How to Get to That “F*** You, I’ll Do What I Want” Place: Steven Yeun, John Mulaney and the THR Comedy Actor Roundtable

“So, same time next week?” Abbott Elementary star Tyler James Williams jokes with the others — Steven Yeun (Beef), Jason Segel (Shrinking), Mo Amer (Mo) and John Mulaney (John Mulaney: Baby J) — after a particularly therapeutic hour of conversation in early May. It is THR‘s annual Comedy Actor Emmy Roundtable, and the five men gathered, a mix of top stand-up and scripted talent, use the platform to swap stories and speak candidly about the pressures of the business, the splurges that they made (or urged others to make) and what, exactly, has prompted tears, hives and periods of necessary silence.

If a fan is to approach you all on the street, what is he or she likely to recognize you from?

MO AMER I usually get, “I’m a huge fan of your music.” I’m like, “I’m not DJ Khaled.” (Laughter.)

STEVEN YEUN For me, it was Glenn [from The Walking Dead] for a long time. It’d be like, “I stopped watching when you died,” which I don’t believe. Like, I finished all the seasons. But now, after Beef came out, they’re like, “Are you the guy in Beef?” And that’s fun.

TYLER JAMES WILLIAMS I got Chris [from Everybody Hates Chris] for a long time, and will continue to. Usually, it’s just something that’s hollered from 15 feet behind me as they figure it out. I also get The Walking Dead. People are still really upset with how that went. Really upset. They’re happy to see me, and then they’re like, “They did you wrong.” But with Abbott, now is the first time I’m getting “Mr.” in front of anything. I’m getting Mr. Eddie.

JASON SEGEL Wow.

WILLIAMS So I’m an adult, y’all.

SEGEL I get Muppets a lot. The kids who were 10 when they saw it are in their 20s now, and that’s a freaky experience. And Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It’s usually an odd dynamic because the kids have seen Muppets, and the parents have seen me naked. (Laughter.)

Tyler, you’ve said that you couldn’t be happier that Abbott happened now and not five or 10 years ago. Why do you feel like you were ready for it now and not then?

WILLIAMS I feel like anybody who starts really young, and Jason may be able to speak to this, so much is out of your control. Stuff is just coming at you and you’re trying to field it as it’s happening. With Abbott, what I loved is that I knew what I was doing. It wasn’t as much the creative, it was handling the success, the press and all of that. I felt much more grounded and knew how to set boundaries and when to tap out. I also knew what I wanted to say and the type of actor I wanted to be. Before, as a kid, you’re just trying to make people happy.

SEGEL At the beginning, you’re just trying to make it. You have the pedal to the metal, creatively, but the struggle I had was figuring out how to adjust that so it became sustainable. At some point, I had to be like, “You’re OK, you can take a couple of months off, you can think about what you want to do next.”

WILLIAMS That’s a huge thing.

But there’s also a system in place that’s telling you to keep going, strike while the iron is hot.

YEUN I felt that. After I left Walking Dead, there was certainly a, “Here’s the road map.” But what was nice for me — which I could have looked at negatively, but I ended up looking at positively — was there wasn’t really a road map for someone like myself. So, it actually created a vacuum, where I could do what I wanted if those situations were available to me. And I was very lucky that they were. So, I pivoted in ways that didn’t feel like tread territory.

John, your comedy historically has been about telling personal stories. This hour special felt more confessional. You’ve said it was fun. Was it also cathartic?

JOHN MULANEY That was the challenge that I wanted to give myself, to maybe be “vulnerable.” What I wanted to see is, could I say this much about myself but still own the room and be an entertainer? That just seemed like more of a challenge, as opposed to more somberly or groundedly presenting the facts of what this special’s about.

You sing a song at the top of the special that hits quickly on all of the recent drama, from drugs to rehab, in your life. The last line is, “Likability is a jail.” Can you talk about what that means to you?

