Saturday Night Live's Bowen Yang Debuts New Bleached Hair

Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang Debuts New Bleached Hair

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“Normative queer semiotics would suggest that i am _________ but they would be wrong,” Bowen Yang captioned a silly selfie showing off his new ‘do

Bowen Yang is kicking off the new year with a new look!

The Saturday Night Live star, 31, showed off his freshly bleached locks on Instagram Sunday, sharing a silly selfie in which his eyes are half open.

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“Normative queer semiotics would suggest that i am _________ but they would be wrong,” Yang wrote in the caption, going on to credit N.Y.C.-based hairstylist Yu Nakata for his new ‘do.

The actor and comedian also re-posted another image featuring his bleached hair, originally shared by fellow actor James Scully, to his own Instagram Story. In the photo, Yang is making a funny face while holding a drink in one hand, as the two dine at Bonnie’s restaurant in Brooklyn.

You star Scully, 29, decorated the photo with a heart-face emoji.

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Yang joined the cast of SNL in 2019 after starting out as a writer the previous year and recently made his Sexiest Man Alive debut, telling PEOPLE in November that the long-running NBC sketch series “changed my life in every way imaginable.”

Earlier in 2021, he also opened up to PEOPLE on his sexuality — notably, about being sent to gay conversion therapy by his parents as a teen.

“There was a huge chasm of misunderstanding,” Yang said in a June issue of PEOPLE. “Neither side really understood where the other was coming from, and it led to very dangerous situations overall.”

Still, “what was always constant was the intention of love from both sides. It pushed me into questioning what it meant, what was protected and what I should be protective about in terms of being a queer person,” added Yang. “I don’t take it for granted.”

RELATED VIDEO: Bowen Yang on Being the First Chinese American Cast Member on SNL: “There’s Some Humility That Has to Be Constant”

Yang, who also co-hosts the Las Culturistas podcast, is the first Chinese American star of SNL and the first openly gay man to be featured beyond a single season.

In May, he and Joel Kim Booster chatted during an episode of Booster’s Joy F*ck Club series, where they discussed how their queerness and race have “intersected and affected both [their] identities.”

“It might be fair to say that at first consideration, it feels like they’re identities that are somewhat at odds with each other. In terms of Western gay identities, which in a lot of ways sort of devalues Asian people or sort of puts Asian people in this weird purgatorial status in the gay community,” Yang said. “That feels like it’s at odds with my Asian identity, which in a lot of weird, bizarre ways is also messaged something around like, ‘You don’t be gay, don’t be gay.’ So having those two things be weird, diametrically opposed poles in some ways, having those two things have to be tightly wound together is really, really, really tough.”

‘The Timeline You’re All Living in Is About to Collapse’

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Saturday Night Live’s first episode of 2022 attempted to make up for the strange, empty show that ended 2021 amid the rise of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant. The cast was back, the masked audience was back, and the show, as they say, went on. But it couldn’t escape the world outside of 30 Rock’s doors.

This season has thus far blended thin political fare with dour-noted escapism, as though the pleasure of putting on a live show is more about continually agitating a bruise than finding true comedic relief. Like so many of its viewers, SNL has been waiting to turn a corner, to move past a scenario with little to laugh about. Last night’s episode felt like one long exasperated sigh. As James Austin Johnson’s Joe Biden wretchedly joked in the opening presidential address, “People got vaccinated and the pandemic got worse.”

Trying to find an answer for why things are so very bad, the sketch landed on … Spider-Man: No Way Home. The latest installment of the superhero franchise opened on December 17, Johnson’s Biden explained. “When did every single person get Omicron?” he asked. “The week after December 17. Stop seeing Spider-Man.”

SNL typically eschews absurdity until later in the night, but the opener’s attempt at it landed with a particularly dense thud. Biden suggested that, as in Spider-Man, multiverses are real and we’re clearly living in one of the bad ones. (Well, unless you count the universe where Biden lost to Trump and goes on to host a CNBC show called T-Birds, Tacos, and Trains.) “Doesn’t that make more sense than whatever the hell our current world is?” Biden asked reporters. The premise gathered mild steam when a tattooed Biden from the so-called real world, played by Pete Davidson, arrived via a time portal to confirm the theory. But even he couldn’t seem to locate the levity in his role, telling the media, “The timeline you’re all living in is about to collapse.” Fully leaning into that macabre tone—apt for our moment—would have made the sketch not merely bleak but darkly funny.

Read: What the success of Spider-Man means for Hollywood in 2022

Despite the somber material, a few cast members arrived ready to deliver. Bowen Yang was a superbly stoic Yao Ming, called in to provide commentary for the analytical sports show NBA on TNT when Shaq contracted COVID. Chloe Fineman’s pitch-perfect Elmo responded to the hubbub this week about his exasperated relationship with Rocco, his friend Zoe’s pet rock, highlighting the actress’s wheelhouse of astute impressions. And Kate McKinnon played an enthusiastic lesbian classics scholar whose personal relationship details keep popping up in her presentation about the poet Sappho.

The evening’s host, Ariana DeBose, fresh off a performance as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s update of West Side Story, tried to character-act her way through her sketches, but even the seemingly lighter material took a gloomy turn. In a new Sound of Music parody, Maria von Trapp (McKinnon) introduced her neighbor’s motherless children to a nun who “just like me … got kicked out of a nunnery for erratic behavior.” DeBose’s governess tried to teach the children to sing because it would help “solve all of the family’s emotional problems,” but in her hands, Maria’s classic “Do-Re-Mi” got a pop-culture update: “Doh, a thing that Homer Simpson says / Ray, a movie with Jamie Foxx.” The kids began adding their own spin on the lyrics, coming up with grimmer examples. “Doe, the last name of a body found in a river,” Yang, as one of the children, sang.

The most energetic moments of the show came from the musical performances by the indie pop-rock band Bleachers—each a true relief. Still, the band’s appearance was a reminder of pandemic realities: The rapper Roddy Ricch had been set to be the musical guest but dropped out at the last minute because of COVID exposure. Was it a coincidence that Bleachers’ first song last night was “How Dare You Want More?”

Between the need to scramble the jets for the final episode of 2021 and the tweaks the show had to make for its first episode of the new year, SNL is clearly treading more cautiously. Rather than detail the next host and musical guest weeks in advance, it announced that information during yesterday’s show. As airlines and small businesses struggle to maintain enough staff to deliver their goods and services, SNL, too, is practicing flexibility. We’re all still living in the middle of a pandemic—and last night’s episode seemed to acknowledge that.

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New year, new host, and new hair for Bowen Yang were on the table in the promo for Saturday Night Live’s first show of 2022.

Actress Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in the updated version of West Side Story, will be the first host of the new year. The Tony Award nominee is making her SNL debut.

Joining her will be musical guest Bleachers, who are subbing for rapper Roddy Ricch because of the latter’s Covid-19 exposure.

In the first promo, DeBose is joined by Jack Antonoff of Bleachers and Yang, who is complimented on his new white hair and “new you.” Of course, he’s not all-in on the “new” horizons of the year, as he confesses.

The second promo finds DeBose and Yang talking about the possible origin of Bleachers name, which is not well-received by Antonoff.

Watch the video above.

Bowen Yang goes blonde for 2022

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“Normative queer semiotics would suggest that I am ________ but they would be wrong,” the SNL star wrote on Instagram, showing his new bleached look.

]

New year, new host, and new hair for Bowen Yang were on the table in the promo for Saturday Night Live’s first show of 2022.

Actress Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in the updated version of West Side Story, will be the first host of the new year. The Tony Award nominee is making her SNL debut.