The Walking Dead: Steven Yeun gets (very) candid about Glenn’s exit

Even though Glenn’s exit from The Walking Dead may have happened a good year ago, the moment still stands out. For Steven Yeun, it may also stand out as people not knowing just what they had until it was gone. This is a character who often had to fight to prove himself, and nobody else within the group often knew where his place precisely was.

Yeun waxed poetic about his departure from the show in a new interview with Vanity Fair, explaining how he feels Glenn was treated in retrospect:

“Internally, it was incredible … Externally, it was tough sometimes because I never felt like [Glenn] got his fair due. I never felt like he got it from an outward perception. 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.”

This is a sentiment that Yeun echoes further when speaking out about the character’s death:

“I’ll be honest with you and put a full disclaimer here: I might not be objective, but I truly feel 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. I look at what happened and I think, ‘That wasn’t any more gory than what we’ve done before, per se.’ No one got their face ripped in half! People got their guts smashed out and their heads caved in. But this one felt gratuitous 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 is far from the first actor to experience this issue, and it’s hard to know what it stems from other than being the true heart of the group. Glenn didn’t have the most discernible skills of the group. He wasn’t the biggest, the most resourceful, the strongest, or the one with the most experience roughing it. He was the guy who was just finding a way to survive, and he was in many sense so many of us if we were in the apocalypse. That’s what his death stung so much — it was losing that one person who was really ground and easily relatable. Without that touchstone, we’ve since spiraled looking for someone else to understand.

New episodes of The Walking Dead premiere this fall; in theory, it’s always possible that Yeun turns up somewhere else. It just won’t be in a spot other than in a flashback or some sort of dream sequence.

What do you make of some of Yeun’s comments, and are you going to miss him as a part of The Walking Dead moving into the future? Share below! (Photo: AMC.)