Spending a day on Fire Island with Mr Bowen Yang is akin, I imagine, to spending an afternoon with Ms Dolly Parton at Dollywood. Moving along the island’s teeming boardwalk, we’re interrupted too many times to count as he’s stopped at regular intervals by friends and strangers.

Through his Emmy-nominated tenure at Saturday Night Live and his more recent move into cinema, Yang has joined a rare league of celebrities who elicit a sense of kinship from the wider public. His audience feel that he could be one of their friends, even if they have never met. As we eat chicken fingers and fries at Canteen, a no-frills island mainstay known more for its people-watching than its food, a steady rotation of sun-kissed boys in Speedos and Jacquemus bags file past to catch a glimpse of the actor and, frequently, to say hello.

It’s Yang’s first time back here for a holiday for nearly two years. He’s at the end of an exhausting month of press for Fire Island, a loose adaptation of Ms Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, which reimagines the story among a group of twentysomething men and trades the novel’s rural Hertfordshire setting for the queer holiday destination of Fire Island in the state of New York.

When he leaves me, he returns to a house occupied by a coterie of his friends and frequent collaborators, including his co-star, Mr James Scully, who makes a beeline for our table after spotting Yang across the harbour. “Bowen Yang will define the next great generation of queer comedy,” he says. “And we’re all lucky to be alive at the same time as him.” In response, Yang offers a drawn-out, “Shuuuuuut up.”

Scully has a point. On the surface, at least, it’s a great time to be Mr Bowen Yang. In 2021, he was named one the 100 most influential people of the year in Time magazine, appeared on Variety’s Power Of Pride list and was named one of People magazine’s sexiest men alive. When Ms Kim Kardashian made a recent cameo appearance on SNL, she sought him out backstage for an autograph. In July, he received his third consecutive Emmy nomination.

“Look, I had no expectation for any of this,” he says. “I want the takeaway of this to be that I have no idea what I’m doing. I feel like Mr Magoo just walking around in a construction zone completely unaware of all the hazards, but somehow surviving.”

His next film, Bros, a Mr Judd Apatow-produced comedy starring, co-written and executive produced by Mr Billy Eichner, is released in September. He will then begin preparing for season 48 of SNL and season three of Comedy Central’s Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens, in which he stars. The Apple TV+ musical comedy Schmigadoon!, for which he was a writer on season one, has also been recommissioned for a second season. All that, while co-captaining his wildly popular podcast, Las Culturistas, which he hosts alongside Mr Matt Rogers, his best friend (and Fire Island co-star). Over the summer, the pair did a sold-out live show at Lincoln Center in New York City, which featured special guests including the actress Ms Lisa Kudrow and the singer Ms Taylor Swift.

Right now, he and his co-stars are doing a victory lap on the island that inspired the film. Fire Island was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews, particularly for Yang’s performance as Howie, the quiet, introspective Jane Bennett of the ensemble, who functions as a counterpoint to the more bombastic Noah (Elizabeth), played by Mr Joel Kim Booster. It’s a friendship that transcends the screen. The pair first met at a New York City improv theatre in 2014. In early drafts of the script, which was written by Booster, the characters were named Joel and Bowen and a lot of the dialogue is pulled from real conversations between the two.

We part ways with our half-eaten chicken strips and walk down the beach to sit and stare out at the ocean, our fingers making vague patterns in the sand. “The only time I’ve put my therapist on assignment to watch something that I’ve been in was for this movie,” says Yang.

The work, he reflects, has been about creating distance from his character, who spends much of the film navigating his feelings of undesirability. While shooting, the director, Mr Andrew Ahn, tried to get Yang into the zone by having him look in the mirror and ask himself, as Howie, “Am I ugly?” It was a challenging experience.

“I am still not a skilled enough actor to do that and not have it affect me on a soul level,” he says. “The past year has been about picking up the pieces. It was a very edifying experience. And painful. And ultimately rewarding. Part of my journey over the past year since we wrapped has been about slowly assembling my self-esteem back together in the context of gay desirability.”

When the topic turns to Saturday Night Live, Yang’s body language shifts slightly, his fingers no longer adrift in the sand. A passing mention of his co-star, Mr Pete Davidson, for instance, can drive a whole news cycle, so the tap has to run at a lower water pressure, as he describes it, when talking about the show that helped establish him. “Working at SNL immediately trains you into withholding,” he says. “It’s like being a racehorse with the blinders [blinkers] on because, if you get too much context, then you go insane.”

Yang’s fame has impacted the way he looks at and speaks about celebrities, something he made a career of before becoming the generative force himself. “What was jarring for me was realising that maybe I’d built a lot of my comedy, my personality too maybe, on shitting on famous people that I didn’t know. Having the perimeters of that change has been very uncomfortable. Who am I without this toxic instinct to talk shit? Maybe that was this inflection point for me.”

These days, he tends not to sneer at anything, “unless it’s morally bankrupt”.

Yang is only the third openly gay cast member in SNL’s almost 50-year history. That has brought its own pressures. For someone with Yang’s cultural cachet, there comes a level of expectation. It’s something he remains ambivalent about.

“You want to make content divorced from your demographic in a way,” he says, “but you also feel like you should write from that perspective. How do you do it in a way that’s somehow decoupled from that?” He has found, too, that his position as one of his generation’s most visible gay comics has attracted vitriol when some of his sketches have been deemed offensive. Has he picked up the phone after watching a rehearsal, called the producers and suggested they don’t run a certain joke? Yes.

“And I have been heard and that gives me encouragement,” he says. Still, he is pragmatic about his status as a role model and has learnt to accept that he can’t be everything to everybody. “I’ve accepted not having every gay infinity stone that there is to have,” he says.

A flock of fans are circling around us once again. Several of them step in to get selfies. Yang obliges and conjures a wide smile for their cameras. Then, as if nothing has interrupted us, “Look, we don’t walk around saying, ‘How are we going to give the most upstanding, no-flies-on-it version of queerness that we can?’ It’s a sketch show that’s still fun because it’s unpredictable – because it’s live – and there’s something messy in unpredictability that I think people like. For all the insanity that the show represents, there’s still something joyful.”

Yang’s most crystallised expression of joy comes at any mention of Rogers or Booster or his Saturday Night Live co-stars, Ms Cecily Strong or Ms Ego Nwodim. “Maybe I’m connecting too many dots, but SNL is kinda like Fire Island. You can overcome all the insane parts of this environment if you’re lucky enough to move through it with people who understand you. There’s something really moving to me about watching what might be considered a community coming up together.”

And with that, he wipes away his sand creation and we head back towards the place he calls home for a few weeks every summer.