Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Russell Wong
By Andrea Plaid
Russell Wong. Via celebritux.com
I need this to be as much as an official record as to what may happen as a Crush post.
See, Senior Editor Tami Winfrey Harris and I are planning an upcoming Table For Two about Downton Abbey and period pieces in general. (The hold-up is my fault: I’m slogging through all three seasons. And I do mean “slogging,” like it’s a this-is-boring-the-hell-out-of-me-and-there-are-no-hawt-ass-people-on-this-show-to-at-least-alleviate-the-tedium struggle. I’m doing this for you, Racializens. Remember that, hear?) And I mentioned the dearth of sexy on the show to Tami. She contends that Thomas (Rob James-Collier) is all pale and dark hair and angular cheekbones and bad boy. And I’m, like, naw, Thomas got that Crispin Glover coloring I can’t get with (and looks like Glover’s socially well-adjusted younger brother). There are just no Colin Firths on this show, I whined. (And I said that as I don’t really think of Firth as spank-bank material–again, just me–but I know he turns the Masterpiece crowd all the way on.) We started trading sexy-in-an-unconventional-looking-way white dudes’ names (Benedict Cumberbatch for Tami; Adrien Brody for me) and hairy-chested white dudes (Hugh Jackman and Scandal‘s Tony Goldwyn for me; neither of them for Tami, though she ‘fessed up that she’s down for the plush upper torso). We happily concluded that we’d “never throw down for a man.”
Then, just to make sure that she and I were solid on the “never throw down for a man” guideline, I ran this week’s Crush by her. Do y’all know what she said?
“I’d cut you for him!”
I was all, like, “Can we at least get out our calendars and arrange days or something?”
So, yeah…Russell Wong.
Wong’s foine-ness has sizzled our screens for at least a couple of generations: some of us remember the Troy, NY-born, California-reared actor from his debut in the mid-80s in Tai-Pan or from 21 Jump Street. Some of us swooned over him in New Jack City. Some of us remember him as the seductive-turned-adulterous-and-abusive playboy husband in The Joy Luck Club. And quite a few of us sighed watching him as Jet Li’s nemesis in Romeo Must Die. Of course, he’s done other roles on the big and small screen, from playing an impregnating angel in the Christopher Walken-led supernatural thriller Prophecy II to a US-exiled Chinese musician-turned-political activist in the groundbreaking TV show Vanishing Son to a son dealing with familial issues as he and his four siblings bury their mom in Dim Sum Funeral. And Wong recently appeared in an IKEA commercial.
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