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His stage appearances were (and still are) admired by the more discerning but also very limited theatre-going audiences of NYC. New York theatre goers might almost be accused of conspiring to keep BD Wong's outstanding performances a secret, a treasure not to be shared with the rest of the world.
The Hollywood system is largely based on the practice of casting to type - and this is particularly true for actors who are of Asian descent. Although Wong's self-image is that of a regular American guy, Hollywood's image of Asian & Asian-origin actors was quite different.
Clearly Wong was not interested in earning an easy living by giving in to Hollywood. He had no desire to be typecast as a Song Liling character, as a gay or sexually ambiguous Asian male. But whilst his theatrical persona diversified and flourished, his fight for cinematic recognition proved the much harder battle, so much so that his talents still remain largely unrecognised by cinema audiences.
His early movie roles really only required him to be efette and to grin boyishly, but for each part in which he was firmly typecast, there would be another in which he would play a new and interesting character.
Unfortunatly, even as his name and face would gradually become familiar to movie-goers, his roles would remain small cameo appearances.
Small androgynous supporting roles in movies such as Crash Course, The Freshman and Father of the Bride did earn him just enough screen time to prove himself as an actor, and even as the careers of other talented young Asian-American actors, such as Gedde Watanabe, floundered, Wong would continued to make small but remarkably different looking appearances in high profile productions such as Jurassic Park and Executive Decision.
Towards the end of the Nineties, BD Wong had achieved a complete transformation of his on-screen image, playing more muscular parts (both figuratively and literally) in the above mentioned Executive Decision, The Substitute 2 and voicing the heroic Captain Shang in Mulan.
At that point Wong has now been making movies for something like 12 years, and his filmography showed that he and his agent had an astute eye for successful productions. Unfortunately , the first movie in which the name 'BD Wong' appeared above the credits was a critical and commercial failure.
Slappy and the Stinkers, a childrens comedy, was widely panned by critics and was given only a limited theatrical release before going straight to video.
The movie itself, a spin on The Little Rascals and Free Willy, was an amiable comedy full of knowing visual humour mingled in with childish pranks in the vein of Home Alone. BD Wong's performance as a selfish school principle can not really be faulted, but it would have been better if Wong had remembered the old actor's adage about working with animals and children.
Reviews for the film were mixed, but some were less forgiving than others.
This would be a career low for Wong, but there is no denying that he put in a valiant effort to turn his part into a piece of respectable work amid the general (intentional) slapstick silliness of the movie.
After 'Slappy', BD Wong disapeared from the movie industry for almost three years, until the release of the oft-delayed The Salton Sea.
Whether his period of exile was self-imposed, or the studios were exacting some kind of punishment on the actor is unclear, but his absence on the big screen co-incided with some of his best work in the theatre and on television.
His return to the big screen came in The Salton Sea, a movie destined to become a cult classic. BD Wong is part of an impressive ensemble of notable American actors.
This role continued his trend of playing harder, rougher characters convincingly. Bubba has none of the charms of any of his other creations, expressing no human warmth at all. We see Wong looking older, more weather beaten than in any previous role, leaving Song Liling dead and buried at last ...
In 2005, Wong returned to the silver screen once more to appear in Marc Forster's psychological thriller, Stay, and filmed the comedy of social manners Social Grace for a 2006 release. He also appeared as himself in The Lady in Question is Charles Busch.