Netflix hit Beef brings hope to Asian actor in Britain Jason Wong from The Covenant, Dungeons & Dragons movies

SINGAPORE – The critical and commercial

success of the drama-comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

has British actor Jason Wong excited because he grew up watching Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh, the Oscar-winning star of the American film.

But that excitement is tempered by the hard reality of the British entertainment industry, says Wong, whose parents immigrated from Malaysia and Singapore. 

He can be seen in two movies now showing in Singapore cinemas – war drama Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant and fantasy adventure Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

Speaking to The Straits Times in a video call, Wong, 37, says that in the United Kingdom, producers and directors tend to make Caucasian actors the default choice when the character’s race is unspecified, while Asian actors are hired only when the character is explicitly written as Asian.

In the long-running BBC crime drama Silent Witness (1996 to present), he played a forensic pathologist in four episodes and baulked at his character being fleshed out as culturally Chinese.

“I didn’t want him to be ‘Dr Adam Yuen, a Chinese doctor’. I was very reluctant to talk about him and his Asian experience. It should be enough that he can be seen to be Asian,” says Wong.

British producers do not yet see Asian actors as bankable, he says, but hopes the situation will improve at home, especially after British stars such as Gemma Chan and Henry Golding (both were in Crazy Rich Asians, 2018) and Benedict Wong (the Doctor Strange films, 2016 to present) have shown that movies can feature Asian faces and still make money.

Jason Wong had known British film-maker Guy Ritchie for more than a decade, after having first met as trainees at a jiu-jitsu academy. He was invited to audition for, and got a part in, Ritchie’s action comedy The Gentlemen (2019) and later, The Covenant, where he plays American soldier Joshua Jung, a member of a squad led by Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal). 

The team, which includes interpreter Ahmed (Dar Salim), develops a strong bond during its deployment in Afghanistan. The story follows Kinley as he tries to save Ahmed and his family after they are left behind, facing the possibility of Taliban persecution following the American withdrawal.

“Joshua was written as Joshua Aiden – he was meant to be played by a Caucasian actor,” says Wong. But after Wong was cast on the strength of his audition, the character’s name was changed to an Asian one. He is pleased that Jung is an “alpha character” who is in the thick of the action.

“East Asians tend to be emasculated on film. I’m glad to play someone in the military because there are Asians in the US military. They are not always the tech geek, you know?” he says.

Wong, who was trained at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, has become comfortable with Ritchie’s improvisational style of film-making.

When shooting The Gentlemen, he had a scene with Golding. Wong played a henchman, Phuc, working for Golding’s gangster Dry Eye.

After telling them the objective of the scene – one of them would leave with a haul of cash – the director left for a cup of tea after informing the two actors to write their own lines.

“He came back and said, ‘All right, let me hear what you’ve come up with’,” he says. And that was the dialogue that made it to the screen.

For Dungeons & Dragons, memorisation was crucial. As the villain Dralas, a Red Wizard who specialises in assassinations, he had to perform a four-minute fight sequence opposite British actor Rege-Jean Page that was intricately choreographed with more than 300 movements.

“Only a quarter of it made it to the screen,” he says. It would have taken two to three weeks to film the entire four minutes, and the co-directors, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, did not have the time, he says.

Right now, he is pleased to be working in the moment when shows such as the Netflix comedy-drama Beef, fronted by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong,

are getting attention.

In the critically acclaimed series, the lead characters are shown to be ordinary Americans first. Their racial and cultural backgrounds matter little in the general flow of the story.

“It’s just people on screen. You are watching two people fight, and they just happen to be Asian. It’s not an Asian-American story; it’s just an American story.”

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves are showing in cinemas.