Actor Jason Wong: from Guy Ritchie’s film set to a voice for game shooting

Most people who shoot came to it through a father with a gun cabinet, a farm, a keeper next door or a syndicate with a spare gun. Jason Wong came to it through a film set. The British actor grew up in west London, trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and holds a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and he has appeared in Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons and The Gentlemen. He learned to shoot because a director told him to, and by his own reckoning it is the best piece of advice he has ever been given.

Three competitive seasons on, he is shooting registered English sporting on the Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) circuit, taking driven days in three counties and making the case for game shooting more plainly than many who were born to it. For shoot owners, keepers and anyone who has ever hosted a first-timer on a peg, his route in is the one the sport needs more of.

“There was a game shooting scene being filmed on Guy Ritchie’s Wiltshire estate Ashcombe for The Gentlemen,” he told Fieldsports Journal. “I was watching them from the sidelines asking endlessly about everything, and Guy just looked at me and said, ‘You’d love it, J – go to your nearest shooting ground and learn.’ So I did.”

The following weekend he turned up at E.J. Churchill’s shooting ground in High Wycombe with the complete beginner’s confidence that he would be shooting like a champion by the end of the afternoon. “In my head,” he says, “I was going to be a AAA shot. The reality was I missed a bunch.” He has not stopped since.

English sporting and the mental game

English sporting is his discipline. He shoots between 100 and 150 cartridges a week when filming allows, shoots registered CPSA competitions twice and sometimes three times a month, and has completed four majors, the Essex Masters twice among them. His coach, Ed Solomons, works with him on the technical foundations and on the mental game, which Wong reckons is the harder of the two.

“It’s just tweaks now on the technical side,” he says. “But the mental side – that’s where it gets interesting. I was at a stand the other day and I realised I was going through my lines for an audition rather than watching the target. My mind was elsewhere. And of course I missed.” He pauses. “Ed and I work a lot on that. Clearing my head. Forgetting the last stand and moving on. Richard Faulds told me the same thing at the British Shooting Show when I was bending his ear about it. Just let it go. Berating yourself achieves nothing.”

What acting and clay shooting have in common

Wong has plainly thought the parallel through. On a film set the ability to shake off a bad take and come back fresh is a professional necessity: directors lose patience and time costs money. On a competition ground the stakes are lower, but the shape of it is the same, the moment of delivery, the instant feedback, the temptation to dwell. “When they call Action! you have to perform,” he says. “It’s the same when the clay comes out of the trap. The adrenaline rush is very similar, actually.”

There is a practical connection too. Producers casting action roles want leads who can handle firearms convincingly on screen, and an actor who can handle a shotgun properly brings something to that conversation that a two-day weapons course cannot. It is no coincidence that his career has accelerated alongside his shooting. The black belt already marked him out as an actor who arrives physically prepared; the shooting has added another string to a bow that has seen him cast in Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in In the Grey and alongside Jason Statham in the recently released Mutiny.

From clays to driven game

The clays came first and the game shooting followed, and Wong talks about driven days with the convert’s mixture of wonder and indignation: wonder at having found something this good, and indignation that nobody told him about it sooner. He has shot pheasant and partridge in Essex, on the Isle of Wight and in Devon.

“I’d never understood any of it before,” he says. “The ecosystem, the economics, what a shoot actually means to the communities around it – the pubs, the farms, the B&Bs. I have friends who run shoots now, who are farmers, and I understand why it matters. The recent political argument about banning game shooting struck me as coming from a deep well of ignorance. I didn’t know either, until I went and looked.”

That is the sentence for every shoot owner and keeper to keep to hand the next time a visiting Gun arrives knowing nothing. Wong did not need persuading; he needed showing. The pubs, farms and bed-and-breakfasts that a driven day keeps busy are an argument that lands hardest on someone who has just stood on a peg and watched it work, and he is now the kind of witness the sport rarely gets: well known, urban and new to it.

He is careful about how he speaks in public, and on social media in particular. He posts about his days, talks about the sport openly, appears at events and lends his name to the conversation. He knows that his profile is still building, that shooting’s image remains fragile in some quarters and that the job of presenting the sport credibly to those outside it is never finished. The community, he believes, needs to think hard about what it puts in front of people who do not yet understand the context.

He is doing more than talking. He is organising a simulated game day for a group of friends, actors and city people who have never held a gun, at James Bradley-Day’s estate in Kent. “Sim days are incredible fun,” he says. “You get the full experience without any of the divisiveness or controversy. It is an accessible entry point. People come back from those days changed and enlightened.” For any shoot wondering who will fill its pegs in five years’ time, that is a recruitment model worth copying: the clay ground first, then a sim day, then a driven day, each step paid for and each one a convert made.

Cartridges, ear defenders and a Perazzi

The commercial side of his shooting has come together with the same momentum. Lyalvale Express has him as an ambassador on the competition circuit, where reliability in the heat of a registered shoot is, he says, one less thing to think about. For hearing protection he shoots in SWATCOM electronic ear defenders, which let him stay connected to his surroundings between stands. And through the distributor Sportsman Gun Centre he has been working with Perazzi, trialling both the MX8 and the High Tech S before settling on the latter as his English sporting gun. It is a serious set-up for a man still in his third competitive season.

Nobody on that Wiltshire film set could have known that a throwaway remark would lead Wong into a world so far from his urban upbringing. When his bewildered London friends see him in tweeds, flat cap and shooting stockings they tease him that he is cosplaying Guy Ritchie. He is not wearing a costume. He has found a rural community that welcomed him with open arms, a new tribe and a way of life that has got well and truly under his skin. Next comes his firearm certificate, a rifle and his first deer, and he is even weighing up a gundog to go alongside his cavapoo. The boy from Paddington is hooked, and the sport is the better for it.