In a show crammed with enigmas, Whiterose is Mr. Robot's sphinx. She's a hacker and a politician who schemes in Mandarin and lies in English. She wears a suit and tie to the office but is more comfortable at home in a fetching skirt set—not a character whose heels just any actor could fill. So to play the transgender Chinese government official/dark-web overlord, Mr. Robot enlisted male actor BD Wong, who's made a career out of popping up in unexpected places (from Broadway to Disney movies to those weekend-long Law & Order: SVU marathons), to embody the woman, the myth, the legend. GQ talked to Wong about the perils of learning Mandarin phonetically, the trouble of tracking down a super-secret Jurassic Park script, and the surprisingly lucrative benefit of being forgotten.

GQ: You don't speak Mandarin, but your Mr. Robot character does. How do you perform a scene in Mandarin if you don't speak Mandarin?

BD WONG: You painstakingly learn the lines phonetically, then learn what each word means, then understand how the word order is all different from your language.

Do people who speak Mandarin say, "You nailed it" ?

My performance in Mandarin is going to be most enjoyable to people who don't speak Mandarin. If I spoke Chinese at all, it would be Cantonese, because it's my family language, so that accent is in my ear. And I did a lot of work learning my first Mandarin scene before realizing I was speaking Mandarin with a Cantonese accent. I had to re-learn it, and I was really tentative and uncomfortable. And at the end of my first scene, I said to Sam [Esmail, the creator of Mr. Robot], "Listen, can we go dub whatever is imperfect in the recording studio after?" I did that, but it's not perfect, because the rhythms are what you're stuck with when you're matching [your voice to the mouth on-screen]. So for my next Mandarin scene, I had a coach to help me overcome my Cantonese tendencies.

I made the mistake of going on Reddit and looking at what Chinese people had to say about my work. I was relieved to find out [that most of the criticism is] for the first scene, not for the second. I feel pretty good about the second scene.

Besides basic Mandarin, what skills have you honed as a perennial guest star?

It's a very weird, random kind of skill set. If somebody came to me and said, "I'm going to guest star on my first show, "Id tell them you have to do more preparation than you would as a series regular, because, one, your work is more concentrated—your screen time is lower, so you have less opportunity to mess up. And you don't want to be the squeaky wheel. If there is a problem on set, let it be the weather or the lead actor being temperamental.

It's like being a guest in someone's home. You want to be asked back.

If you're really a pain in the ass, they'll figure out a way to not let you come back. You could be there for like an eight-episode arc, and four episodes into it, they can go, "No, we cannot take this anymore. Let's just kill this person right now."

** Mr. Robot has famously tight security to keep plot twists under wraps. Are you given full scripts, or do you just see your isolated scenes?**

They want to just send me my scenes. The series regulars all know much more than I do. They have a sit-down with Sam before each season starts, and they get to be told what's going to happen to them. But if I really pitch a fit, which I do now, I get a script. They have a guy drive it up in a car, and I have to sign a paper. It's really, really strict security, and rightly so.