MULANEY I don’t think people set out to be likable, I think they put themselves out there in some way and, speaking for myself, they enjoy the feedback that others relate to [what they’re doing or saying]. It starts off, “Oh, I must be onto something,” or, “There’s something about me these people get” — I find that one most dangerous. When they don’t get you, then that’s phase two, and you go, “Oh, I like the positive, but why aren’t they getting this part? Why did they miss this aspect?” Then, if people are disappointed in a direction you take, I wouldn’t say that’s hard because it’s very amusing at first because it’s so parental, like, “We’re disappointed in you.” It’s just an odd feeling because I didn’t know we had that kind of relationship. The thing I found doing the tour was this idea of “I’m not going to people-please as much in life” is all great and it’s very liberating, but it’s interesting to see that when you stop people-pleasing, some people are not pleased. Like, not everyone will just applaud it.

You recently guested on Bupkis, your pal Pete Davidson’s show, and, again, you’re playing this post-rehab version of yourself.

MULANEY If you go through my work, most of my television is me playing myself on friends’ shows. (Laughter.)

It also seemed to fit into this repackaging of you — or of who the audience thought was you. If likability is jail, how conscious and freeing is showing this other side?

MULANEY We’ll see. Because am I still doing the same thing? Am I trying to communicate, “Hey, there’s a lot more going on with me, you all get it now?” Am I still looking for that? Of course I am.

AMER But it’s also outrageous to think you’re going to be the same person. You grow, you go through different experiences — family challenges, life challenges. I think about Will Smith, about this likability, this box that you’re in the whole time and it’s not sustainable. Something’s got to give at some point.

SEGEL It goes back to the thing of taking time to think, taking little pauses, because, especially in comedy, if something goes well, there’s a system in place to encourage you to repeat that.

AMER Yes.

SEGEL And it becomes a facsimile of a facsimile and diminishing returns until it crashes into a wall and then you turn around, and everyone who was telling you to do more has jumped off the train already. (Laughter.) I think generally the reason the first thing worked is because it was something honest, an honest reflection of where you were at the time. And then it becomes increasingly less effective because it’s no longer honest. So, those little pauses are where you’re supposed to reflect on, “OK, where am I now?” Forgetting Sarah Marshall is about a breakup because that was about as sophisticated as I was at 24 years old. But if you’re still making movies about being afraid of girls at 35, you see it, you know what that looks like, it’s not working anymore.

MULANEY I don’t know if you (to Amer) felt this with your first stand-up special, but you basically have [age] zero to 25 to ruminate on things and come up with a sensibility and figure out the jokes you like. So your first special is the first 20-odd years of your life. And then your second one is one year, and it was made while you were mainly touring.

AMER That’s a really great point. For me, I was always explaining myself. It was, “Wait, you were born in Kuwait, but you came to Texas when you were 9. So, you’re Kuwaiti?” I’m like, “No, I’m not Kuwaiti. My parents are Palestinian.” “Wait, how come you’re not Kuwaiti? You were born there. I don’t get it.” I was like, “I’m fucking tired of these questions.” So, the whole first special is going to be answering all of your questions, and then I just want to be a comedian.

Jason, you seem to like to test the limits of your likability in your work. You even urged the Shrinking writers to have your character behave pretty poorly …

SEGEL Well, here is my experience in life: I’m flawed. I have stuff that I’ve done that I’m not proud of, and I have friends and family who know these things and still love me. My acting idol when I was young was Kermit the Frog, and then that gave way to Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart. It’s the same style of acting, as a surrogate. I am you on this journey, so put all of your stuff onto me. There’s another type of acting that’s aspirational, they’re way cooler than you, like George Clooney. I don’t watch him and think, “That’s me.” I think that’s who I aspire to be. So, as long as I’m playing it like I’m all of us, and, “God, look at this fucking terrible thing I’m doing,” people will be like, “Oh, I’ve done stuff like that.”

AMER A hundred percent. You also don’t know where the line is until you cross it, right? Anytime I was fearful about something in the show, [it was because] it was so personal, it was scary. There was one scene where I literally broke down. It was about my father being tortured, and about dealing with that and suppressing that in the series. I thought, “Oh man, I didn’t mourn this in my actual life. Whoops.” I’m walking off and nobody can even look you in the eye. Years ago, Dave [Chappelle] told me, “Be so honest that it’s hard to make eye contact with you,” and I didn’t get it until that moment. It makes me emotional just thinking about it.

