Success Quote by Aaron Yoo

The interesting flex here is that Yoo isn’t chasing the obvious prestige role; he’s deliberately swerving around it. “Everyone else says Hamlet” isn’t just industry trivia. It’s a quiet roast of the actorly status game, where wanting Hamlet functions like a shorthand for seriousness, angst, and awards-season gravitas. Yoo clocks that expectation and then refuses it with a clean pivot: “but I want to play Romeo.”

That choice reframes Shakespeare in the Park not as a résumé line, but as a public, communal arena. Hamlet can be performed as an interior monologue in tights; Romeo has to live outdoors, in front of a mixed crowd, with noise, heat, and energy. Romeo is velocity: a role built on charisma, urgency, and emotional risk. Yoo’s subtext is that he wants the version of Shakespeare that feels alive, not embalmed in canonical “greatness.”

There’s also something culturally savvy in choosing Romeo, a part too often reduced to teen melodrama. In a moment when masculinity gets policed into either stoic grit or ironic detachment, Romeo is unabashedly sincere. Yoo’s dream isn’t just about getting into the park; it’s about claiming a romantic lead that’s frequently treated as lesser-than “serious” tragedy. The line carries an actor’s hunger, but also a small manifesto: give me the role where feeling isn’t a weakness, and where the crowd can’t help but feel it too.