The NGLCC/American Airlines ExtrAA Mile Award is one of the highest honors of the National Dinner Awards Gala and recognizes an LGBT or allied person, persons or organization that have gone the extra mile to support LGBT equality.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Wong is the only actor ever to have received all five major New York Theater awards for a single role – namely his performance in M. Butterfly (his Broadway debut): the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Theater World Award, the Clarence Derwent Award, and the Tony Award.
Wong gained notice on HBO’s critically acclaimed series Oz as the resilient prison priest (Father Ray) for the show’s six-season run. Then, for eleven seasons on the top-rated NBC series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit he played George Huang, an FBI forensic psychiatrist and expert on the criminal mind.
BD co-starred in the NBC series Awake, in which he played John Lee, Det. Britten’s therapist in the ‘red reality’. Other television credits include ABC’s All-American Girl (as Margaret Cho’s brother Stuart) and HBO’s telefilms And the Band Played On and The Normal Heart, as well as guest-starring roles on Sesame Street, The X-Files, Madam Secretary, Nurse Jackie, and NCIS: New Orleans. He most recently has been seen in two drastically different television roles simultaneously: as the nefarious Hugo Strange on Gotham and as the mysterious trans-female hacker Whiterose on Mr. Robot. For his work on the latter, he received both a Gold Derby Award and a Critic’s Choice Award nomination.
Wong has appeared in more than twenty feature films, including Jurassic World, Focus, The Space Between Us, Stay, The Salton Sea, Executive Decision, Seven Years in Tibet, Jurassic Park, Father of the Bride (1 & 2), and The Freshman. He can also be heard as the voice of Shang in the Disney animated films Mulan and Mulan II.
Wong’s additional New York theater credits include The Tempest, A Language of Their Own, As Thousands Cheer, Shanghai Moon, and the Broadway revivals of the musicals You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures (the latter for which he received a Drama League nomination for distinguished performance). He produced and directed The Yellow Wood for NYMF and Cindy Cheung’s Speak Up Connie for the All For One Festival, and co-wrote and directed Alice Chan for the La Jolla Playhouse POP Tour. He recently starred regionally in The Orphan of Zhao at La Jolla Playhouse and San Francisco’s A.C.T. In addition, he has starred in five productions of the one-man musical Herringbone, a project dear to his heart.
Wong published his first book, Following Foo: the electronic adventures of the Chestnut Man (Harper Entertainment), a memoir about the extremely premature birth of his son, in 2003.
Community service recognitions include those from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Asian AIDS Project, GLAAD, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Asian Arts Alliance, Association of Asian-Pacific American Artists, East/West Players, Second Generation, Organization of Chinese Americans and APICHA. He sits on the boards of both the Actors’ Fund of America and Rosie’s Theater Kids.
Wong resides in New York City.
Previous NGLCC National Dinner Honorees have included: former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, NAACP Board Chair Emeritus Julian Bond, tennis legend and LGBT champion Martina Navratilova, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Actress Judith Light, MSNCB news anchor Thomas Roberts, and NBA player Jason Collins, to name a few.
