A 30-Year Affair
Out actor BD Wong sounds off on how his successful—and varied—career on screen and stage started with a little-known one-man musical.
BD Wong has a confession to make: he’s obsessed with the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. “I just launched this Kickstarter campaign to raise the money for [my new] CD,” he says. “I just happened to randomly meet one of the three founders of Kickstarter and I got some advice…on how to do it. So I just launched this campaign and I’m dying to know if people are actually going to [donate].”
The CD he’s referring to is a live recording of his two-night-only performance of Herringbone, the one-man, 11-character musical about spirit possession and childhood stardom, which will benefit—and take place at—Dixon Place on the Lower East Side May 21 and 22. And this is not Wong’s first go-round with Herringbone. “I have been really into this show for like 30 years,” he points out. “It was always in the back of my mind.”
We chatted with Wong—best known for the disparate roles he’s played in Broadway in 1988’s Tony-winning hit M. Butterfly, on HBO’s Oz and NBC’s Law and Order: SVU—about where Herringbone fits among those titles, how it fulfills his artistic desires and why he just couldn’t pass it up. On First Discovering Herringbone: “When I first moved to New York I saw the original production at Playwrights Horizons, off-Broadway—I was a volunteer usher—and it just stuck with me in a very deep way. I said from that moment on I had just always wanted to do it.” On Pushing Gender Boundaries in Herringbone: “It feels really natural to me. I don’t think the issue of gender is really the main thing. I think it’s the issue of duality and multi-character.” On Getting the Perfect Job: “I think my ideal acting situation is a situation that straddles the tightrope of content and commerciality. It’s almost impossible to find.”
On Multi-Tasking: “I always have—aside from Herringbone—two or three different things going on at the same time, in different levels of development or something like that. And they slowly move forward in different ways.” On His SVU Character, Dr. George Huang, Coming Out: “I’m not really sure why they did that. It seemed like an opportunistic choice to me. He wasn’t gay for 10 years and then all of a sudden I was playing him gay.” On Moving from SVU to Awake: “I wasn’t crazy about commuting to L.A., but it was fine. It wasn’t terrible like I thought it might be. Everyone involved in [the show] I really enjoyed. That doesn’t happen very often.”
On Falling In Love With M. Butterfly: “My personal thing, is, yeah, I’ve always done—not cross-gender—but done multi-character [performances]. You know, when I was in high school I did all of that. So when M. Butterfly came, I felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my part. I know how to play this part, because I know how to do duality.’” On Why M. Butterfly Ruined His Drag Career Before It Even Started: “I couldn’t do it better than that. It was expensive. It was transformative. I got a lot of props for it and everyone that worked on it got props for it. So everything seems to kind of pale in comparison to that.”