Yee Jee Tso played Chang Lee in the 1996 TV Movie, and has since played an entirely different character in some of the audio adventures. He’s interviewed on the BBC site, and here are a few extracts from that, covering how he got the role of Chang Lee:
We had an open casting call for the Doctor Who TV movie with Paul McGann. They were filming it in Vancouver which is where I’ve been a professional actor for nine years now. Then they did the call-backs, [and] it was between two or three of us.
It just so happened that something terrible had happened and I was late for the audition by about an hour and a half. I found out later from Philip Segal that that’s precisely why they hired me. They wanted the Chang Lee character to have this ‘I don’t care’ kind of attitude, and I guess me showing up really late for this huge casting call was the ‘I don’t care’ attitude they wanted.
Geoffrey Sax had mentioned to me something about how I was going to have these repercussions happen to me and that I might be doing conventions and stuff. Eventually that did end up happening to me. I hooked up with different conventions here and there and ended up doing the circuit.
Doctor Who Interview Archive 