American Born Chinese debuted earlier this year on Disney+ to generally positive reviews. The series follows tenth-grader Jin Wang (Ben Wang), who is struggling to fit in with his peers. When he is tasked with showing new exchange student Wei-Chen (Jimmy Liu) around, he is unexpectedly thrust into a battle between mythical Chinese gods with Montgomery County, MD’s Leonard Wu playing the role of protagonist Niu Mowang also known as “The Bull Demon.”
Leonard Wu, who grew up in Rockville and is a 1998 graduate of Wootton High School, is known for his roles as Orus in the Netflix drama series Marco Polo (2016), Shiwei Chen in the drama television series Bosch (2018), Kinuba in the action film Alita: Battle Angel (2019) and Ryuzo in the video game Ghost of Tsushima (2020). He has appeared in various television shows, including Bones, NCIS, Veronica Mars, and Workaholics, as well as several feature films including While She Was Out opposite Kim Basinger, and 17 Again, which stars the late Matthew Perry and Zac Efron.
In 2016, he portrayed Orus in the second and final season of the Netflix drama television series Marco Polo. In 2019, he portrayed Kinuba in the science-fiction action film Alita: Battle Angel. In 2020, he went on to provide the voice and motion-capture of Ryuzo, a leader of the Straw Hat ronin who is a childhood friend of the main character,
Daisuke Tsuji’s character, in the PlayStation 4 video game Ghost of Tsushima.
American Born Chinese was released on Disney+ on May 24th and is rated PG. Per Disney, “Based on the genre-hopping graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, “American Born Chinese” tells the story of Jin Wang, an average teenager juggling his high school social life with his home life. When he meets a new student on the first day of the school year, even more worlds collide as Jin is unwittingly entangled in a battle of Chinese mythological gods.”
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