by JAMES S. KIM | @james_s_kim
editor@charactermedia.com
There’s never a dull moment when The Walking Dead star Steven Yeun is with the always zany Conan O’Brien. The last time Yeun appeared on Conan, he told O’Brien about how all Asians don’t look alike. Before that, Yeun explained why he used a photo of a male underwear model as his Twitter profile picture, invited the television show host to an Atlanta strip club, and even confided to O’Brien that he was ashamed of his tiny nipples.
If you thought those instances were a bit too intimate, this latest adventure between O’Brien and Yeun knocks down whatever barriers remained between them. The Korean American actor brought the TBS talk show host to Wi Spa, a Korean spa in Koreatown, Los Angeles, where they stripped to the buff for a true Korean spa experience, including a scrub-down and time in the sauna.
To his credit, when O’Brien found out that the men’s bathhouse and saunas are only traversed in one’s birthday suit, he accepted without too much complaint. Who knew he could be even paler under his shirt?
Once the men are inside the spa, things get pretty hilarious–or in the case of O’Brien’s skin, an incredibly bright shade of red. Yeun and O’Brien move from the hot tub to the steam room, talking (and hugging) with other naked Korean men, then cool off in the ice bath. They even get a full body scrub to get rid of dead skin, leading to some piercing screams from the two guests.
Back in the co-ed area of the spa, Yeun and O’Brien don the Princess Leia bun towels and doze off in a jjimjilbang, haunted by dreams of evil body scrubbers and tall naked Irish men.
“No, no, it was not fun,” a smoother-skinned O’Brien tells Yeun after it was all over. “It was painful, and I think life-shortening. I will be dead within 48 hours.”
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