Born and raised in San Francisco, California, Wong's early childhood was busy and creative. He showed an early interest in classial music, learning to play the violin, and sung in a choir. A love of acting soon followed. He became involved in community theatre, learning not only about acting, bu also all aspects of putting on a show: from stage direction to lighting, from set design to set building, printing posters and selling tickets.
Whilst at Lincoln, he continued to direct and act in a string of amatuer productions, including Grease.
Whilst at Lincoln, he continued to direct and act in a string of amatuer productions, including Grease, whilst also becoming deeply involved in other aspects of dramatic production, from designing and producing production posters to the designing and construction of their sets. He graduated in the Class of 1978. He is honoured on Lincoln High's Wall of Fame.
He then went on to San Francisco State University, enrolling as a Theatre Arts Major. SFSU was a major disapoinment for Wong, and he dropped out after almost two years after not being cast in a single production at the university.
Ironically, BD Wong is named in SFSU's "A History of SF State" and is often cited as an illumni.
Wong left the West Coast for New York City in the hope of continuing his education there.
Having got his Equity Card, Wong started working in theme parks around the country, performing in musical reviews in a number of theme parks including Hershey Park in Hershey, Pennsylvania and Mud island in Memphis, Tennessee, and doing dinner theatre and performing in off-Broadway productions. Bradd Wong's professional stage debut came in a 1982 production of Androcles and the Lion at New York's Town Hall.
Shortly after Androcles, BD Wong returned to the West Coast, and had begun taking parts on television shows like Blacke's Magic, Simon and Simon & The Shell Game. This would continue until 1986, when he made his big screen debut with a fleeting appearance in The Karate Kid Part 2.
Wong would go on to earn considerable critical acclaim for his portrayal of the role, a role which is still identified as being solely his, despite numerous other stage productions and a movie adaptation since then.
BD Wong was also featured in the annual edition of Life: The Year in Pictures 1988, his photo occupying an entire page of that publication. Song Liling had become an icon of the Eighties. For Wong, despite already have been an actor for a number of years, 1988 was the year it all began. Wong would go on to diversify into a plethora of stage parts never before played by an Asian American before ...