Let’s get one thing straight (pun absolutely intended): Bowen Yang has had a year that would make most people’s heads spin, and he did it while wearing a hoop skirt.
The man who spent seven seasons as Saturday Night Live‘s most reliably brilliant cast member — the first Asian American in the show’s history, and only the third openly gay one — walked away from 30 Rock in December 2025. No scandal. No drama. Just a guy who’d apparently had enough of being told he was “just the gay Asian guy on SNL” and decided to go do something about it.
That something? Playing Mary Todd Lincoln on Broadway.
Because of course it is.
From Brisbane to 30 Rock (With a Detour Through Conversion Therapy)
Bowen Yang was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1990 to Chinese parents who moved the family to Montreal, then Denver. By high school, his classmates voted him “Most Likely to Be a Cast Member on Saturday Night Live,” which is either the most prophetic yearbook prediction in history or the most specific. Probably both.
But here’s the part that isn’t funny: at 17, his parents discovered him having “lewd conversations” on AOL Instant Messenger (remember when that was the scandal? Not Grindr, not OnlyFans — AOL Instant Messenger), and they sent him to gay conversion therapy. His mother told him it didn’t happen “where we come from.” His parents gave him a choice: do the therapy and go to NYU, or stay home and attend community college in Denver.
He chose NYU. He chose New York. And eventually, he chose himself.
“I think I didn’t really get a grasp on who I was until two years ago,” he told Willie Geist in 2025, at the age of 34. Which means the guy who was already a famous TV star and cultural icon was still figuring it out. That’s not a vulnerability. That’s a public service announcement for anyone who thinks they need to have it all together by 25.
SNL: Seven Seasons of Being Too Good at the Job
Yang joined SNL as a staff writer in 2018 and got promoted to featured player in 2019 — the first Asian American to hold the role. He became the first SNL featured player ever nominated for a Primetime Emmy. His Kim Jong-un impression was unsettling. His “Trade Daddy” Chen Biao was iconic. His turn as the iceberg that sank the Titanic made everyone cry, which is a weird thing to say about a sketch comedy show but here we are.
But when he left in December 2025, mid-season, people asked why. Yang was blunt about it on his podcast: “I came in pre-stretched, pre-dyed. People had their over-determinations on what I was, which was: ‘Oh, that’s just the gay Asian guy on SNL.'” Anytime he tried something different, the response was the same: “He’s being gay and Asian as always.”
So he left. Lorne Michaels reportedly asked him to stay for another half season. He declined. When the boss who launched a thousand careers asks you to stick around and you say “I’m good,” that’s not a career move. That’s a flex.
Oh, Mary! — The Role That Was Waiting for Him
On September 15, 2026, Bowen Yang made his Broadway debut as Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola’s deranged, beloved, Tony-winning dark comedy about the alcoholic, cabaret-obsessed wife of the 16th president. The show is 80 minutes of unbridled chaos, and Yang — who called it “a deranged and profound masterpiece” — stepped into the hoop skirt like he’d been waiting his entire life for someone to offer it to him.
And here’s the thing about that: Oh, Mary! was created by Cole Escola, who is also queer, also a comedian, also someone who came up through the same downtown New York comedy scene as Yang and his podcast partner Matt Rogers. This isn’t just a casting decision. It’s a baton pass from one generation of queer comedy to the next, and the fact that it’s happening on Broadway — in a play about Abraham Lincoln’s miserable wife — makes it somehow even gayer than if it were a show about actual gay people.
Broadway audiences, it turns out, are thriving. Instagram reactions called Yang’s Mary “my favorite Mary.” Reddit threads are already speculating about who should take over after him. He’s doing the role for a limited 12-week run, which means if you haven’t already bought tickets, the gays have already gotten there first. They always do.
Las Culturistas: The Podcast That Built an Empire
Before SNL, before Broadway, before Wicked, there was Las Culturistas — the podcast Yang co-hosts with his best friend and NYU freshman-year fate-mate Matt Rogers. (They were paired together because they were both gay, which they resented at first, and now they finish each other’s sentences for a living.) The show started with 65 listeners and grew into a cultural institution, complete with the annual Las Culturistas Culture Awards, which premiered June 17, 2026, on iHeart.
The podcast is where Yang is most himself — unfiltered, silly, deeply informed about pop culture, and willing to go to emotional places that his SNL characters couldn’t. It’s also where he processed his SNL exit, his career anxieties, and his identity in real time. In other words, it’s the podcast equivalent of therapy, except with better guests and an explicit content rating.
Wicked, Wickedness, and Why It Matters
Oh, and he was in Wicked. You know, the biggest movie musical of 2024? He played Pfannee, one of the mean girls at Shiz University, alongside Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. So between SNL, Wicked, Las Culturistas, and now Broadway, Yang has essentially conquered every medium of entertainment in the span of two years. The conversion therapist who was supposed to “fix” him is presumably somewhere having a very bad afternoon.
The Bottom Line
Bowen Yang’s story is the kind that should be impossible: a gay Chinese American kid from Denver gets sent to conversion therapy, ends up on the most famous sketch show in television history, leaves on his own terms, and then debuts on Broadway as Mary Todd Lincoln in a play that is explicitly about the absurdity of human longing. You couldn’t write this. Or rather, Cole Escola did write this, but only the Mary Todd Lincoln part.
What makes Yang worth spotlighting isn’t just that he’s talented, though he is — it’s that he keeps choosing the harder, weirder, more honest path. He left the most stable job in comedy because he wanted more range. He went to Broadway not with a safe play but with the most gloriously unhinged role currently running. He talks openly about conversion therapy, identity, and the slow process of figuring yourself out, because he knows someone listening needs to hear it.
And honestly? Mary Todd Lincoln would be proud. Wherever she is. Probably drunk.
