Don’t worry, Steven Yeun still totally wants to do a Marvel movie

It’s tempting, in these dark days for Disney, to read every bit of news as a sign of Marvel’s declining fortune. From the box office to the many Blade rewrites, everything seems to point to the end of an empire. Steven Yeun’s departure from Thunderbolts came across that way: buzzy actor flees failing studio! Yet Yeun will be the first to tell you that is not the case.

“I wanna do a Marvel movie,” he says in no uncertain terms in a new interview with Variety. In fact, he even has “some ideas” about what kind of Marvel project he’d like to be part of, “But I heard if you put it out there, you’ll never get it, so I’ll keep it close to my chest.”

Rather than dissatisfaction with Thunderbolts or the MCU as a whole, Yeun implies that it was an issue of scheduling that led to his departure from the film. “I think for me, time passing and things shifting kind of pulled me out of it. But [director Jake Schreier], I know, is going to do an incredible job,” he says. He is particularly careful not to upset the Marvel overlords, admitting that “It took a lot of drafts on email to make sure that I conveyed the sincerity of how sorry I was to have to back out.”

Even so, The Walking Dead alum thinks he “probably pissed off too many people leaving” to necessarily be invited back to the playground anytime soon, “so I’m just gonna say, ‘Thank you for having me.’”

If you’re a Marvel fan, the takeaway is that cool actors still want to work with Kevin Feige (and they also still feel the need to display some obsequiousness when addressing the film industry’s biggest power player). If you’re among those rooting for Marvel’s downfall, the takeaway is that the MCU slate is still so uncertain and disorganized that they can’t lock down someone like Steven Yeun into a shooting schedule.