Bowen Yang has taken on the father of all movie roles in his latest project — but he's serving mother.

The Saturday Night Live star told The Messenger that he's "incredibly honored" to play God in A24's outrageous new comedy Dicks: The Musical, joining a "pretty small, literal pantheon" of actors, including Morgan Freeman and Alanis Morissette.

"And I think it's a fun new interpretation of God that we haven't seen, but we've all kind of implicitly known to be like, I'm gonna say accurate because God is extremely petty," said Yang. "Old Testament God especially."

He added, "I mean, he was flooding the earth and raining frogs down on people. That's really gay, petty sh—. And even in the New Testament, like he first forsakes his own son. Like that's every gay father who's adopted in the last five years who still wants to go Mykonos and hires a sitter. That is God, you know? So I think it's beautiful."













Although Yang recalls church being "a lovely sort of haven" for him growing up, he doesn't consider himself religious these days. "I feel like I recalibrated my distance from religion in my life," he explained.

"But I feel like in preparing for the role, it was just really fun to subvert all of that," added Yang. "Because I took [Christianity] very earnestly, I took it very seriously growing up, and then I didn't. And then now, it was nice to sort of go back to it with a fresh set of eyes and be like, 'God is a really messy queen.'"

In Dicks: The Musical, alpha males Craig (Josh Sharp) and Trevor (Aaron Jackson), who find out they're identical twins separated at birth and set out to get their parents (Megan Mullally and Nathan Lane) back together.

Bowen Yang attends the Los Angeles premiere of A24's 'Dicks: The Musical' on Sept. 18, 2023 in Beverly Hills. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Bowen Yang attends the Los Angeles premiere of A24's 'Dicks: The Musical' on Sept. 18, 2023 in Beverly Hills. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images© Provided by The Messenger

After Sharp and Jackson originated the musical as an Upright Citizens Brigade two-man show entitled F---ing Identical Twins, Yang was "blown away" by the absurdity and jumped at the chance to be part of the movie.

"It feels so fortuitous, and I feel so lucky to be a part of something like this," he explained. "We have deserved it for a long time in a way that blows past camp. I feel like queer people have had to really repurpose a lot of media in the past as a way to sort of slyly wink at themselves or the culture and claim it as their own."

Yang continued, "And this is something that kind of goes beyond taste and critique. It feels so thrilling to have something in the vein of like a John Waters film but to have it come out in the 2020s. So it's a huge honor."

Dicks: The Musical is now playing in select theaters, expanding nationwide on Oct. 20.