SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY

Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”

- Michael Schulman

At some point last summer, Bowen Yang lost his grip on who he was. For months, he’d been flying back and forth between New York, where he’s in the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” and London, where he was shooting the movie musical “Wicked,” playing a snarky schoolmate of Glinda the Good Witch. Lorne Michaels, his boss at “S.N.L.,” had warned him about the exhausting schedule. “I have my nootropics for focus, and I have my CBD oils for sleep. I can really overcome this,” Yang recalled thinking. “And I didn’t, and I couldn’t.”

During “Wicked,” he’d spend hours getting into his elaborate costume, makeup, and toupee. Sometimes he’d sit in his trailer all day without being called to set once—standard procedure for a big-budget movie, but the jet lag and the tedium wore him down. “It was a 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,” he said. He started telling himself that the good things in his life had been flukes, that his success had all been a terrible mistake. He wondered whether residual trauma was surfacing from his teen years, when his parents sent him to gay-conversion therapy.