Steven, I’ve heard you and your co-star Ali Wong say that you broke out in hives after Beef wrapped.

YEUN Full-on hives. (Laughter.)

You’re able to laugh about it now, but did you recognize what was happening at the time?

YEUN Surprisingly, I laughed when it happened. It was all over my body. I was like, “What the fuck is happening?” (Laughter.) To echo Tyler’s sentiment from earlier, I am grateful I came to a character like Danny now. Even five, six years ago, I would’ve totally bailed on that dude.

What would that have looked like?

YEUN Like me playing a caricature of Danny, in which my performance was a slight wink to the audience that this is not me.

SEGEL That’s right.

YEUN But instead, I’m like, I will be a proxy for this character and this experience because we don’t throw that away. And I think that was the hives, because I’m also human and I also want to be liked. And every day was walking onto set being like, “Ah, Danny is so fucked up. He’s doing some gnarly things, but can I find a way to feel the feeling of why someone would do something like this?” That was an interesting exercise. I was just holding a lot in, and when I left, I let it go. The shame.

WILLIAMS I remember having [a version of] that with you (to Yeun) when we did my last scene of The Walking Dead. I remember that day, not wanting to leave that show and feeling shame for feeling that. Because as an actor, you go from project to project and it’s just part of the world, so you should be used to working with people and then just detaching. And it was a struggle that day. But then that became the thing. After we shot it, they called cut and I just broke down.

You collapsed?

WILLIAMS Yeah, it was a whole thing. And [Yeun] was a really good guy about it.

YEUN Dude, the whole scene was you saying, “Don’t let me go.”

WILLIAMS Yeah, you’re in this moment and everything you’ve been feeling all day, you didn’t realize that was the point. The point was to get you right there to that time and not judge it and just let it be what it is [for the scene]. I didn’t realize that until we were out the door.

I’m curious, why do you think that one felt different?

WILLIAMS I think that show, particularly for me, didn’t feel like a transient show. It felt like something where I made real connections with real people.

YEUN That was a family show.

Looking back, what felt, at the time, like the biggest risk?

SEGEL After How I Met Your Mother ended, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I really wondered if I was actually good enough to do drama. I took a movie called The End of the Tour to play David Foster Wallace. The degree of difficulty of it not looking like a Saturday Night Live sketch, when you get the glasses and the bandanna and you’re saying the lines, felt so high. I also had no system of prep because you prep differently for comedy. There was a lot of improv in how we came up, and these were big chunks of dialogue. I literally just played in my head, “What would Edward Norton do?” I got a dialect coach and I did all these things that I heard you do if you’re a real actor. But man, I was scared …

John, I imagine going from being a relatively anonymous writer on Saturday Night Live to fronting a sitcom, Fox’s 2014 Mulaney, with your name in its title felt risky?

MULANEY Very anonymous. (Laughs.) I think I thought that I was bringing a sensibility that was, I don’t know, more widely appreciated. And then I was also trying to turn that on its head by doing a multicam, like, “Look, we can really make this form weird and interesting again.” There were a lot of challenges. And I really suffered from high self-esteem at that time. (Laughs.)

But your initial pitch for the show was very different, no?

MULANEY Yeah, there was another version at NBC called Mulaney Don’t Drink, which was about me getting sober at 23. It was based on the time in my life when I got sober at 23 and had two roommates and was just trying to figure out: What does a good person do? That was an actual part of my life, or a pointless gauntlet I threw down in front of myself. That was the NBC show, and there was really something lost when I, on the advice of others higher up, took that out. But I take full responsibility. I lost the thread that made it something.

SEGEL But how are you supposed to know at 23? I have so many things in my career where I’m like, “Oh God, I should have … whatever.” And it’s like, how the fuck was I supposed to know?

MULANEY Well, yeah. And Saturday Night Live, people talk about how high-stakes and stressful it is — it’s also the most protected environment in entertainment. We don’t get notes. I saw Jeff Zucker maybe once when he was the president of NBC. Nothing reached us, so to suddenly be the writer, producer and star of a network pilot, let alone a series, it was suddenly being the captain of a cruise ship. I was like, “I have to worry about personnel, menu binders, meals for people, hours, how late everyone’s there.”

