Chuck Zlotnick/Universal/"Jurassic World"
BD Wong has been acting since the early 1980s, showing up in memorable movies like "Father of the Bride" (and the sequel) as the flamboyant assistant of the wedding planner (played by Martin Short) to recurring TV roles such as playing Dr. George Huang on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit."
But for the rest of the summer you'll likely remember him best for playing another type of doctor.
Over 20 years ago Wong played Dr. Henry Wu in "Jurassic Park." Dr. Wu only shows up for one scene, but like most things that happen in "Jurassic World" (opening in theaters Friday), you should be familiar with Steven Spielberg's original to keep up with what's going on in the latest film in the franchise.
In "Jurassic Park," Dr. Wu is the chief engineer of InGen (International Genetic Incorporated), the bioengineering start-up responsible for recreating the dinosaurs featured in Jurassic Park.
In the film, when doctors Grant (Sam Neill), Sattler (Laura Dern), and Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) interrupt the ride they're on which explains in general terms how the dinosaurs were cloned and enter the laboratory, there we find Wu with pencil and clip board in hand looking over the newly-cloned dinosaur eggs.Through the main character's visit to the lab and speaking with Dr. Wu, they (and the audience) have a better understand of how the dinosaurs came back into the world, and some major plot points…like the fact that they've cloned Velociraptors.
After that scene we don't see Dr. Wu the rest of the film, leaving us to assume he either made it on one of the last boats to the mainland off Jurassic Park or he was gobbled up by the dinosaurs.
In "Jurassic World" we fast forward twenty-plus years later and the failure of Jurassic Park has now become the wildly successful Jurassic World. It's a fully-functional theme park beyond anything we saw in the first movie, including bigger dinosaurs.
This is the handy work of Dr. Wu, who is now the head of the InGen division that clones the dinosaurs.We learn quickly that crowds flocking to Jurassic World are no longer satisfied with just seeing a Tyrannosaurus Rex or Raptor, and through this pressure to keep amazing audiences Dr. Wu and his team have pushed the envelope in their cloning habits. They've created dinosaurs (or perhaps it's better to call them "attractions") that marvel but are extremely dangerous.
As Wong explains it in this promotional video for "Jurassic World," "they [InGen] are exploring new things because they have taken the technology to a really extreme depth, and that extreme depth leads to death."
Chuck Zlotnick/Universal/"Jurassic World"
But unlike "Park," Dr. Wu doesn't just disappear for the rest of the film. This time around he's involved in matters that endanger everyone at Jurassic World and could possibly be of great importance for future movies in the franchise.