The Spotlight
Ben Wang
THE KARATE KID: LEGENDS ACTOR LEAPS INTO HIS FIRST LEADING MOVIE ROLE
WORDS ALEX GODFREY
IT ALL STARTED with cat sick. Having moved with his family from Shanghai to Minnesota when he was six, Ben Wang learned English by consuming nine hours of television a day. Most helpful of all? Infomercials. “There would always be the same ones,” he says now, “with a guy carefully explaining what he was doing. Like, ‘Watch how the chamois absorbs your cat’s puke,’ doing the motion. And I’m like, ‘Ah, absorb. Yes, absorption.’” Fluency followed, as did debut forays into filmmaking: with his grandfather’s camcorder, he’d make his own infomercials. “I’d sell garbage,” he explains. “Because there was garbage around the house. So those were the first pieces of media I created. It wasn’t good!”