The X-Files Episode With Two Stars Before Their Signature Roles
Season 3 of The X-Files saw a lot of appearances by actors who would later become much bigger stars. In fact, there were a couple of episodes that featured more than one of these future celebrities. One such episode is “Hell Money,” in which both BD Wong and Lucy Liu appear, years before either were cast in roles they would become much more well known for.
Hell Money
The X-Files episode “Hell Money” finds Mulder and Scully in Chinatown, San Francisco because of a man murdered by cremation. Investigating the victim leads the FBI agents to a bizarre underground lottery. In the hopes of winning the growing pot, players risk their own body parts and organs–including organs they can’t live without.
The game is run by a character credited only as the Hard-Faced Man, played by legendary character actor James Hong. Anyone who tries to defy the game is visited by three mysterious figures in white masks. We never actually see the three figures hurt anyone, but the results of their visits are quick and ruthless.
BD Wong As Detective Glen Chao
BD Wong plays San Francisco Detective Glen Chao in the X-Files episode, and at first he seems to want to only help Mulder and Scully. Eventually, we learn Chao not only knows much more than he’s letting on, but he’s actually taking money to protect the game. In the end he tries to redeem himself, but redemption doesn’t always work out in The X-Files.
Five years after appearing in “Hell Money,” Wong began a much longer gig in the role he’s best known for–as Special Agent Dr. George Huang in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He also returned to the part of Dr. Henry Wu in 2015’s Jurassic World–a part he originated in Steven Spielberg’s game-changing Jurassic Park.
Lucy Liu As Kim Hsin
Lucy Liu’s part in “Hell Money” is smaller than Wong’s, but no less vital. In a few scenes, Liu plays Kim Hsin, a young woman recently diagnosed with Leukemia. Her father (Michael Yama) enters the macabre lottery in hopes of winning the money to pay for Kim’s medical treatment–losing an eye in the process. He almost loses much more.
Liu was a relative unknown when she appeared in The X-Files, but that didn’t last for too long. Four years later she landed big roles in both Shanghai Noon and Charlie’s Angels. In 2003 she became forever known as O-Ren Ishii in Quentin Tarantino‘s Kill Bill: Vol. 1.
A Unique Episode
“Hell Money” is unique in The X-Files in that it lacks the usual obvious connection to the supernatural or unexplained. There’s nothing that either isn’t explained or couldn’t very easily be explained with a little imagination.
For example, in one scene a man about to have his heart surgically removed sees ghosts taking it from his body, but considering the drugs administered to him beforehand this could easily be explained as hallucination. In fact, later in the episode Kim’s father has a similar vision of his daughter that would have to be hallucination since Kim survives (and so would make a bad ghost).
There are the three masked men who act as the lottery’s arbiters of justice–they dispose of the bodies of the game’s losers and attack those who work to run from and/or expose the game. But while their appearance has a supernatural flavor, we never see them do anything explicitly supernatural.
Because of this, we don’t get the trademark X-Files back-and-forth between Mulder and Scully. Once they find out about the game, they only want to stop it, and Mulder is uncharacteristically quiet on the subject of ghosts.
