Exclusive Interview: Steven He Talks About His Journey as a Filmmaker, the Secret to His Success, Ginormo!, and Creating Impact

Chinese-Irish filmmaker and creator Steven He has made quite a name for himself with his laugh-out-loud comedy skits, which have racked up billions of views online. His content has resonated with audiences around the world and created a lasting impact, making a community feel seen. But his journey has been anything but an overnight success, and Steven will be the first to tell you that. Despite facing thousands of rejections, it’s his determination and drive that have pushed him forward and seen him emerge as one of the top creators in the world. That and probability and statistics.

Taking everything that he’s learned on his journey as a filmmaker, he’s teaming up with Ken Mok (America’s Next Top Model) to bring us the laugh-out-loud series, Ginormo!.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Steven about his career, the secret to his success, Ginormo!, and more.

PC: How did you discover your passion for storytelling and content creation?
Steven: I’ll share a story that I rarely tell, and it’s how I became an actor. I was thirteen years old. I was in China. By that time, I had already come to the West, so I could speak English. The school was entering a festival that had to do with learning English, which is very strange. In China, we have these festivals where they’re promoting academia. One of the subjects was English, so our school was putting on a play. I happened to be the best English speaker, so I was cast.

The play was about one of the most popular cartoons in China at the time. It’s a very goofy cartoon about six sheep and two wolves. It’s like a goofy Tom and Jerry-style cartoon where the wolves always try to get the sheep but they never do. I played one of the sheep. He was the buff sheep. He was the one who was always in the gym, lifting weights. Of course, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was thirteen. I was put into this big, goofy costume of a sheep. It looked exactly like the cartoon. I was told that my stage direction was to walk on stage and do this and that. We put the play on, and to our surprise, actual people came. We thought this was a school thing, but the general public came and there were a lot of kids there because they love the cartoon.

So I followed my directions. I said my lines very loudly to the audience. I did my bicep curls as my character. Then we finished. I didn’t think too much about it. I was like, “Okay, this was a weird experience, but it was cool.”

We walked backstage. I’ll always remember this. There was a back door. A little kid who must have been five burst through the back door with his mom behind him and with this camera. He came to us and walked past every one of my cast mates—there were eight of us—and he said, “I love you. You’re my favorite sheep.” His mom took a photo of us. That was the second that I became an actor. Because I had seen that by doing something which was weird to me at the time I had actually made this kid’s day. It wasn’t me who made his day. It was his favorite cartoon. I didn’t deserve it at all, but I got a glimpse of what it was like to create a piece of work that people enjoy. From that day on, I was an actor.

PC: You recently shared on Good Morning America that you faced over 3,000 rejections on your journey, and you’ve been really open about the ups and downs of this industry. During those challenging times, how were you able to persevere?
Steven: That was quite difficult. There were moments that were challenging when I asked my mother, “Should I be a doctor?” There definitely were. But I’d say my mindset really helped. I didn’t look at it in terms of luck or “Maybe I’ll get there.” I looked at it mathematically, and that gave me a massive edge in my own head. I always choose probability over luck because you have power over probability. You do not have power over luck. So I developed that mindset with all those rejections.

To win a one-in-a-million lottery, it’s simple. You just have to lose a couple of million times. I’ve actually done the math. This is how much of a geek I am. If you buy a million tickets, your chances of winning are like 65%. But if you buy two million tickets, your chances of winning are around 83%. With three million, your chances go up to 98.5%. That’s what I hung on to because I knew math is math. Reality is reality. I hung onto that concept that with 100 tries, they’ll probably all fail. With 500 tries, I might have a decent shot. With 1,000 tries, I might have a good shot. The probability just starts stacking up. So I relied on statistics and my understanding of math.

PC: On the flip side of that, you’ve also had a lot of success. When you look back, is there a moment that stands out?
Steven: There are insights that stand out to me. This is a funny story. Even with my last video, I have learned that it’s impossible to predict the success of a project. I’ll share my experience. There have been so many times when I am making a video and I think it’s amazing. All the jokes are funny. It looks fantastic. It sounds fantastic. Everything is great. I’ll upload it and it gets no views.

This is a true story by the way. On my YouTube channel, I’ve started making shorts. What I’m doing now is I’ll make a skit. I’ll make it into both formats: long form and then I’ll cut it down into a vertical short form. There was this one skit that was 90 seconds. We cut it down to 60 seconds and got rid of the rubbish parts. I was like, “Eh, it couldn’t hurt. Let’s just upload it.” That is my most viewed video on my shorts right now. It’s impossible to predict the success of a series.

When I first blew up, it was a skit about dodging my mom’s slippers. That blew up completely unexpectedly. Then the Asian dad character blew up. Again, it was completely unexpected. Today, it’s the same. It goes back to the probability thing.

PC: In addition to being an actor, you’ve also written, directed, and produced. How has your work behind the scenes impacted the way that you approach your work on screen and vice versa?
Steven: That’s a very insightful question. I have learned a whole lot. It was a huge perspective shift because I thought I knew some stuff about acting after getting a bachelor’s degree and spending five full years being educated in it. I could not believe how much more education there was when I started doing everything else.

Being a cinematographer, I learned how to expose the camera and design shots. That taught me so much about acting. Directing taught me so much about acting. Writing taught me so much about acting. Editing, I had no clue about all the things that editors are concerned with regarding actors. Give them options. Give them different takes. Match your movements consistently. I never knew that.

I’ve always listened to my acting teachers in terms of “This is how you act.” But having been exposed to every other skill set that it takes to be a content creator that educated me even more. I do believe that a well-rounded filmmaker is great, sometimes even better than a specific filmmaker. That’s why I admire people like Charlie Chaplin, who practically did everything. It very much influenced how I think as an actor.

