“Beef”'s Steven Yeun Thanks 'a Lot of People Who Looked Out for Me' in Inspiring Call for 'Grace' After Emmys Win

The actor said in his speech, "Judgment and shame is a lonely place but compassion and grace is where we can all meet"

Steven Yeun takes the cake with his Beef win at the 2023 Emmy Awards.

The star, 40, won outstanding actor in a limited series or movie for the Netflix show on Monday.

Also nominated in the category were Daniel Radcliffe from WEIRD: The 'Weird Al' Yankovic Story, Evan Peters of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Welcome to Chippendales' Kumail Nanjiani, George & Tammy's Michael Shannon, and Taron Egerton from Black Bird.

"Thank you for this immense honor and blessing," said Yeun in his acceptance speech. "Man, I have a lot of people to thank. A lot of people that looked out for me on my way to even get to be in this business."

Related: Ali Wong Emotionally Thanks Her Daughters After Winning Best Actress Emmy for Beef: 'You Inspire Me'

"There were days when it was difficult to live in Danny's skin. Sometimes I wanted to judge him; sometimes I wanted to make fun of him," Yeun said, though Beef's on-set photographer Andrew Cooper told him one day, "Never bail on Danny."

"I wanna thank Danny for teaching me that judgment and shame is a lonely place, but compassion and grace is where we can all meet," the Walking Dead alum added.

In Beef, Yeun played Danny Cho, a man whose repressed anger was unleashed after he found himself in a road rage incident with Ali Wong's Amy Lau. In the event's aftermath, the former strangers' lives became intertwined in unexpected ways, laying the groundwork for a complex cultural examination.

"There's a lot going on," Yeun told PEOPLE last April of his creative process before and during production on the Netflix series. "I think we start somewhere and then we dig so much deeper, and that's something I'm always looking for."

At the time, the Nope star told NPR that the role had him looking back on his youth.

"Playing Danny was, at times, asking me to revisit a part of myself that when I was younger, I didn't have a full handle over," Yeun explained.

"With Danny, it wasn't that it was cathartic, per se. I got tired being that angry for so long. Every day, you know, I'd show up on set and I'd just be like, 'Danny's doing what today?' And I'm just like, How do I justify this? How do I not hate Danny? How do I love Danny? How do I never bail on Danny? Because Danny is a side of all of us. And how do I never bail so that the audience will never bail?"

Related: 'Succession', 'White Lotus' and More Dominate 2023 Emmy Nominations: See the Full List

Fellow nominee Radcliffe, 32, starred as "Weird Al" Yankovic in the zany Roku Channel biopic. During an appearance on The View in March 2022, the English actor revealed that while he wore a wig to duplicate the accordion-playing singer's signature curly locks, the mustache was all him.

"Real mustache, fake hair," Radcliffe told Ana Navarro, Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines and Sunny Hostin. "Anything to avoid fake facial hair. Grow it if you can."

Radcliffe went on to open up about the film — which, according to a press release, explored "every facet of Yankovic's life, from his meteoric rise to fame with early hits like 'Eat It' and 'Like a Surgeon' to his torrid celebrity love affairs and famously depraved lifestyle."

"It was honestly an incredible fast shoot, it was, like, 18 days," Radcliffe said of making the project. "But it was one of the most fun things I have ever done in my life."

Related: Daniel Radcliffe Transforms Into Weird Al in 'WEIRD', a Movie About the Musician's 'Scandalous' Life

Peters channeled his inner demons to portray notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. The Netflix series followed Dahmer's many crimes from the perspective of his victims. Just the latest in a series of projects to recount Dahmer's murders, Ryan Murphy's series was first announced in March 2021 with American Horror Story alum Peters attached to lead.

The previous Emmy winner, 36, opened up about what it was like to embody the serial killer during a moderated discussion hosted by Netflix in October 2022.

"Doing the role, I wanted to give it 120 percent the whole way through, so I brought in a lot of darkness and negativity," he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The actor banked on keeping his sights set on the series wrapping as he grappled with Dahmer's life.

To step away from the sinister, Peter revealed he fell back on viewing a specific comedy film: "It was just having that end goal in sight, knowing when we were going to wrap and finally being able to breathe and let it go and say, 'OK, now it's time to bring in the joy and the lightness and watch comedies and romances and go back to St. Louis and see my family and friends and yeah, watch Step Brothers.'"

Related: Evan Peters on the 'Real Struggle' of Taking on 'Dahmer' — Including Yo-Yo-ing 35 Lbs. to Play Killer

In Hulu's Welcome to Chippendales, Nanjiani took on the role of Somen "Steve" Banerjee, an Indian immigrant who founded the all-male stripping empire.

"This is by far the most challenging job I've ever done, in terms of the length of the shoot, the content of the scenes, and emotional difficulty of those scenes," Nanjiani told Vanity Fair in August 2022. "It's one of those things where I just jumped in, and trusted that it'd reveal itself as it goes — and it did."

Speaking to PEOPLE in May of that year, Nanjiani delved deeper into Banerjee's haunting fate. "People don't know that the real story of it is really wild," he said, adding. "Some really surprising stuff happened, and it's surprising that people don't really know about it."

Noting that "there's a lot of twists and turns" within the series, Nanjiani detailed that "the show itself spans 15 years from the beginning, all through [the Chippendales] hype, to sort of when it started being less popular."

Related: Kumail Nanjiani Says He's Not Interested in Playing 'Boring, Good, Noble Characters'

Shannon took on the role of country legend George Jones in Showtime's George & Tammy.

With 30 chart-topping hits between them, Jones and Tammy Wynette earned the title of Mr. and Mrs. Country Music many times over. But their tumultuous private life put an end to their passionate marriage in 1975 after just six years, leaving a string of hits and heartbreak in their wake.

Their complicated love story was explored in the six-part miniseries, and Shannon's performance alongside Jessica Chastain as Tammy became a bittersweet trip down memory lane for the late couple's only daughter Georgette Jones Lennon.

"It's been a crazy emotional roller coaster," she told PEOPLE in December 2022. "But it's therapeutic because you start thinking about things you tucked away a long time ago, whether it be painful or even good memories."

Related: See the Stars of George & Tammy Compared to the Real-Life People They Play

Egerton took on the role of Jimmy Keene, a convict who attempted to elicit a confession from suspected killer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) under the agreement that he'd be free if he succeeded.

The story was adapted from the acclaimed true-crime memoir In with the Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption by James Keene with Hillel Levin.

In addition to Egerton, Hauser and Ray Liotta — who was nominated after his unexpected death at age 67 in May 2022 — also received nods at this year's Emmys.

Liotta's daughter Karsen shared her gratitude in a statement to PEOPLE last July: “I am so grateful to the members of the Television Academy for honoring my Dad with this nomination. He was so incredibly proud of his performance in Black Bird, and it would mean the world to him to be nominated alongside Taron and Paul.”

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