The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun Hopes To Adapt Chew in Live Action

Most fans know him as The Walking Dead‘s Glenn Rhee, but actor Steven Yeun will soon take on another comic book role — that of Tony Chu, lead character of John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew.

The critically-acclaimed Image Comics series is heading into its third act, according to Layman, with an end now in sight — but the story is being adapted into an animated feature film soon starring Yeun and The Guild creator Felicia Day.

Recently, we spoke with Yeun about the new season of AMC’s The Walking Dead, and convinced him to give with us a little about the status of Chew.

Where is Chew, at this point?

Well, where we’re standing at now is we’ve done some preliminary recording on some of the earlier mock-ups of the animation and I think we’re waiting right now to finish that out with everybody. That’s kind of where it’s at, at this point. We’ll see how that evolves and how it gets pushed through.

I’m really excited about it. The comic and the character, I’ve been a fan of for some time now and it’s such an interesting way to play the absurd. It’ll be very very interesting to see how it gets adapted, if it ever does and I hope it does, into real life.

How does it feel to be a guy who’s suddenly fan-cast in things now? It’s like, “if you had a blank slate and could get any actor…” and people pick Steven Yeun.

You know, that’s not the weirdest part actually. The weirdest part is probably everything. I’d just come from Chicago and I’d been doing live comedy theater with Second City, touring small cities and colleges. To all of a sudden have what that this show had brought on has been very surreal. For me at this point, I look at it as, I’ve been afforded a great opportunity to push myself and stretch myself and in the same regard, show myself in many different facets. I’ve been having a lot of fun just not playing Glenn, you know? People get Glenn, they get that. That character exists in this world. And I’ve been having fun doing stuff with Paul Scheer’s group. We did this thing called Filthy Sexy Teens, where I played this weird, weird Chuck Bass type of character. It’s just like, you get to play these different characters. Even in I Origins when I played Kenny, it was…off. It was different. And I’m having a lot of fun showing people different shades of myself and we’ll see how that manifests.

And Chu is a completely different character from Glenn. Chu is angry, loud and obnoxious sometimes and reluctant. Glenn is heart-filled and soulful and positive. And it’s very cool to see that juxtaposition as well.

So we’ll see. I hope to get to that place where it gets into live action; I would love to break that open.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC.