Benedict Wong on starring in Doctor Strange
From a Manchester comic book store to Marvel magic – British East-Asian actor Benedict Wong on starring in Doctor Strange
If you were to examine the source material of Doctor Strange, the latest film in the ever expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, you would quickly realise that its creators had a job on their hands when it came to presenting Doctor Strange's colleague Wong to a contemporary audience. The original 1960s rendition of the character was little more than a cardboard cut-out East-Asian stereotype, more servant than a sidekick, and not something you would wish to be present in a blockbuster action film in 2016.
Fortunately, Marvel boss Kevin Feige and director Scott Derrickson, along with writers Jon Spaihts and C. Robert Cargill, were aware of this. Enter the appropriately-named Salford-born actor Benedict Wong who was tasked with bringing the updated character to life.
“It was great to collaborate with Scott and Kevin to craft and create this drill-sergeant librarian character that you really wouldn’t want to fuck with,” begins Wong, who has hot-footed it from the LA premiere of Doctor Strange to London ahead of its nationwide opening across the UK. In the film, which sees another Benedict – Cumberbatch, of Sherlock fame – taking centre stage as an arrogant neurosurgeon turned master-magician, Wong is, if anything, a character that stands tall over Strange’s pompous attitudes, slamming him down to earth when required and guiding him in the mystic arts.
It has been a long and uneasy road for Benedict Wong. There was a time, early on in his career, when he wanted to pack in the acting game, so frustrated with the lack of roles for a British East-Asian actor. Fifteen years ago he was a jobbing actor, making a living in smaller roles, accepting what he could, never able to find meaty characters with arcs or journeys. The roles he found instead were as the immigrant, the gangster or the waiters.
“I went back up to Manchester to audition for Phoenix Nights, which I love and think is brilliant, and I was waiting in this rooms for about an hour and forty minutes and heard nothing. I had no idea what was going on,” he recalls. “It was a one-line role playing an illegal immigrant, and I wrote a letter and gave it to the receptionist to pass on to the casting director, and essentially it said that while I loved the show, I think I am better than this. Maybe I wasn’t really writing to her; maybe I was writing it to the industry.”
Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Wong (Benedict Wong)
Following this incident, he rang his agent and tried to quit. His agent had a ray of hope, a script from Stephen Frears called Dirty Pretty Things. It was a role that not only had an arc; it was a performance that earned him a British Independent Film Award nomination, starring alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou. It had taken him ten years of hard work to reach that milestone, and he would subsequently go on to star in two Ridley Scott films (Prometheus and The Martian), not to mention a headline role as Kublai Khan in Netflix series Marco Polo, currently the second most expensive show on TV behind Game of Thrones.
“I think that there is a dearth of work for East-Asian actors, or actors of colour,” says Wong. “I am an ambassador for Act for Change, where we highlight this problem and keep the movement going and try and find a solution,” he adds optimistically, but without a hint of naivety as to the seriousness of the problem. Wong is an actor that knows graft is a fundamental component to success, but that the industry still has many diversity problems.
Back to Doctor Strange. Wong recalls his trips as a teen to Odyssey 7, a now-defunct Manchester-based comic book store where he would pick up copies of Spider-Man. “I was a little crestfallen as a kid because there was never an East-Asian superhero,” he explains. After having lunch with his friend Ejiofor, who joins him in the cast of Doctor Strange as the brooding Magician Mordo, he discovered the character of Wong – a character he had to play. “I was convinced that they wouldn’t pick me and would want someone with martial arts skills, just being down on myself, thinking it won’t be me,” he states in his humble, self-deprecating manner. He was wrong: both the director and Feige loved his audition and cast him in the role.
There was a slight hitch. He was just finishing filming on the second series of Marco Polo, for which he had to gain 40 pounds. Fortunately, Wong impressed the bosses at Marvel HQ so much they “moved the mountain to fit in with the shooting schedule and made it happen.” It was a tight turnaround. After completing Marco Polo's shoot in Malaysia, he jetted back to London, dumped his bags and within an hour he had a car waiting to take him for his costume fitting before the next day, where he hit the ground running on the Doctor Strange set.
Doctor Strange is Marvel’s most audacious film to date and is packed with psychedelic visual effects and a grandiose, high-fantasy plot. Was he at all concerned that audiences would baulk at the strangeness of this latest addition to the MCU? “I just thought to myself, ‘Fingers crossed, good luck everybody.’ Looking at the comics, I kept thinking about how were they going to do this?” But they did do it, and it has met with nearly universal praise from fans and critics, with his performances getting the seal of approval from Marvel originator Stan Lee.
“We were doing the LA premiere, and I was on the red carpet, and the press officer was ushering me along, and I clocked Stan Lee, and I couldn’t believe it. The fanboy in me went ‘My God, I have to meet him’”, he recalls. “I went over and said, ‘You don’t know me, but…’ and he stopped me and said, ‘You’re Wong, you’re great!’ Honestly, it was like being knighted in the Marvel Universe.”
This was a moment that brought it full circle for Wong, from a little boy reading Spider-Man comics in Manchester to a star in a $165 million superhero movie. He smiles, playing with a jade ring on his right hand while recalling an on-set anecdote. “We were doing additional photography in LA with Benedict and Chiwetel. We were standing there waiting in the wings, and we had this recognition moment where we’re like, ‘we’re doing this,’ and all smiled at each other. It was like Brits on tour.
“You find yourself flitting between moments remembering when you were reading comics as a kid, to waiting in a waiting room for an hour and a half, to being on the set of a movie like Doctor Strange, and it feels unreal. It flashes before me. It is an amazing feeling being rewarded back in adult life, being surrounded by these incredible actors and this wonderful team. What a gift. Maybe there is a little British-East-Asian boy out there who will want to go and see an East-Asian superhero. Now we have one.”
Doctor Strange is in cinemas now; Marco Polo is currently streaming on Netflix; follow Benedict on Twitter @wongrel