Law & Order: SVU star BD Wong issued an apology after posting a racist joke on Instagram.
Wong, 65, commented on a video shared by content creator Mike Holston Monday, December 1, in which Holston, who is Black, was seen petting a binturong nuzzled on his shoulder. “Name this animal… wrong answers only 🤣,” Holston captioned the post, to which Wong responded in a since-deleted comment, “It appears to be a Black man.”
The Mulan and Jurassic World actor later deleted the comment and took to Threads to issue an apology for his ill-thought joke.
“Y’all I made a very bad joke. As most people in hot water do, I deleted it for Damage Control,” he wrote on Monday. “But it’s out there & continues to hurt & disappoint & I’m really sorry about the hurt part. Super dumb, but I tried to follow the ‘Wrong Answers Only’ prompt w/the wrongest answer. This succeeded only in that it was Super Wrong.”
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Wong continued, “I know nobody gets a free pass. I’m sorry if this #wtfbd moment tarnished any respect you may’ve had for me. [And] thanks if you advocate for an internet that’s safe for everybody.”
In a subsequent Threads post, Wong wrote, “I want to elaborate re: a racist comment I posted, to clarify that I recognize & accept the responsibility for how terrible it is.”
“It’s also wrong to try to ‘explain’ anything, & I think that causes a further breaking down in folks’ trust,” he continued. “Let me please spend the energy on how wrong I know it is to exploit a despicable, racist trope in the supposed spirit of humor; I do know better, but again no excuses. Very sorry for the hurt I’ve caused & for taking lightly something so deeply injurious.”
Wong is best known for playing psychiatrist Special Agent George Huang in Law & Order: SVU, joining the cast in season 2 and appearing in the long-running NBC procedural drama through season 12. He later made guest appearances in episodes during seasons 13 to 17.
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Wong reprised his role as Huang in the SVU season 27 premiere that aired in September.
In August, Wong, who is of Chinese descent, called out the casting of a non-Asian actor, Andrew Barth Feldman, as one of the lead roles in Broadway musical Maybe Happy Ending, replacing Darren Criss, who is of Filipino descent.
“The Asian community, particularly actors, feels rather betrayed by the news,” he wrote in an essay shared on Instagram.
“Advocating for one’s own representation is stultifyingly self-debasing. No, we don’t want to ‘get somebody fired.’ We must express, though, how painful it is to be passed over, yet how used to it we’ve become. How incomprehensibly rare ‘Asian Shows’ are,” he said.
“Team MHE does what it thinks it must. Producing a Broadway musical is a b*tch. I feel for them. Yet, this decision’s still taken as a hard slap in the face of both the Asian actor community and the Asian audience,” he continued. “Our long-standing history of exclusion is real.”
