- Bowen Yang stars in a remake of the 1993 romantic comedy The Wedding Banquet
- The Saturday Night Live star has a nude scene — but he didn’t tell his mother, who plans on watching the movie
- “I want her to be surprised,” he tells PEOPLE of the film which costars Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone
Bowen Yang didn’t give his mom the naked truth about what she’s about to see in his new movie The Wedding Banquet.
The Saturday Night Live actor, 34, who has a nude scene in the romantic comedy, tells PEOPLE his mother recently asked him when she can see the film, an update of Ang Lee’s 1993 classic.
“I was like, ‘April 18th.’ And then it dawned on me, ‘Oh, she’s going to see my ass.’ But it’s going to be great,” he adds.
Asked if he gave his mother, Meng, a heads up, Yang says no. “I haven’t. I want her to be surprised,” he quips.
Yang says he’s eager for his mother and his father, Ruilin, to watch the film for other reasons.
“I’m very excited for them to see, especially because they’ve seen the original, and especially because they’ve been on this journey,” he says.
That journey is one of acceptance, as Yang has discussed before. In 2020, he told The New York Times that his parents learned he was gay when they discovered “lewd conversations” on his AOL chat when he was a teenager.
“They just sat me down and yelled at me and said, ‘We don’t understand this. Where we come from, this doesn’t happen,’” recalled Yang, whose parents are Chinese immigrants. They then enrolled Yang in gay conversion therapy.
Through the years, they have come to understand their son. “They embrace my queerness, and they ask about it,” he tells PEOPLE now. “They’re curious about it, they want to know more. And I never thought I would get to that point.”
When Yang watched the original film, he had gone back in the closet to his parents following the conversion therapy. He recalls how the story — involving a gay man keeping his sexuality from his family — “resonated” with him at the time.
And though he felt a connection to the 1993 version, Yang says he didn’t grow emotional reading the script for the updated movie.
“I was reading through it in a way that was probably a little bit more detached,” says Yang. He plays Chris, a commitment-phobic Seattle nature guide whose boyfriend, Korean expat Min (Han Gi-chan), remains in the closet to his conservative family.
In order to avoid going back to Korea when summoned by his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) Min hatches a plot. He’ll pay for the further IVF treatment Chris’s best friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and her partner Lee (Lily Gladstone) can no longer afford if Angela marries him.
Yang says one of the ideas from the movie that most stuck out to him was “people are all we’ve got.”
The Wedding Banquet is in theaters nationwide on Friday. April 18.
For more on Bowen Yang, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE.
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