Exclusive: BD Wong visits 'Gotham' for Strange role

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

BD Wong is paying a visit to Batman’s hometown.

The actor, who was recently seen as the antagonistic geneticist Dr. Henry Wu in Jurassic World, is set to play another villain on Fox’s TV series Gotham. Wong has been cast in the recurring role of Hugo Strange, a brilliant professor and psychiatrist tapped to head up Gotham City’s notorious Arkham Asylum.

He’s hired to help the city’s criminally insane, but Strange has a nefarious streak as well: The professor is also conducting experiments on inmates and testing extraordinary abilities in order to create superhuman folks for Indian Hill. The underground Wayne Enterprises black-ops program was introduced in this week's episode of Gotham as the secretive place where a badly burned Firefly (Michelle Veintimilla) was taken after being captured by the GCPD.

Strange’s first appearance in Detective Comics No. 36 in 1940 predated iconic Bat-baddies such as Catwoman and Joker, and the comic-book supervillain has starred in various cartoons and the recent Batman: Arkham video-game series.

A Tony-winning actor, Wong is a veteran of movies and TV, notably playing the priest Father Ray on HBO’s Oz and spending 11 seasons as forensic psychiatrist Dr. George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.