Bowen Yang's Final Fantasy Is Happening Now

Introduction by Megan O'Sullivan and Gutes Guterman

On January 17th, 2024, Byline was mentioned on “Las Culturistas” by Bowen Yang himself. “A lovely, lovely, lovely publication,” he said. Three lovelies. We had only been around for six months. We had only one printed issue. But Bowen, an astute purveyor of the arts, was privy. We decided to shoot our shot and asked Bowen to make an appearance on our cover. Then we waited.

Of course, persistence is key and Bowen is a busy man. We followed up on several mediums. We sent DMs. In 2025, it almost worked out—but the timing didn’t line up. Two and a half years after our first try, a glimmer of hope: Our Shopify account revealed that Bowen bought a copy of our Out of Body issue. This was our time. We penned a letter, which looked more like a ransom note, asking if Bowen would like to be our Fantasy issue cover girl. We sealed the envelope and sent it off with a few extra magazines. Several days later, an email arrived: Bowen is a fan of the magazine and we’d love to explore this cover.

When we told Bowen this story—that it was like capturing our white whale—he gasped, “I’m Moby Dick!” He has covered vast oceans of culture. He left his graphic design job, which he held while he pursued a career in comedy on the side, in 2018 to join SNL as a writer. Before that, he began “Las Culturistas,” the podcast to end all podcasts, with Matt Rogers in 2016. He became an SNL cast member in 2019 and made history in 2021 as the first Chinese American player to earn a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He was named Time 100’s most influential people in 2021. He’s starred in a bevy of films since then, including Fire Island, The Lost City, and Wicked, and most recently, he made his Broadway debut as Mary Lincoln Todd in Oh, Mary!

But offstage and off-screen, Bowen is just Bowen. He’s an encyclopedia of pop culture. He’s a music-loving (on set he told us he’s recently listening to Remi Wolf’s new album and Grace Ives), Final Fantasy playing, Brooklyn dwelling, aquascaping enthusiast with a penchant for what’s happening now. He might have graduated with a Chemistry degree and intent to become an MD, but he landed with a Cum Laude honors degree in what is up. His path may have been winding, but winding paths are known to lead to the best fantasies (that’s rule of culture #72). Below, Bowen talks to Byline about his early dreams, his come-up, and what parts of culture fuel him most today.

BOWEN ON EARLY FANTASIES

The big dream was just to be in New York. That was it. The very existence of the city broke you out of whatever goldfish bowl mentality that would otherwise keep your desires humble or whatever. It did feel too lofty to think, “I’m gonna be on Broadway or TV or movies one day.” But being in New York felt attainable and general enough to have it peel back another layer of what other dreams would reveal themselves to be. SNL made it look jazzy. Music made it sound sexy. 90s sitcoms made it seem like a place where you had a DAY—however it landed on the spectrum between Sex and the City and Seinfeld. The media depiction of New York was the fantasy.

My first memory of feeling compelled to participate in culture was seeing my high school’s production of Hello, Dolly! right before I started there and was determined to be in Once Upon a Mattress the following year. Then when it came time to audition, I had no concept of what the mores were, so I checked a box that I was not interested in understudying (without really knowing what that meant) and that I only wanted to play the Jester.

The director pulled me aside and explained that it wasn’t the customary or acceptable thing for a freshman to make “demands” like that, which wasn’t where I was coming from at all, but I’d made a first impression on her that was completely irredeemable. She kicked me out of my junior year musical because I was buried under schoolwork, only for her to begrudgingly mend fences the next year because she needed someone to play one of the Chinese stowaways in the original, racially insane version of Anything Goes.

This is all to say that my early enthusiasm for wanting to “make” culture was fantasy misinterpreted as entitlement, which it wasn’t, but the thing about fantasy is that everyone is entitled to it. Only when it rubs someone the wrong way (a high school musical director, a boss, a Hollywood exec) do you understand how it squares with reality. Then when those people absolutely need you to play an ethnic stereotype, you can go, “Oh, I already did that in high school.”

