Ben Wang, the Karate Kid: Legends actor built for other people’s franchises

Ben Wang

Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 21, 1997 Beijing, China
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Long Walk, Karate Kid: Legends, Mean Girls
Awards	CinemaCon Star of Tomorrow

Few young actors have been trusted with as much inherited property as Ben Wang. Sony gave him the lead of a karate saga that two generations of moviegoers already owned. Lionsgate sent him into the arena of a Hunger Games prequel. A Stephen King adaptation put him on the road with a column of doomed boys. Now Marvel is negotiating to make him Bobby Drake, the Iceman, one of the founding mutants of the X-Men. Every one of those jobs asks the same thing of him: step into a story the audience knows by heart and make it feel as if it were happening for the first time. What his career has rarely asked is what he would do with a story that belongs to him.

There is an irony in how he got here. The American screen trained him before any drama school did. Wang has said that he learned English by watching an unhealthy amount of television after he arrived in the United States as a boy. He was born Wang Pucun in Beijing; the Chinese-language press knows him as Wang Ban. His parents divorced when he was four, and two years later he and his mother emigrated to the United States, where he grew up in the small college town of Northfield, Minnesota, moving between his mother’s home and his grandparents’.

The birth date on his records is September 21, 1997. He graduated from Northfield High School in 2016 and went on to study musical theater at New York University. Along the way he collected the skills that would later read like a casting brief: fluent English and Mandarin, and training in karate, kenpo, wing chun kung fu, kumdo and taekwondo.

The first screen work was modest. In 2021 he played Eli Brown in an episode of MacGyver, followed by small parts in The Last O.G. and Search Party. Disney+ then gave him two jobs in the same year. In 2023 he played Bo in the basketball comedy Chang Can Dunk and took the lead in American Born Chinese, Kelvin Yu’s series based on Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel. As Jin Wang, a tenth-grader trying to blend in while gods from Journey to the West fight around him, he held the centre of a cast that included Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. The series premiered at SXSW and scored 94 per cent with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

The studio offers followed fast. He appeared as Jacob Zheng in the 2024 musical version of Mean Girls, and in February of that year The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Sony had found its new Karate Kid: Wang would play Li Fong, a kung fu prodigy who moves to New York, opposite Jackie Chan‘s Mr. Han and Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso. Before the film opened, the exhibitors’ convention CinemaCon named him its Star of Tomorrow in 2025. Karate Kid: Legends reached American cinemas on May 30, 2025.

The reception is where the pattern shows its cost. Karate Kid: Legends drew mixed reviews, 57 per cent positive on Rotten Tomatoes, and the site’s consensus credited the nostalgic pull of Chan and Macchio rather than the newcomer at the centre of the poster. The film opened to $21 million against projections of $25 to $30 million and finished at $117 million worldwide, a respectable result rather than a coronation. American Born Chinese had the opposite problem: strong notices and too few viewers. Disney+ cancelled it after one season, and the show was also criticised in Taiwan for turning the exchange student Wei-Chen, Taiwanese in the graphic novel, into a mainland Chinese character. Then there is age. Wang was in his mid-twenties playing a high-school sophomore and his late twenties playing Li Fong. At 29, ComicBook.com noted, he would be older than most of the actors cast as the founding X-Men, even though Iceman is written as the youngest of them. None of this is a failure. It does describe a career in which Hollywood keeps valuing him as a dependable successor, and it is still an open question whether that adds up to a star.

The strongest evidence that it might came from smaller films. In Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk, released by Lionsgate in September 2025, he played Hank Olson, one of the boys marching to the death in Stephen King’s dystopia. The film earned 88 per cent positive reviews and $63 million on a $20 million budget. In 2026 he played Caleb, an aspiring talent agent, in David Wain’s comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which premiered at Sundance and reached theatres through Sony Pictures Classics in July. More telling is Brian, the directing debut of Will Ropp, which premiered at SXSW in March 2026. It is the first feature in which Wang plays the title character, leading a cast with William H. Macy and Randall Park, and its early reviews were unanimous in its favour.

The franchises are not done with him. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which premiered in London on October 28, 2026, opens in the United States on November 20. Wang plays Wyatt Callow, a District 12 tribute and oddsmaker who enters the arena alongside Joseph Zada’s young Haymitch Abernathy. He has also signed on for the sixth and final season of Apple TV’s For All Mankind, and has two independent films, Kate Must Die and Admissions, in his slate.

The biggest of the inheritances is still being negotiated. On November 2, 2026, Deadline reported that Wang had entered talks to play Iceman in Marvel Studios‘ X-Men, directed by Jake Schreier from a script by Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo, and set for May 5, 2028. The deal had not closed and Marvel did not comment. Gabriel LaBelle, Jackson Kelly and Rhenzy Feliz were reportedly among the actors who tested for the role.

If the deal closes, Bobby Drake will be the oldest character he has taken over: a mutant introduced in 1963 and played on screen by Shawn Ashmore across four Fox films. It would also be the clearest test of the question his career keeps raising. Wang has shown he can carry a legacy without dropping it. Brian suggests he can carry a film with his own name on it. The next few years will show which of those Hollywood decides to pay for.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, X-Men, Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, The Long Walk, American Born Chinese

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