PC: We’re living in such an exciting time in the industry where there is no longer one traditional way to get a project greenlit or made. We’re seeing storytellers create their own projects. Tell us a bit about Ginormo! and how your personal experiences led to its creation.
Steven: This has been a journey that I’ve been on for over two years. It’s a journey that I set up after building an initial audience where I wanted to make cinematic filmmaking profitable in-house. This has been a dream of mine because I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker and tell stories through this amazing medium. So I wanted to bring that to the audience that I have now, which is new media: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

Within that journey, a big set of challenges were presented. To make a channel profitable is common. A lot of us do it. I do it at the higher end. A lot of great YouTubers do it as well. But bringing cinematic filmmaking to that has built-in challenges. First of all, it’s extremely expensive. On the set of Ginormo!, we had 100 people-days. Paying everyone’s salaries for a single day means a lot of money is going out. To earn that revenue back is significantly more difficult than me shooting by myself, which is free. Then there are other challenges like the actual format itself. 90% of our job is understanding the algorithm and optimizing for it. That’s how we compete in it. So when you’re making a video as a successful YouTuber, 90% of the work is, “I need to get my click-through from six percent to seven percent. What methods can I use to do that? I need my retention to go from 60% to 80%. I need my average watch time to hit about fifteen seconds.” That is the important stuff that decides whether you’re a successful YouTuber or not. Before I understood that, I had made hundreds of videos with no views. I’ve learned that it’s not necessarily about if the video is good or not—it must fit the platform. In the case of YouTube, it must compete in the algorithm.

I’ll give you a specific example that is very visceral. If you took a random Oscar award-winning Best Picture movie and uploaded it onto YouTube—we’re not counting films like Everything Everywhere All at Once because that movie is amazing—that upload is likely to get little to no views because of the format. It doesn’t suit the format where an audience member has perhaps fifteen minutes for lunch and then opens up YouTube. They’re probably not going to click on a two-hour-long video. With that host of challenges, we have innovated and we have created new ways of storytelling and even entirely new formats in terms of how to turn a film into six episodes or how to turn one shoot into multiple things.

The first attempt on this journey was last April when I produced a one-day shoot that created three comedy skits. I invited eight of my great friends to come and film with me. It worked out well because I did hire fifteen people. It was an expensive shoot. We worked out well financially, but we also made extraordinary achievements, including one unique achievement that I don’t believe had been done before: we were trending number six, seven, and one simultaneously in the United States. That was a success. We learned from the tactics that we used.

The second try is Ginormo!, which is launching in May. At this time, it’s a twelve-minute, six-episode scripted narrative series. It’s a parody of 1970s kaijus. We’re very excited. We’ve built a lot of other tactics and strategies into this one in order to compete as well as make it a suitable piece of content for YouTube and this audience.

PC: You’ve created this with Ken Mok. How did this partnership form, and how does that collaboration work when you’re trying to fit these specific algorithms and different platforms?
Steven: Ken is a dear friend of mine. I’m so grateful to have him on the show. The power of us coming together is something to be really proud of. This is an Asian-strong show with eight extraordinary Asian creators on it. The main creators of this show are me and Ken.

Ken and I have been friends before the show. We worked on traditional projects together in the traditional TV world. At the same time, I was working on this journey of building this business model. I mentioned how it was going. Then, he mentioned this idea that he’s had in his head for a while about a parody of Japanese kaiju shows. Immediately, I was in love with the idea. How do you not love a descriptor like that? Then I read the first episode which he wrote and I was like, “This is it. This is absolutely perfect.”

It has a goofiness. It doesn’t take itself seriously. I’m able to inject a lot of optimization into it for the YouTube algorithm. We made it into a show that has a lot of values beyond the traditional and normal values. Of course, it’s entertaining. There are jokes in there, but we added an entire plane of meta jokes that parodies the poor filmmaking back in the day. Like straight-up mistakes in continuity. You get a character who’s holding a mug, then you cut away, and he’s holding a cigarette. Then we cut back and it’s not even there anymore. These are the things that I find hilarious, and I believe you don’t have to be in the series to find it funny either. It’s like watching this thing go horribly wrong. We injected a lot more value in the costume and the set designs. We have a plane with a whole other narrative in there.

The format of twelve minutes is something we had to use in the writing. If you wrote traditionally as a normal writer would, you would take two minutes to develop a plot and tell the payoff in the third minute. We don’t have that luxury because I can see in the stats that within 30 seconds, 20% of people have dropped off. We had to rethink the way that we write and create a product that’s more suitable for the platform and that the YouTube audience would enjoy.

PC: Outside of this series, you’re creating content that makes underrepresented communities feel seen. Have you had time to reflect on your contributions and the impact that you’re creating?
Steven: Thank you. Creating impact is really important to me. I’ll share a story of what I’ve experienced so far. The week that we trended numbers six, seven, and one, I was in New York. There were a few times when I was in Chinatown eating my favorite rice roll. A grown Chinese man came up to me and he said, “I’ve been watching you for ten years. Besides Ryan Higa, I’ve never seen Asian faces on YouTube. Now you guys have literally taken over the trending board, the recommended page, and the home page.” That was a moment that gave me a lot of pride because they were happy to see themselves represented. They were happy to be represented as “normal” and not as a minority but as humans and to have their stories told.

This has happened multiple times and in different places where a child would tell me that he’s the only Asian kid in his school and he wasn’t feeling so confident about it. But now everyone is running around saying, “Emotional damage,” like my character does. Suddenly, he feels so cool to be himself. That made me so happy. You deserve to be proud of who you are. If I can play any role in helping people feel that, I’m grateful for that.

To keep up with Steven, follow him on Instagram. Subscribe to his YouTube channel.