Staying Fit
BD Wong, 62, has certainly made his mark on stage. He’s the only actor in Broadway history to win a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Clarence Derwent Award and Theatre World Award for the same role: Song Liling in M. Butterfly. His on-screen accomplishments include roles in movies such as Jurassic Park and TV shows including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In his latest project, he voices Buddha in Netflix’s animated family adventure movie The Monkey King, streaming Aug. 18.
Note: This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike was announced on July 14.
The Monkey King is appropriate for all ages. What do you remember watching when you were growing up?
I was a Batman fan — the original television show Batman. I was a big Mary Tyler Moore fan and Carol Burnett fan. I would say those two shows [The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Carol Burnett Show] and all the shows at the time. There were only three channels, so we all watched the same shows.
What inspired you to choose acting as your profession?
I didn’t. I was always rather outgoing and enjoyed engaging people in what I realize now is a form of performance, but it wasn’t really performance at all. It was kind of fooling around at parties and stuff like that. It wasn’t until I was in high school, and I had a very, very specific and meaningful relationship with the high school drama teacher, that I really understood the value of the talent that I had, and that I had potential to do something with it. She [Zora Chanes] really encouraged me and forced me in some ways to use it, to access it, to explore it. [My parents] were trepidatious, and they were kind of cautious. And Mrs. Chanes was a huge influence in all of us coming to the conclusion that it was something worth exploring.
Wong is the voice of Buddha in Netflix’s animated film “The Monkey King.”
Netflix
While you were making your way into acting, what jobs did you do to support yourself?
The now widely known Roundabout Theatre [in New York City] was beginning, and I was a house manager, assistant house manager, basically. But it was only two of us running the whole small little theater. It was very romantic. I saw all these wonderful plays and performances, but I was also working in what I considered a survival job that was not unrelated to what I wanted to do. I worked as an usher a lot when I was younger, right out of high school, [at] the big theater that was in my hometown, San Francisco. I got a job there and I worked there for years, and I saw some of the great performances that came through town, and I learned so much from them. Those two jobs didn’t pay as much as big waitering jobs or something like that, but they allowed me to keep my foot in what I felt was the area that I wanted to be in.
