Bowen Yang On ‘Depersonalization,’ Generational Trauma, and His Friendship with Matt Rogers

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 17, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | September 17, 2024 |

Last summer, Bowen Yang took a brief hiatus from hosting his podcast with Matt Rogers, “Las Culturistas.” He was flying back and forth between New York and London to film SNL and Wicked, respectively, but eventually, “the jet lag and the tedium wore him down.”

“It was the gradual accumulation of idling, getting dressed up with nowhere to go, feeling like it was sanding down whatever I had preserved from the week before at ‘S.N.L.’—whatever was left over of my psychic tolerance,” Yang tells The New Yorker. Castmates like Ariana Grande and industry friends like Cole Escola were reaching out to offer support, but he says it got to the point where he was “having dissociative episodes, completely detached from any sense of self.” He and his therapist determined that he was experiencing “‘depersonalization,’ a condition in which you feel unmoored from your body and psyche.”

“I was like, I really need to get to the root of this problem, which is: Who are you? Really, who are you?”

It comes as no surprise that Yang experienced these symptoms when you consider his upbringing. The second child of conservative immigrant parents, Yang grew up with the knowledge that he wouldn’t have been born if his parents hadn’t moved out of China before his birth in 1990, when the one-child policy was still in place. When he was in high school, they sent him to gay conversion therapy after finding evidence of his communications on gay internet forums and chat rooms. “There was a period of, like, three weeks where I would come home every day to my parents sobbing,” he said. They gave him the ultimatum of staying in Colorado and living at home while attending college or going to NYU, where his sister went, “if he agreed to see a specialist.”

“But I did not have the conviction of thinking, I’m going to be a gay man and suffer through that. I was like, You know what? Sure. Maybe I am this malleable thing.”

So he went to NYU and studied medicine to appease them, but in New York, he met Rogers, with whom he eventually discovered his comedic sensibility.

“There was something to this rapport that we knew that we had with each other that gave us a dangerous edge,” says Rogers. They were in the improv scene at NYU together, but Yang “sort of had one foot in and one foot out,” according to another friend and classmate, Stephanie Hsu. It wasn’t until he was sitting for his premed exams his senior year that he had a light bulb moment. He left the exam room without finishing, called his parents, and told them he would be pursuing comedy instead of medicine. He’d already officially come out of them, which he said “didn’t go great,” but he was planning on moving back to Denver anyway. It was Rogers who stopped him.

“I was just, like, That can’t happen,” Rogers said, who invited him to join his new comedy group, Pop Roulette. “That was this huge life preserver that was thrown at me,” said Yang.

Then came “Culturistas,” which was pitched to Yang alone before he recruited Rogers, who moved the show in the direction of pop culture commentary and away from Yang’s more high-concept ideas. The show put them both on the map, and in 2017 Rogers was invited to the Just For Laughs festival but Yang wasn’t.

“That was the first time we were a little bit separated in terms of career trajectory…It started to become apparent to me that we could have real conflict,” said Rogers. He was right: in 2018, they both auditioned for SNL, and the stress of waiting to hear their fate made them drift apart, not speaking for months outside of recording the podcast. “I’ve never felt I was performing my friendship with Matt, except for that period,” said Yang.

“That was…an intense moment,” Rogers recalled of Yang getting the gig when he didn’t. “Because it felt like the first sign that we were really going to be separated, and that potentially, if it went one way, he would really skyrocket. I was afraid he would outgrow me, and I would lose him.”


Well, skyrocket he did, and deservedly so, which is not to say it was at Rogers’ expense—he’s written for and starred in several shows since then and had a Showtime comedy special, but a lot of his success depends on the podcast. So, when Yang tried to quit last summer in the midst of his breakdown, telling Rogers “he’d been feeling like a sidekick,” Rogers had to “urge” him to see reason.

“He can have anything and anyone he wants in this industry. I can’t,” Rogers said. “If at any point he wanted to just toss me aside, I felt like he could. And in that moment, it felt like he was.”

They’ve obviously worked things out and are better now that Yang is better personally, but that parasocial relationship is either going to help or hurt them going forward. I’m always happy to see Yang on my screen, I just hope that, when he gets to the top of the mountain he’s been steadily climbing, he doesn’t forget the friends who, by his own admission, threw him life preservers along the way.