Chloe Bennet was born Chloé Wang on April 18, 1992, in Chicago, Illinois.[2] She is the daughter of Bennet Wang,[3] an investment banker[4] and Stephanie Crane, an internist.[5]
In 2007, at age 15, Bennet moved to China to pursue a singing career; while in China, Bennet lived with her paternal grandmother and studied Mandarin.[4] Back in the US, she released two singles "Uh Oh" and "Every Day in Between" in 2011, under her birth name Chloe Wang.[8]
In 2010 she moved to Los Angeles, California.[4] Her first on-screen appearance was as a host for the short-lived TeenNick summer dance series The Nightlife. She appeared in the 2011 music video for South Korean band BIGBANG's "Tonight".[9] While pursuing an acting career in Hollywood, she changed her name to "Chloe Bennet," after having trouble booking gigs with her last name. According to Bennet, using her father's first name rather than his last name avoids difficulties being cast as an ethnic Asian American while respecting her father.[6][10]
2012–present: Breakthrough
From 2012 to 2013, she had a recurring supporting role in the ABC drama series Nashville as Hailey.[11] In December 2012, she was cast as a series regular on the ABC series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,[11][12][13] which premiered on September 24, 2013. Bennet portrayed a hacker known as Skye, who was revealed to be Daisy Johnson / Quake in the second season.[14] Bennet was awarded the "Visionary Award" by East West Players, the longest-running professional theater of color in the United States, on April 21, 2017, at their annual gala.[15] She dedicated her award "to all the little girls who want to be a superhero; I'm just a half Chinese girl from the southside of Chicago."[16]
In 2019, Bennet was cast in the lead role as Yi in the animated film Abominable.[17] She appeared in the 2020 film Valley Girl, a jukebox musical remake of the 1983 film of the same name, as Karen, the "Queen Bee".[18] The film was originally scheduled for release in June 2018, but was postponed due to controversy around one of its cast members, Logan Paul.[19]
In March 2021, she was cast as Blossom Utonium in the upcoming CW live-action pilot Powerpuff, alongside Dove Cameron as Bubbles and Yana Perrault as Buttercup.[20] However, after a decision to reshoot the pilot episode and subsequent scheduling conflicts with another project, Bennet left the project in August 2021.[21] In 2023, she starred as the main actress in Mike Rohl's Married By Mistake as Riley Smith, a recent graduate of Stanford University who drunkenly marries her friend Nate Fisher.[22]
Later that year, Bennet joined the cast for the second season of Invincible.[23]
Personal life
"I think what's really dangerous with what, continuously, is happening with Asian-Americans in Hollywood is there's a narrative that white Hollywood, or just any other ethnicity really in Hollywood gives to Asian-Americans that, 'You're the butt of the joke.' They're determining that we're the nerds, that we're the shy girls or that the guy that can't be sexy because he's an Asian man."
In 2018, she revealed that she has had anxiety and ADHD since childhood.[24]
Bennet has described the American film and television industry as racist against Asian Americans and other people of Asian descent. In a 2016 interview, she noted, "Oh, the first audition I went on after I changed my name [from Wang to Bennet], I got booked. So that's a pretty clear little snippet of how Hollywood works."[25] In September 2017, after actor Ed Skrein stepped down from his role as Major Ben Daimio in the then-in production film Hellboy following backlash over the fact that Skrein, a white actor, was playing Daimio, a character who is Japanese-American in the Hellboy comics, Bennet wrote a since-deleted post on Instagram in which she applauded Skrein's decision, and addressed her own experiences as an actress of Asian descent in Hollywood, saying, "Changing my last name doesn't change the fact that my BLOOD is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese. It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood is racist and wouldn't cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable."[25]
^ ab《神盾局》公布主角造型照 汪可盈饰演黑客斯凯 (in Chinese). QQ.com. Tencent Entertainment News. August 23, 2013. Archived from the original on October 13, 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2013.