Would you consider taking another stab at a semi-autobiographical comedy à la Mo in today’s market?

MULANEY My immediate thought was, “Oh, should I?” (Laughs.) But I’m not sure. I’ve enjoyed doing it through stand-up. And one thing I learned from doing it was that I wasn’t sure what my story was. Like, what exactly am I bringing to everyone and do they need it?

Mo, you’ve said that nothing in your career happened overnight. What had been the feedback for so long and when did it change?

AMER I had a great mentor, Danny Martinez, at the Comedy Showcase in Houston. I walked into this club at 17 and he said, “You’re going to be successful if you do this, this and this, but it’s going to take you 20 years to get there.” I was like, “I’m in.” It gave me something to work toward. And there were stages. You start learning and growing, and there’s pain. Lots of pain. Post-9/11, I’d [hear a lot of], “Hey, you’re really talented, if you could just change your name.” But I was so focused on being myself.

Tyler, you recently said, “I’m in a phase in my career where I’m doing things for me now.” When was that not the case and how did it shift?

WILLIAMS I think for a while I was doing things just to survive. I think one of the hard parts of finding success young is then you’re thrown into the “do you have staying power” argument. I was just trying to keep the train moving, which eventually everyone figures out is not sustainable. But after taking those periods of silence, I was able to figure out what I actually wanted to do. If you don’t get to “fuck it, I do what I want,” eventually you burn out.

When do the rest of you feel like you got to the “fuck it, I’ll do what I want” phase, assuming you have?

WILLIAMS By the way, [Steven] is the inspiration for my “fuck it, I do what I want.” Every time I’m like, “I feel like I should do this,” or I have people on my team saying, “You should go this way,” I think about Steven and I’m like, “Steven would just be like, ‘Nah, I’m going to wait.’ ” And I’ve admired that about his career since leaving The Walking Dead. I feel as if when you choose something or I see you do something, it’s because you’re truly inspired by it and want to.

YEUN Thanks, man. I think that’s partly true. I think where I can’t take most of that credit is, again, there’s no road map for someone like myself, at least for me before. And so there were very easy no’s. It was like, “Do you want to do the thing that everybody’s seen someone like you do?”

AMER “Would you like to play terrorist number seven?” No, I’m good.

YEUN Yeah, right, and then a script would appear to say, “Here’s a shot at not doing that.” There was a part of “fuck it, I’ll do what I want,” but there was also part of it that was like, “I’ll show you.” So, I was still bound to the expectations of others, and I still am. I wish I was a total “fuck it, I’ll do what I want” guy. But for me, I’ve just been very fortunate that for every obvious door, there was a tiny hidden one that I could go, “Oh, I’ll do that.”

SEGEL There was a period in my life and career around the last couple of years of How I Met Your Mother where things were firing in both movies and TV, and everyone was telling me how well it was going and I was really unhappy. And so I then had to grapple with why? What’s off about this equation? I think the thing that I was confronted with is that it’s really great to make the decision of “fuck it, I do what I want,” but unfortunately there’s a system of permission in place where people will go, “We don’t give a shit [what you want to do].” Like, “Good for you, man.” (Laughter.)

AMER “Neeext.”

SEGEL I had to fight hard to put a Dracula puppet musical at the end of a movie. All my ideas are [often met with] people being like, “No, that’s stupid.” So, it’s about summoning the will to say, “OK, shit, I have an idea and I believe in it and it won’t leave me alone and now I’m going to do the three or four years of fighting through all the permissions and pushing the boulder up the hill.” And then sometimes you get the boulder right to the top of the hill and they still say no, and three years are gone. It’s tricky. Part of the equation is getting to the point where you ask yourself, “What is worth trading my time for? What am I going to give over nine months or three years for?” Because I look back at the ones I didn’t like and I’m like, “That was not worth age 28.” (Laughter.)

