“My earliest memory of an actor is Jackie Chan,” says Ben Wang. “When I was a kid, I didn’t know the name of any actor. But I knew who Jackie Chan was.”
Now the 25-year-old stars with Chan in Karate Kid: Legends, in which Wang plays a young martial artist, Li Fong, who travels from Beijing to New York City and learns from Chan’s Mr. Han, who is returning from 2010’s The Karate Kid.
“I’ve worked on a couple of things with big-name people, and I thought that I had gotten a handle on how to sort of handle it internally so I can go and — you know — do some work. You can’t fawn over these people. You’ve got work to do,” Wang says.
“But really, truly, Jackie Chan — the first day I met him I was speechless. I forgot how to talk.”
Wang was 10 when Chan’s Karate Kid came out, and had just started acting in local productions. He was living with his mother in Northfield, Minnesota, a small town surrounded by cornfields. They had moved from China to be close to Wang’s college professor grandfather after Wang’s parents divorced when he was four.
Like Chan, Wang has an incredible work ethic — but also a lightness about it. He makes things seem easy, and makes hard work sound like a simple matter of fact.
How did he become a martial artist? He answers self-effacingly: He was a dweeb and bad at sports, he says, which was a challenge in rural Minnesota.
“The ball is key out there, and I was no good with the ball,” he laughs. “Also, I had a good friend of mine who did Taekwondo, and he was like, ‘Come, so I can finally have someone I can beat up.’ It was great. I learned a lot, and it was really fun.”
He was in second or third grade at the time. Soon he moved into acting, taking the stage for the first time thanks to a traveling summer program that did its own adaptations of popular productions. One was a variation on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but with songs that “I’m pretty sure Shakespeare didn’t write,” he says.
“They also did Aladdin, but spelled with two Ls, to avoid copyright,” he adds. “It’s crazy, but it was super fun.”
Ben Wang on Starring With Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid: Legends
He doesn’t like to dwell on struggle or hardship. Asked about the biggest obstacle he’s overcome, he pauses.
“I mean, 10 years ago, the big problem I had was that I wasn’t good at acting,” he says. “And I overcame that by going to school and learning and studying and training for 10 years. That’s not a very exciting answer, but that’s the truth. It took me a long time to get to the place where I can do the things I can do, and there’s more things that I want to do, and I know it’ll take a lot more work to get there, too.”
He landed his first gig on the CBS MacGuyver reboot that ran from 2016 to 2021: “I was the guest star of the week. I hack a car, and they’re like, ‘This kid’s good — but his parents are dead!’ [Dramatic music.]”
He loved everything about being on the show — the education, getting paid to act, the craft services. “It was, like, the best catering that I’ve had in my life so far,” Wang laughs. “I was like, ‘Oh, is this the norm? Lamp chops for lunch?’ No! Only when you’re on America’s top broadcasting network.”
He went to New York University — New York remains his home base — and racked up a long list of credits, including Search Party, 2023’s Chang Can Dunk and last year’s Mean Girls. He also starred in the 2023 Disney+ series American Born Chinese with Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh, both Oscar winners for 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once.
He compares his progress in acting to the incremental improvements you make in martial arts.
“You can’t break through with karate, man. You can’t. You can’t throw a bad kick one day and then come in the next day and it’s perfect,” he says.
“It’s the same with everything. I went to school for musical theater. You can’t not be able to sing and then somehow brain-blast yourself into being an opera tenor. It’s all muscles — including ways of thinking and working it out. So you have to build those connections in your brain about how to solve problems.”
Did he ever think his childhood interest in martial arts would pay off in his acting career?
He laughs again.
“I mean, I’m an Asian dude in Hollywood. I was like, ‘I think the chances are high that at some point I’m going to be asked to do martial arts.’”
But the Karate Kid films are different, he says.
“It used to be that in Hollywood, if you’re an Asian guy and you’re being asked to play these roles, martial arts would be the character, right?” he says. “When you look at this movie, it’s a piece of the character. … He’s a person.”
Also Read: 5 Confessions of a Karate Kid
Besides Chan, the new film also pairs Wang with Ralph Macchio, the star of the original 1984 film who put a fresh spin on it with Netflix’s just-completed Cobra Kai series. Though Wang was exactly the right age for the 2010 version, he also appreciates the Macchio film.
“What it said is that karate is a thing that anyone can learn, and that anyone from anywhere can use to better themselves, not just physically, but also mentally,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter what you look like, or who you are, or where you come from — if you’re willing to put in the work, if you can find the right teacher, then you can grow.”
He says of Macchio: “He is the franchise. He is The Karate Kid.”
While shooting Legends in Montreal — which stood in for New York City — Wang soon overcame his star struckness. And knew that he belonged.
“What was apparent about Jackie Chan just from watching him on set for 20 minutes is that he loves making movies — that there’s nothing in the world that this man loves more than making movies. And I feel kind of the same way about myself. So I think that immediately when I saw that, I was like, ‘I’m in the right place.’”
Karate Kid: Legends is now in theaters, from Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Main image: Ben Wang in Karate Kid: Legends. Columbia Pictures