Steven Yeun is speaking out about his decision to exit Marvel’s Thunderbolts.
“I think for me, time passing and things shifting kind of pulled me out of it,” Yeun, 40, said to Variety on Wednesday, January 3. “But [director] Jake [Schreier], I know, is going to do an incredible job.”
Yeun said delays in production due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes played a role in his decision. The Walking Dead alum confessed that he put a lot of effort in when he alerted the studio about his departure.
“It took a lot of drafts on email to make sure that I conveyed the sincerity of how sorry I was to have to back out,” Yeun admitted, noting his decision “probably pissed off too many people.”
While Yeun won’t be in the upcoming action flick, the actor is still interested in joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe at some point. “I wanna do a Marvel movie,” he shared on Wednesday.
When asked which film franchise he’d like to play a part in, Yeun teased he had “some ideas” but wanted to keep his aspirations to himself
“I heard if you put it out there, you’ll never get it,” he said. “So I’ll keep it close to my chest.”
Yeun was initially attached to Thunderbolts in February 2023, however, Marvel never officially announced his involvement. Five months earlier, the studio announced at D23 that Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour and Julia Louis-Dreyfus would be reprising their respective Marvel roles to lead the antihero film.
The film was expected to be released on July 26, 2024, but was delayed after having to pause production in May 2023 due to the 2023 WGA Strike. After the actors’ strike ended in November 2023, filming got pushed back to 2024. Thunderbolts is now scheduled to premiere on July 25, 2025.
While not much is known about the movie’s plot, the comics follow a group of villains who team up in a Suicide Squad fashion. Harbour, 48, teased that his character Red Guardian will have a touching story arc with Pugh’s Yelena.
“That relationship with Yelena is, like, we get to go into that more. [It’s] funny and satisfying in a real emotional way,” he said during an August 2023 episode of the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast. “They’re letting the Red Guardian do stuff that he’s never done before. … The script we have is really tight.”
