Young Mazino Net Worth 2026 | Salary & Career Timeline

Young Mazino was working a corporate job between auditions when he booked the role that changed his career. Three years later, he is a series regular on one of HBO’s biggest dramas, and his net worth has moved accordingly.

Here is a complete breakdown of Young Mazino’s net worth in 2026, exactly how he built it, and what his Emmy-nominated breakout role actually paid him compared to his current HBO salary.

What Is Young Mazino’s Net Worth in 2026?

Young Mazino’s net worth is estimated between $1 million and $2 million as of 2026. His exact finances are not publicly confirmed, but that range is a reasonable estimate based on his Emmy-nominated breakout role, his current main-cast salary on HBO’s The Last of Us, and a decade of supporting work that preceded both.

What makes Mazino’s net worth story notable is not the total figure itself, but how recently it started climbing. For roughly ten years, he worked in relative obscurity. In the three years since, he has gone from a one-off guest actor to an Emmy nominee to a main cast member on one of television’s most expensive and acclaimed dramas.

What Is Young Mazino’s Real Name?

Young Mazino was born Christopher Young Kim on August 12, 1992, in Silver Spring, Maryland, to Korean immigrant parents. He adopted the stage name “Young Mazino” early in his career, a choice reportedly influenced by his love of anime, after discovering that multiple other actors already worked under his birth name.

He attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, before relocating to New York City in 2014 to pursue acting seriously. In 2017, he trained for a year at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, one of the industry’s most respected theater training programs, while also formally trained as a musician in his youth.

How Did Young Mazino Get Started in Acting?

Mazino’s acting career began in 2013 with small, often uncredited roles in television and independent film. During these early years, he worked a corporate job to support himself financially while continuing to audition, a period he has spoken about candidly in interviews as a necessary but difficult stretch before his break arrived.

Between 2015 and 2020, he built a résumé of guest and minor roles across established network shows, including Blindspot, New Amsterdam, Blue Bloods, and Prodigal Son, the kind of steady, unglamorous credits that build an actor’s reel without generating public attention.

How Much Did Young Mazino Earn From Beef?

Mazino’s breakout arrived in April 2023 with Netflix’s Beef, where he played Paul Cho, the younger brother of Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), across all 10 episodes of the main cast role. His exact Beef salary has not been made public, but limited series leads on a Netflix production of that scale typically earn a per-episode rate in the low-to-mid five figures, which would place his total compensation for the season in the range of several hundred thousand dollars before accounting for any backend participation tied to the show’s awards success.

Beef went on to become one of the most critically acclaimed shows of 2023, and Mazino’s performance earned him a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. The nomination itself functions as a financial asset beyond the paycheck: Emmy-nominated actors routinely see their next-project rates increase, since studios and casting directors treat the nomination as third-party validation of an actor’s ability to carry a major production.

In 2024, Variety named him one of its Asian Pacific stars to watch, a recognition that typically precedes, rather than follows, an actor’s biggest career jump.

What Does Young Mazino Make on The Last of Us?

In January 2024, HBO announced Mazino had been cast as Jesse in the second season of The Last of Us, one of the most expensive and closely watched drama productions on television. Jesse is a significant character adapted from The Last of Us Part II video game, described by the show’s creators as a community leader who puts others before himself, and casting him required an actor who could hold his own against an ensemble led by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.

Season 2 aired on HBO between April and May 2025 and went on to earn 17 Primetime Emmy Award nominations, cementing the show’s status as one of the most awarded video game adaptations in television history. Mazino has continued in the role into Season 3, confirmed for 6 episodes in his announced arc.

HBO does not publicly disclose cast salaries, but main cast members on a flagship prestige drama of The Last of Us’ budget and scale typically earn substantially more per episode than limited-series supporting roles, placing Mazino’s current television income in a meaningfully higher bracket than his Beef-era earnings just two years earlier.

What Else Has Young Mazino Been In?

Alongside his television work, Mazino appeared in A24’s Opus (2025), a thriller co-starring Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, and Amber Midthunder. Landing a supporting role in an A24 film with that cast signals where casting directors now place him relative to the industry’s rising names, putting him in the same project as another actor whose net worth and career have climbed sharply in the same period.

Mazino has described himself as a lifelong fan of anime, manga, and older cinema, interests that reportedly shaped both his stage name and his approach to character work, a recurring theme in his press interviews as his profile has grown.

Young Mazino Net Worth: Why the Number Is Still Moving

A net worth between $1 million and $2 million is a meaningful figure for an actor only three years removed from a corporate day job, but it likely understates where Mazino’s finances are headed. With The Last of Us renewed through at least a third season and his Emmy-nomination-backed reputation now established, his per-project rate has almost certainly increased since Beef, and each additional season of an HBO flagship drama compounds that further.

The more instructive story here is the timeline. A decade of guest roles produced modest, inconsistent income. One Emmy-nominated performance and one HBO series regular role, landed within roughly eighteen months of each other, did more for his net worth than the previous ten years combined.

Sources: Wikipedia, IMDb, Gold House, Stella Adler Studio of Acting, Variety, Yahoo Entertainment, TechNadu.