What culture made me say culture is for me? I think I’ve gotten it down to four definitive answers in each quadrant of the Reader/Kayteigh/Publicist/Finalist (Las Cultch fandom) matrix: The Reader answer is early Captain Underpants books, the Kayteigh answer is Britney Spears, the Publicist answer is the 1998 Oscars, and the Finalist answer is the mainline Final Fantasy series. All of them are their own political wires with something profound to say beyond the obviously frivolous thing. All of them have influenced whatever I’ve managed to put out myself. And, not a coincidence, all of them are based on some kind of fantasy.

ON LIFE BEFORE DREAMS CAME TRUE

I lucked out with a graphic design job despite having no real qualifications for it other than being self-taught in Adobe. The guy who hired me was this sweet gay stoner (at least in vibe) who to this day remains the coolest person I’ve met. Then it was a succession of other cool bosses who were incredibly patient with me despite the fact that I’d run out on lunch breaks for way too long to audition for pilots I would never book. I am grateful for them all.

The first TV job I ever booked was Broad City, which still feels like a life peak. I took myself to Rice to Riches when I wrapped because the sidewalks that day seemed to ooze magic and butterscotch rice pudding seemed like the most decadent thing to treat myself to. Then the real “break” was booking the pilot for Nora from Queens, which blew my mind in a very specific way when I realized that I had a TV family, that I was one of many Asian people on the call sheet. It felt like a fantasy that I’d never allowed myself to have because none of this was on the vision board. There was no vision board to begin with, so let this be a lesson: NOT manifesting works.

ON THE MEANING OF FANTASY

Fantasy is optimism, which we are being choked out of moment to moment. But I think of optimism as a terminal state, in that you’ve moved through the nihilism of “real life” and have decided to create your own meaning within limitless wanting, and the only reasonable thing to do is stay there and allow yourself to think that a better world is possible.

I love culture that doesn't necessarily take you out of the world but changes the terms by which you agree to live in it. Something has really locked in for me in recent years, and I now know, for a fact, that the Final Fantasy series is the most meaningful, impactful culture I’ll ever consume. It’s taught me about solidarity, ecological collapse, imperialism, chosen family, and that a group of seemingly incompatible people can fundamentally alter the structure of their world. I've learned more about collective action from Final Fantasy games than from most of the institutions that were supposed to teach me about “civic responsibility.” Plus, every character is dressed like a genderless raver in a sex club. It’s perfect.

I think early on I’d fantasize about acquisition: of a job or a prize or a thing. And I’ll always want the latest chic air purifier or some such. But now I think my fantasies are about making things that endure. The podcast being 10 years old gives me a sense of how to do that in other areas, hopefully. Which isn’t necessarily oriented toward growth, because that notion is scary in a neolib way. It’s more important that the things I help build can last. I’d rather go through rough patches with a project that has longevity than keep raising the bar to an impossible standard.

ON THE ROLES HE PLAYS NOW

Of playing in Oh Mary! today, Younger me would say, “Who is Cole Escola?” and then in 2009 discover Jeffery and Cole Casserole and become obsessed. It means so many things to me now. It’s my Broadway debut for my favorite play of all time, with a completely downtown sensibility that allows me to inhabit another queer person’s fantasy, which is itself a metatextual fantasy and reimagining of a historical figure who experienced every kind of incomprehensible tragedy. I get to share this role with my heroes. It is unreal beyond any level of understanding, and yet everyone involved has made it feel like the most natural, sublimely real thing.

I think people mistake a fantasy being realized for some kind of totalizing feeling. We’ve been told a million ways that things aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and yet we're all amnesiacs when it comes to that. Wherever you go, there you are, which includes "success."

I ground myself through video games, especially ones that I am bad at. Games demand input, and many times that input leads to failure. It's why you'll hear people say that a notoriously punishing game like Elden Ring helped them through a period of severe depression, because it gave them a manageable relationship to something that initially seemed insurmountable. You can get mauled by an abominable monster named Starscourge Radahn, but eventually you learn his attack patterns and kill him and experience this disproportionate sense of triumph because hours ago you couldn't even imagine getting past this moment.