[4] He was brought up in Salford[3] and attended De La Salle Sixth Form College in the city, where he took a two-year performing arts course.

He appeared as Errol Spears alongside Sean Lock in the situation comedy 15 Storeys High, and as Franklin Fu in the second series of Look Around You.

[6] In 2003, he was nominated at the British Independent Film Awards for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Guo Yi in Dirty Pretty Things.

The next year, he appeared in another Ridley Scott science fiction film, playing Jet Propulsion Lab director Bruce Ng in The Martian.

[19] In 2016, he co-starred as Wong in the superhero film Doctor Strange (2016)[20] and later reprised the role in Avengers: Infinity War (2018),[21] Avengers: Endgame (2019),[22] Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021),[23][24] Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021),[25] Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022),[26] and the 2022 Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

In 2017 he voiced Alex Yu in the Arkane Studios game Prey and starred in "2036: Nexus Dawn", a promotional short film prequel to Blade Runner 2049 directed by Luke Scott and co-starring Jared Leto.

[29] He joined the cast[30] of the Netflix live action adaptation of the Chinese novel The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which began shooting later that year.