Though many today know him for this role, Benedict Wong has been making memorable appearances in film and television for the last 30 years, working on his craft and stealing scenes. He’s also appeared in a lot of science fiction movies. Here’s a look at some of his best performances outside the MCU, which fans of Wong should put on their watchlist.
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The 2007 sci-fi film Sunshine was directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, and will not be the only example on this list of Benedict working with Garland. The film also starred Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Tony Garity, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Chipo Chung. The movie followed the crew of astronauts on a mission to reignite the dying Sun.
An international crew pilots the Icarus II, with Wong playing navigator, Trey a child prodigy who once created a computer virus that brought down a sixth of the world’s computers. After picking up the distress signal from the Icarus I, which disappeared seven years prior, things start to go wrong for the crew. After a shielding mistake from Trey, Captain Kanada dies in a repair accident and the ship’s oxygen reserve is damaged. Trey is unable to cope with the death of Kanada and is assessed as a suicide risk and sedated. The film is a sad and striking portrayal of madness, hope, and despair with a futuristic bend.
Based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, The Martian stars Matt Damon as stranded astronaut Mark Watney and features Benedict Wong as Bruce Ng, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director. When a mission to Mars goes horribly wrong and leaves Watney stuck on the red planet, the people on the ground have to work to bring him home. Meanwhile, he manages to cultivate potato crops in the harsh Martian soil.
Wong’s character is part of the crew at NASA working to get Watney back to Earth safely, preparing a space probe to deliver a payload of supplies to Watney to tide him over until the next mission to Mars reaches him. Bruce and the team fail as the director of NASA bypasses safety inspections to save time, and the probe explodes on launch. Wong’s character is an integral part of the team back on Earth and lends humor to the situation while still creating solutions, like having Watney go into space with only the Hab canvas as a hull.
In Nine Days, Winston Duke, another new star spotlighted by his involvement in the MCU, plays Will. Will is a man who judges whether or not souls will be born into bodies. Those that aren’t chosen as fit to be born are given an experience of their choice, before being erased from existence. Wong plays Kyo, Will’s supervisor and only companion. Although Will was once alive, Kyo is a soul that has never lived.
Will is obsessed with a woman called Amanda, a soul that he previously selected for birth. One day she dies in a car crash, devastating Will, who then has to interview souls to fill her place. Kyo tries to help Will through the process of both grieving and selecting a new soul to live, but Will is too deep in despair. The film examines the meaning and purpose of life and how we weigh worth in a compassionate and heart-rending way, with Wong delivering a tender performance of someone who lives vicariously through others.
Another feature where Wong worked with Alex Garland is 2018’s Annihilation. Based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, the film recounts the story of an expedition into an anomaly known as The Shimmer. Wong plays Lomax, an interviewer trying to get the truth of the expedition from Natalie Portman’s character Lena.
Throughout the film, Lena recounts to Lomax and his team what happened to her teammates when they encountered The Shimmer. The movie features some incredible effects and truly creepy creature design as the anomaly begins to affect and change the world and anything living near it. Lena is the only survivor from her team; the rest were either killed by a grotesque bear creature or morphed into something new in The Shimmer. The film ends on an ambiguous note with Lomax confirming that The Shimmer is gone, but with doubts that Lena is who she says she is.
Ridley Scott’s prequel to the Alien franchise explores how the Xenomorphs came to be and how Weyland-Yutani came to be involved in the species’ evolution. In the film, the vessel Prometheus is on a mission to find out more about humanity’s predecessors the Engineers and is following a map found on an archaeological expedition. Once they reach their destination, a distant moon dubbed LV-223 it isn’t long before things go dramatically and gruesomely wrong for the crew.
Wong plays the pilot Ravel, who stays aboard the ship as the crew goes out onto the planet to explore. To save their friends and the fate of the world towards the end of the film, Ravel and the ship’s captain and navigator sacrifice themselves by piloting their ship into the Engineer’s craft, killing them in a fiery explosion. Prometheus divided fans upon release, but ultimately delivered a thrilling and interesting start to the Xenomorph storyline.
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