Benedict Wong

Biography:

Benedict Wong was born in 1971 in Eccles, part of Salford, England. His parents had emigrated from Hong Kong, traveling through Ireland before settling in the UK. He grew up in Salford and later attended De La Salle Sixth Form College, where he completed a two-year performing arts program.

Wong’s first acting job was in the 1993 BBC Radio drama Kai Mei Sauce, written by his cousin Kevin Wong. He went on to play Errol Spears opposite Sean Lock in the sitcom 15 Storeys High, and appeared as Franklin Fu in the second season of Look Around You. His performance as Guo Yi in Dirty Pretty Things earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 2003 British Independent Film Awards.

In 2007, he starred in the feature film Grow Your Own. He guest-starred on The IT Crowd as Prime, a former Countdown champion previously known as Harold Tong. His other roles around this time included Juso Kita in the film Shanghai, and Li in the BBC fantasy series Spirit Warriors.

Wong appeared as the pilot Ravel in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). In 2013, he played the lead in #aiww: The Arrest of Ai WeiWei at the Hampstead Theatre, and later that year joined the Almeida Theatre production of Chimerica as Zhang Lin—a performance that earned him a West End Frame Award nomination. He also portrayed gangster Lau in BBC Two’s comedy-drama The Wrong Mans.

In 2014, Wong took on the role of Kublai Khan in the Netflix series Marco Polo, which was renewed for a second season. He appeared again in a Ridley Scott project the following year, playing Jet Propulsion Lab director Bruce Ng in The Martian.

Wong entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2016, debuting as Wong in Doctor Strange. He reprised the role in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), and the Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022).

He appeared as NCA agent Shaun Li in the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation” (2016), voiced Alex Yu in the video game Prey (2017), starred in “2036: Nexus Dawn,” a Blade Runner 2049 prequel short, and played the scientist Lomax in Annihilation (2018).

Wong voiced skekVar in Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019) and Bull in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. In 2020, he guest-starred in What We Do in the Shadows as a necromancer, and his political play #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei was re-streamed by The Guardian.

In 2021, Wong voiced Tong in Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon and earned a Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Male for his role as Kyo in Nine Days. He joined the cast of Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, released in 2024 to strong reviews—particularly for Wong’s performance. In 2022, he narrated Ai Weiwei’s memoir 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows for BBC Radio.

Wong is married and has children. A supporter of Manchester United, he has expressed his fandom publicly. In September 2025, he signed an open pledge with Film Workers for Palestine, committing not to collaborate with Israeli film institutions he believes are tied to “genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”