Steven Yeun Has Now Truly Quit ‘The Walking Dead’

The Walking Dead alum Steven Yeun, who played Glenn Rhee, admitted he doesn’t keep up with the series to find out what’s happening with Glenn’s wife Maggie (Lauren Cohan).

“I haven’t been watching TV,” Yeun told The Hollywood Reporter.

“Is that bad? I’ve caught some episodes here and there, but I’ve been mostly working. I still talk to all my friends and they keep me updated. I think the friendships are much more necessary to keep up with, so it’s been nice.”

Yeun’s longtime quick-witted survivor was brutally killed off after seven seasons in The Walking Dead‘s season 7 premiere, which saw then-newcomer bad guy Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bash the father-to-be’s head in with a barbwire-wrapped baseball bat.

The Korean-American actor has gone on to find success in Netflix original movie Okja and voiceover roles in Netflix original series Trollhunters and DreamWorks’ Voltron, and now makes his leading-man South Korean film debut in Lee Chang-dong-directed drama Burning, Yeun’s first all Korean-language role.

Yeun said during a Walker Stalker Nashville appearance in 2017 it was “hard to leave family after seven years of being together,” but added his exit also “feels very complete.”

“Something needed to happen to propel this next season,” he said at the time.

Yeun later opened up to Vanity Fair about his turn as the fan-favorite Korean-American pizza boy, admitting he felt like “people didn’t know what to do with Glenn.”

“They liked him, they had no problems with him, and people enjoyed him. But they didn’t acknowledge the connection people had with the character until he was gone,” Yeun said.

Glenn’s death “felt gratuitous” to audiences, Yeun believed, “because one, it kept going, and two, ‘I think they took away someone that I didn’t realize I had made such a connection with until they took him away,’” Yeun said.

“It was tough sometimes because I never felt like he got his fair due. I never felt like he got it from an outward perception,” Yeun said of Glenn.

“I don’t say this as a knock on anything. He always had to be part of something else to legitimize himself. He was rarely alone. And when he was alone, it took several years to convince people to be on his own.”

Yeun continued: “I think the cruelest thing is that if Glenn had continued on, knowing how things usually shake out, I could totally foresee a situation where he just slowly, quietly disappears into the background and is kind of remembered but not really.”

But Glenn’s brutal and gory death “was like holding up a battered skull to the world to be like, ‘don’t forget, this Asian person existed in this medium and now he’s f—king dead,’” Yeun explained. “That’s super cool! I’m cool with that.”

The Walking Dead will return this fall on AMC.