Tyler, you’ve been invested in the working experience of the child actors on your show. You’ve said, “Abbott in general has been therapeutic for me. I needed to know that I could influence it being done differently.” What would have been helpful to see or hear at that age?

WILLIAMS “Nobody knows what they’re doing. It’s not just you. Everyone’s scared and no one knows if this is going to work.”

MULANEY But what a rush it is to pretend you know what it is you’re doing! (Laughter.)

Your Abbott co-star, Janelle James, recently told a story about permanently relocating to L.A. and needing a car after Abbott scored a second season. She said she’d planned to buy a Mazda, until you chimed in. According to her, you said, “You cannot pull up to season two in a Mazda.” I’ll stop there, is this story tracking for you?

WILLIAMS Yeah, yeah, it definitely tracks. (Laughs.)

And then you took her to some dealerships, and she ended up with, what, a BMW?

WILLIAMS Yeah, I think so.

AMER I would’ve taken her to Mercedes, but it’s fine. (Laughter.)

At what point in your career did someone pull you aside and tell you something similar? That it’s OK, you’re successful, you can treat yourself or have a little fun?

WILLIAMS That’s why I think we had that conversation. It didn’t happen for me. And with Janelle, specifically, because the minute we saw the pilot, it was like, “You’re going to be a huge thing.” But you spend so much of your career in this place of being scared that the bottom will fall out. And it felt like there was a nice opportunity to let her know, “No, I think this one’s stable.” Like, based on my history and what I’ve seen, this is stable enough that you don’t have to spend the majority of the ride scared. That was the thing I was trying to get her to as fast as possible.

SEGEL Good for you.

WILLIAMS Because you can spend four years of a six-year show scared it’s going to get canceled and never actually enjoy it.

For the rest of you, did anyone pull you aside and urge you to stop and spoil yourself a bit?

YEUN I was scared that the bottom was going to drop out for a while.

SEGEL I’m still like that. I mean, I’m not even joking. Honestly, I’m still quite scared of it.

YEUN Same.

AMER But you work so hard, it’s good to spoil yourself sometimes. For me, it’s about comfort, especially as much as I travel as a comic. So, I splurge on not touching my bags. I don’t want to carry these fucking things. And great restaurants. It’s like, “Please know who I am, please.” (Laughs.)

Before we go, what have you all not done that you’d still love to do?

SEGEL I’d like to play a villain. Part of my self-awareness is that I know I walk the line between charming and creepy and I often fall on charming, but I’d like to tip the other way.

YEUN Danny was a hard left turn for me in a really fun way and I loved it. So, I don’t know.

Well, your next project is a giant Marvel movie …

SEGEL Cooool!

YEUN Yeah, Jake Schreier, who did episodes of Beef, got the gig to direct [Thunderbolts] and then he 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.” I think it’s less about now checking things off a bucket list and more looking at an experience.

Are you ready to experience all that comes with being part of a Marvel project?

YEUN Sometimes I’ll have conversations with friends who are like, “Do you know what you’re doing?” And I’m like, “Yeah, we’re making a movie.” And they’re like, “Do you know what you’re doing?” I try not to take that in because I think that’s the trap. The trap is to look at that thing in the context of how society might view that thing. In the immediate, I’m just making a movie. Putting it out is a whole other thing that I’m going to have to prepare for afterwards.

MULANEY Is the money as good as we’d all hope, or was it slightly disappointing? (Laughter.)

YEUN I’m not going to go there.

How about the rest of you?

WILLIAMS A lot of the things I’ve done have been likable, and I’d like to explore the unlikable. But then, all my favorite things I’ve ever done came about because I wasn’t thinking about that thing. That’s what happened with Abbott. In the middle of the pandemic, I think I was at home, just high, eating chips, and it popped up. So I’m just really having fun right now with what comes.

And you, John?

AMER More babies, John?

MULANEY Yeah, of course. (Laughs.) Before I die, I’d like to write one film as good as Searching for Bobby Fischer, or any of those films I saw as a kid that really packed a punch and just got life right. If I could do that once, I’d be very happy.

And then cast all these guys.

MULANEY Absolutely. Chess masters, all of us. (Laughter.)

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in the May 31 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.