Bennet's mother is Anglo-American and her father is Chinese. Ignatius College Prep. In , at age 15, Bennet moved to China to pursue a singing career; while in China, Bennet lived with her paternal grandmother and studied Mandarin.
In she moved to Los Angeles, California. 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. In , Bennet was cast in the lead role as Yi in the animated film Abominable. In , she revealed that she has had anxiety and ADHD since childhood. Bennet has described the American film and television industry as racist against Asian Americans and other people of Asian descent.
In a 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.
In September , 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.
