Steven Yeun is no stranger to Robert Kirkman’s work. The currently Oscar-nominated actor is best known to many for his work as Glenn on The Walking Dead, a zombie series which adapted Kirkman’s popular comic. Now, Yeun is taking the lead on Invincible, an animated show on Amazon which packs just as much violence as The Walking Dead and offers a bit more in the way of humor, attitude, and language. Plus, it boasts an all-star cast voicing the character Kirkman created at Image Comics, including Marvel and DC movie legend J.K. Simmons who plays Omni-Man, the father to Yeun’s Mark Grayson. The duo talked with ComicBook.com for an exclusive interview about the upcoming series.
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“[Kirkman] wrote an incredible comic book, I think he writes a lot of incredible comic books so, I’m very thankful to him for allowing me to be in his universe in general,” Yeun says of reuniting with Kirkman years after departing The Walking Dead. “I’m happy to jump in on anything he’s doing, and so I’m glad it’s this one too.”
Simmons, on the other hand, is new to Kirkman’s work, though he has appeared in comic book titles like Spider-Man and Justice League movies. “As a newcomer, I’m not part of the Kirkman repertory company like Steven is, so, I’m a newcomer to this particular superhero world,” Simmons says. “I found it, honestly very relatable, and as a dad and as a human being, and also just really creative in a fresh take on the superhero world.” See the full interview in the video above!
There are plenty of ideas the cast can pull from the comics, should they choose to do some extra research on the Invincible characters and their stories. Yeun has read most of the books, according to Kirkman, and he has quite a bit of knowledge on display while talking about bringing Mark Grayson to life. The comic first started publishing in 2003 and concluded in February of 2018 with issue #144.
“When we talked about doing his voice, we wanted to make him more youthful and then I would see him juxtapose to this like superhero young teen body, and I was like, ‘Wow, he sounds a little bit more insecure than someone that looks like that probably should or could be,’ and I loved that dissonance in the end, because it kind of shows his journey that he has a lot to live up to,” Yeun explains. “He has a lot of expectations that he’s built up in his own mind, and he’s not able to even see himself for who he is at that moment, sometimes I’m like that kinda looks like he’s 30, and so it’s pretty interesting to play that, and that’s Mark, he’s coming into himself and he has maybe the largest, biggest thing to live up to which is the most powerful superhero in his universe, and so, yeah, that’s big shoes to fill.”
That most powerful superhero in his universe, Omni-Man and his father, is a character Simmons delivers in spades in the first three episodes which were provided to ComicBook.com ahead of their release. “One of the things that appealed to me about this, was that, the metaphor for puberty here that Mark is going through and that is a difficult thing to negotiate as we all know from the side of the kid, and as I now know from the side of parents as well, it’s such a fraught time in life for all of us,” Simmons says, describing Nolan Grayson’s perspective of his son in the Amazon series. “In the case of these characters that Robert’s handed to us, it’s like that on steroids. So, that was definitely one of the really interesting aspects of it to me. And, the whole family dynamic with the father, mother, and son and it was a real treat to be able to play those scenes with two actors like Stephen and Sandra and sometimes even to be in the studio together which is unusual in my experience in animated.”
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Invincible premieres its first three episodes on Amazon on March 26.
