I felt like we were doing 10 films,” says Benedict Wong, looking visibly exhausted at the memory of his six-month tenure as Kublai Khan in Marco Polo, Netflix’s epic new sensory overload of a drama series. “When I came out the other end I was kind of shellshocked, really. I just sat in my flat on the sofa, staring at the wall, going, ‘Ahhh, I like static’”. Sitting before me today, wearing a tweed blazer and a very earnest expression, the Salford-born actor speaks with a quiet thoughtfulness about what is possibly the world’s most bombastic television project yet.

Filmed in Venice, Kazakhstan and Malaysia on a reported budget of $90m (that’s second only to Game Of Thrones in terms of expenditure), Marco Polo follows the adventures of the eponymous Italian explorer in the 13th-century court of the Khan – a man who ruled over one-fifth of the world’s occupied land mass. As Kublai, Wong spends his days dodging assassination attempts, ordering deaths of varying invention, amusing himself with his throng of concubines and – mainly – sitting on a really massive throne. He’s also a market-owner extraordinaire and controller of the legendary Silk Road. It’s a far cry from how many will fondly remember Wong, as Sean Lock’s lumbering flatmate in the cult BBC3 sitcom 15 Storeys High.

Today, Wong has relinquished his seat of power for one of those impractically plumped-up hotel room armchairs; it’s too small for him, despite the fact that Wong is not nearly as imposing in the flesh as he is onscreen in Marco Polo. “I liken it to the idea of being a CEO of a huge company,” says Wong of the Khan, a man whose reach extends into the far corners of the show’s world, both figuratively and literally. His huge physical presence – achieved partly by the show’s stellar costume department (including Tim Yip, who won an Oscar for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and partly by Wong putting on “about two-and-a-half stone” – is symbolic of the lavish grandeur of his court. So outlandish are the aesthetics that, at first glance, Marco Polo looks as if it might be set on another planet: the incredibly ambitious hair and makeup is closer to something like Star Wars than any period drama fare we’re used to. The Khan himself has his hair shaved into a horseshoe shape to mark the court’s affinity with horses. “I’m hoping the Hoxton hipsters are going to start copying that now,” says Wong, eagerly.

It’s a universe that couldn’t be further from the world of 15 Storeys High. Sean Lock’s early 00s sitcom offered a grimy smeared window into life high up in a south London tower block, starring Lock as Vince, a man who passed his time determinedly pilfering other people’s anecdotes and maniacally safeguarding his own personal space. Wong played his perennially unwelcome flatmate Errol. A modest hit at the time, in the 12 years since its debut the show has steadily earned a reputation as a hidden gem of BBC comedy. Wong’s face lights up when I ask him about it. He’s delighted at the show’s cult status, that people are “still buzzing off it and they’re still finding it funny. It’s great that it feels like it’s still got a shelf life.” Wong landed the part thanks to his friend, the actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz, who was voicing Errol on the sitcom’s radio incarnation before it transferred to television. “Basically he just did an impression of me,” says Wong, “so when I turned up they sort of gifted me the part.”

It was a role that came at a pivotal point in Wong’s career: by that point, he’d been acting for a decade and was rapidly losing heart in an industry that was treating him “just as a race, not as a person”. After “embracing Bertolt Brecht and having a go at Shakespeare” at college in Manchester, he found himself repeatedly sidelined at castings, “doing the role in the takeaway, or gangster No 3”. The disjuncture between the way society exists in reality and how it is mirrored back to us in the cinema and on television screens is something that clearly plays on his mind. “We live a sort of duality, people born here and of an ethnicity,” he says of his experiences. “In terms of representation, television is reflecting an era that has passed. It’s the wrong time, it’s the wrong period. In all sorts of television, it doesn’t feel like the 21st century.”

In the end, it was an audition for Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights that nearly sent him over the edge. “I was waiting for about an hour and 40 minutes and no one came out to say sorry,” he remembers. The part was “a one-line illegal immigrant. And it was like Network, I just flipped. I wrote a letter to the casting director that went: ‘Thank you very much, I think Phoenix Nights is brilliant, good luck with it, but, you know what, I’m better than this.’” After that experience, Wong decided to quit acting altogether. “I left there feeling really emotional. I called my agent and said: ‘That’s it, I’m done, I’ve had enough.’” But his agent told him to wait, because there was a script he thought he should read. “I said, ‘What’s the part?’ [He said] ‘It’s an illegal immigrant.’ I went, ‘No! Fuck that! I’m not doing that again!’” But the project turned out to be Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, a tale of exploited immigrants starring Audrey Tautou and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The film was nominated for just about every award going (including an Oscar) and earned Wong a nomination for best supporting actor at the British independent film awards.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Benedict Wong. Photograph: Steve Zak

In the intervening years, Wong has been scaling the Hollywood heights, with parts in Kick-Ass 2 and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, while continuing to make his presence felt in the UK, cropping up in Channel 4’s Top Boy, on the West End stage as part of the cast of Chimerica, and in numerous British comedies, from The IT Crowd to goofy thriller The Wrong Mans.

It might be impossible to swerve the fact that many of his best-known characters still wear their ethnicity overtly, but Wong has managed to find more layered, sophisticated parts as his career has progressed. For all its big-budget bombast, Marco Polo does look beyond the hypnotic, alien surface of the Khan’s court to explore the codes of that culture with an open mind. The production, too, is a resolutely global one, with a truly international cast (Polo is played by an actual Italian), and it just launched simultaneously into almost 50 territories via Netflix. With this epically scaled series behind him, though, Wong clearly feels he has business to attend to closer to home. In the future, he says, he’d like to play some part in correcting the anachronisms he’s seen on screen. “I’d like to helm my own series,” he ponders, when I ask about his plans for the future. “Something British. Where I’m playing someone from here. I think that’s something I haven’t done.”

Marco Polo is available now on Netflix