BD Wong
BD Wong is an actor, born 1960.
BD Wong's career has a landmark at the very start of it. His Song Liling in M. Butterfly won him a Tony Award, and he remains the only actor in Broadway history to take the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Clarence Derwent and Theatre World awards for a single role. Nothing was ever going to top that on paper, so he built something else instead: three decades as the actor a production calls when a part needs intelligence and stillness.
Television is where most viewers know him from. Dr. George Huang, the forensic psychiatrist on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is a small, calm role played across many years, and Father Ray Mukada on Oz is its opposite, a prison chaplain steadily losing an argument with his own institution. Whiterose in Mr. Robot is the best of the three, a performance of enormous control in which the character's power is implied rather than demonstrated, and it brought both an Emmy nomination and a Critics' Choice nomination.
He is also, improbably, the through-line of a blockbuster franchise. Dr. Henry Wu appears briefly in Jurassic Park (1993) and returns decades later in Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, promoted from expository geneticist to the man responsible for the mess. Alongside that sits Shang in Mulan, the role that made him familiar to children, and Hugo Strange on Gotham, where he is plainly having the time of his life.
Movies (37)
- Mulan (1998)
- Jurassic World Dominion (2022)
- Jurassic World (2015)
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- Bird Box (2018)
- Mulan II (2004)
- The Karate Kid Part II (1986)
- Focus (2015)
- Father of the Bride (1991)
- Heart of Stone (2023)
- Executive Decision (1996)
- Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
- Stay (2005)
- Father of the Bride Part II (1995)
- The Monkey King (2023)
- The Substitute 2: School's Out (1998)
- The Space Between Us (2017)
- The Normal Heart (2014)
- Joe's Apartment (1996)
- The Ref (1994)
- Marco Polo (2007)
- The Salton Sea (2002)
- The Freshman (1990)
- Men of War (1994)
- And the Band Played On (1993)
- Mystery Date (1991)
- Blue's Big City Adventure (2022)
- Double Switch (1987)
- Family Business (1989)
TV (10)
Where to start with BD Wong
Look him up for Mr. Robot before anything else. Whiterose is a supporting part built almost entirely from poise and threat, and Wong plays her with a patience the rest of the show cannot always match.
Oz is the older television work worth the effort, brutal and far better acted than its reputation suggests. Jurassic Park is a few minutes of screen time that later grew into a whole arc, so pair it with Jurassic World to see the joke pay off, and with Jurassic World Dominion if you want the full run. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a procedural to sample rather than watch, and his episodes are the measured ones. Mulan is the childhood entry point, and Gotham is where he lets the ham out as a gleeful mad scientist.
The Jurassic films
Dr Henry Wu is the only character to appear across the entire franchise, from the 1993 original through the Jurassic World trilogy, and the films gradually turned a two-scene exposition role into the man responsible for everything.
The long television roles
Three substantial runs, all of them different. Whiterose in Mr Robot is the one to seek out, a part written with a specificity that television almost never attempts and that brought him an Emmy nomination.
The voice work
Shang in Mulan is the role a whole generation knows him for without knowing it, and the animation credits run from Disney to a talking cockroach in a nineties cult comedy.
The early film credits
The eighties and nineties, when the parts available to him were mostly small and mostly defined by ethnicity. And the Band Played On is the exception and the one worth finding.