Meet Wong in Brief DOCTOR STRANGE TV Spot
We've seen a lot of footage from Marvel's Doctor Strange, but we haven't seen much from Benedict Wong's character, whose name is...Wong. The actor has previously explained that his character has been revamped considerably from the "tea-making manservant" to a drill sergeant type of guy who is one of the "masters of sorcery."
Director Scott Derrickson recently spoke with the New York Daily News about Wong, and how he was originally not even going to be in the movie at all:
I was very happy with [casting Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One], but I was also very conscious that in doing that I was erasing a significant potential Asian role. I was going to leave Wong out of the movie at first; he was an Asian sidekick manservant, what was I supposed to do with that? But once the decision was made to cast Tilda, we brought Wong back because, unlike the Ancient One, he could be completely subverted as a character and reworked into something that didn’t fall into any of the stereotypes of the comics.
This movie has received some controversy over its casting (or lack thereof) for Asian actors, but this is the first time I'm hearing about how they reworked the story to include a revamped Wong as a subverted presence in the movie. It sounds like they were at least making an effort to step in the right direction here, and we'll find out how it all works in the film when Doctor Strange arrives on November 4, 2016.