knew that I was trying to do the right thing at all times if I could. What does that mean? That experience was really wonderful for me because it taught me two things. I remember this one moment, the season two of Walking Dead. At that time, I was like the model concept of like the guy doing the right things. Like I was on time, knew all my lines, didn't take too many takes, just did it. I did it by the book and I did it. There are moments of freedom and a little charisma, I suppose, but like I was largely there to not be a hindrance. That really locked me into a type of performance that was very rigid. And so I remember one time we were, everybody was fighting in front of the barn. The scene was to fight in front of this barn argument. And like, I didn't have lines. And so I was like, oh, if I don't have lines, I don't know what to do. So I'm going to try to get behind the camera and not be on camera. Because if I don't have lines, then like I don't feel free enough to do something random, which completely went against all my nature of college and Second City doing improv the whole time, which was so bizarre that I thought that way. And I remember Michael Satrazimus, who I love to this day, he was the first camera operator at the time. But now he's one of the most storied Walking Dead directors of all time. And he nudges me as I'm standing next to him. He just nudges me. He's like, yo, get in there. And I'm like, what? He's like, get the fuck in there. And he just like pushes me in. And then I was like, hey, oh, stop, stop, stop.