B.D. Wong: (on how he sees his life) [It's like] a train that for a long time has not always made its destination clear.
B.D. Wong: (on the death of his son) I thought I was doing all the right things as a parent by taking care of everything, but guess what? Shit is going to happen. Ironically enough you have to love it, you kind of have to say, Come at me, show me what you're going to show me. Things like this show me as a human being what human beings are capable of. What is heroism without tragedy? Do we want life without heroism?
B.D. Wong: (on TV) Television shows and movies that are all white, I can't watch them. They totally alienate me.
B.D. Wong: (on training for his role in "Exceutive Decision") We were sent down to Fort Bragg in North Carolina for about a week, primarily for weapons handling. There was a lot of target practice. They gave us a crash course as to what a team of people might do on such a mission.
B.D. Wong: (on becoming an actor) When I first decided to become an actor, I went through that whole thing with my folks, because my folks were so sure that they wanted me to be a doctor, which couldn't be a more wrong thing for me, really. But they had their natural kind of parental tendencies, and I had an older brother who was a doctor. So, it was very difficult for them to make the adjustment that I would become an actor, even though it was so clear throughout my whole childhood that I was so not anything but a kind of creative, hammy kind of person. To answer your question, the road that I've been on, which is a huge part of my success, comes from their support. That road that I'm on now is of great satisfaction to them. They feel a great deal of pride, I think, and a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that they played a huge part in my becoming an actor, and that the fear that they swallowed was a big part of what brought me to kind of get here. So, I think they are really enjoying this part of it immensely.
B.D. Wong: (on his parents) My dad has a childlike, yet wise, philosophy, a simple wisdom. He can cut right to the truth of something, in an emotional way.
B.D. Wong: (on racism, race and the limits non white actors experiance) I'll tell you why it's such a huge issue. It's because there are so many different facets to the issue of race. There's the issue of non-traditional casting, and non-traditional casting specifically was invented because the playing field between actors of all different races was not even. And non-traditional casting is the specific casting of an ethnic person or a non-white person in a role in which their race does not matter in the piece. Now that's a very important distinction to make, because there are many roles in which the race of the character really is crucial to the mechanics of the play or the theme of the play or the theme of a production of a play. And non-traditional casting is not that. Non-traditional casting is, to put it really mundanely, we need a doctor, and the stereotypical kind of 1960s or 1950s version of a doctor is a Caucasian man in a white lab coat. Non-traditional casting was trying to show and trying to explore the fact that, "No, we must no longer think of a doctor as a Caucasian man in a white lab coat unless his Caucasianness is really integral to the production or to the play." So, that was really an employment issue. That was an issue of allowing actors to compete for parts and have the playing field be open. Then, there's an issue of something called color-blind casting. And color-blind casting is, in the best of all possible worlds, in that world in which the actor's craft and his creativity and the audience's imagination are so incredibly perfect that anybody can play any part. A Caucasian man playing Othello, or even a Caucasian man playing the engineer in 'Miss Saigon,' or an Asian man playing, you know, my example is always Rolf in 'The Sound of Music' -- because when I was a little boy I wanted to be Rolf in the 'Sound of Music' -- is really "anything goes." You can have that, and the audience goes there, and it can be the most beautiful thing about the theater -- the fact that the audience suspends its disbelief to even transcend race, the most presentational thing about an actor. But we're not there, because the playing field is not even for actors to compete for roles in which race is not an issue. Furthermore, it only goes one way. Color-blind casting, up until this point, really kind of only goes one way, which is the Caucasian actor playing Othello, or Caucasian actor playing the Asian role. I don't have the same freedom that a lot of classical Caucasian actors had, which is that they got to play all these different things, and I never get to play a white person, specifically a white person. I can play a part that has been played by a Caucasian person in the past, but that's kind of different.
B.D. Wong: (on working on 'You're a Good Man Charlie Brown' and 'As Thousands Cheer) I love musical theater. And my experiences with Charlie Brown and As Thousands Cheer were great for me, because I got to do these things I hadn't done before.
B.D. Wong (on race and individuality) Why can't we have our own individuality, and you have your own individuality? And what's really wrong with that?
B.D. Wong: (on handling rejection) I'm just getting to a point now in my life where rejection is not taken personally. Although every once in a while, that one thing catches you where you have put so much of your heart into something and so much of a knowledge in your mind that it is the right thing for you, and when it doesn't happen, it can be really, really sad. That's the one thing that I really want to get out of my life, the feeling of sadness that happens, because I'm becoming more and more aware now that it's not personal, it's not a personal thing. And a lot of times, I used to have to do a lot of tricky justification to kind of get past it, and I don't have to do that so much anymore. I don't have to say, "Oh, they're jerks," or, "Who needs them, anyway?" I just have to kind of accept that life is what it is, and that my life that I've chosen, which I love and which is noble, has these things in it. And I kind of like that now. I kind of wear it like the red badge of courage, I guess.
B.D. Wong: (on TV) Lots of TV is crap. In sifting through programming, minorities have difficulty finding quality representation.
Wong is currently on the board of advisors for the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE).
Wong was one of the performers in The 42nd Annual Tony Awards (1988)
Wong is the voice of Agent Will Du in Disney's 'Kim Possible II' (2005)
Wong plays Pedro in the 2006 TV series 'Marco Polo'
Wong sang on a track called 'Wishing You A Drag Queen Christmas' on the 1993 album 'Cabaret Noel: A Broadway Cares Christmas'. The album was released to raise money for AIDS charities and featured other actors from the Broadway stage.
Wong lives with long term partner Richie Jackson.
Wong appeared in two new Public Service Announcements to mark the 25th year of the fight against AIDS, to premiere on World AIDS Day on December 1, 2006.
Wong played Bubba in 'The Salton Sea' (2002) which also starred fellow 'Law and Order' actor Vincent D'Onofrio.
Wong and Richie Jackson (ex-partner) hired a surrogate mother to bear their child they desperately wanted and Jackson's sister provided the ovum. The surrogate gave birth to male twins on May 28, 2000. Sadly one twin, Boaz Dov Wong, died at birth (from twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome) the other twin, Jackson Foo Wong, was adopted by the couple. Wong would later write a book about this experience entitled 'Following Foo'.
B.D. Wong is left-handed.
He attended Lincoln High School in San Francisco.
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