|
By Christina Radish
|
|
George Takei at the NBC Winter All-Star Party held at the Ritz Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, Calif. on January 17, 2007. | Known around the world for his portrayal of Mr. Sulu, in the acclaimed television and film series Star Trek, George Takei has more than 30 feature films and hundreds of television guest-starring roles to his credit. His most recent guest-starring appearance has been as Kaito, the father of Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka) on NBC’s smash hit drama Heroes, about the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities.
The 69-year-old, highly accomplished Los Angeles native took time out to talk to MediaBlvd Magazine about life after Star Trek, the possibility of time travel, and what it was like living in a Japanese internment camp.
MediaBlvd> How did you end up being cast as Hiro’s father? Was it a surprise call from out of the blue, or did you reach out to the show?
George> It was a surprise call. I have been viewing the show because, shortly after it came on the air, I got emails from fans telling me that there’s a Japanese character on the show who’s a Star Trek fan, and so I thought I better check it out. And then, one day, my agent called and said, “There’s interest in you from Heroes, but they want you to audition.” And I said, “Oh, sure, fine.” Usually, they cast me without an audition because they know what I can do, but they wanted me to audition. I’m not one of these tough guys who won’t audition, so I said I’d do it. I had them send over the script, and I looked at it, called my agent and said, “Sure, it looks like a piece of cake.” And, he said, “They want you to translate it into Japanese and audition in Japanese.” And I said, “Oh, well, I do speak Japanese. It’s a little bit of extra work, but I’ll take it on.” So, I translated that and went and auditioned, and they were very happy with it. It turns out that they wanted to make sure that my command of Japanese was credible. I speak Japanese fluently. As a child, I had to go to Saturday Japanese school, which I hated as a kid, but the reward was summer school in Japan, and that was great fun. I was appointed by President Clinton to the US-Japan Friendship Commission, and it was just at that time that I happen to be the Chairman of the Board of the Japanese-American National Museum here in Los Angeles. I was also granted the high honor of the Order of the Rising Sun with gold rays from Emperor Akihito himself at the Imperial Palace, so my command at Japanese is fluent.
MediaBlvd> Is it safe to say you’re not playing one of TV’s more loveable dads?
George> Well, it’s hard to make any judgment yet. I am making discoveries with each script. I thought he was just a very concerned father who’s powerful, but I’m discovering various other dimensions to him, which makes the character even more ambiguous. Why is he doing what he’s doing? What’s his motivation? Where does he want to go? I’m like the fans, in that I’m learning more with each episode, myself.
MediaBlvd> Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between Mr. Nakamura and his son? What direction do you see it going in?
George> Everything in life has consequences and one of the most consequential acts is creating another human life. Kaito Nakamura is a father, and with that comes consequences. And, I'm discovering that there's a whole different kind of consequence with my particular son. What’s intriguing about Heroes is that it examines those consequences of life. Keep tuning in to find out what the various consequences of life are on Heroes.
MediaBlvd> People often refer to you as a renaissance man, and now people are starting to say the same about Masi Oka. When the two of you got together, what did you find interesting about him as a person?
George> When I first met him, we started chatting and we were commenting on how interesting it was that we were going to be working in Japanese. When we were talking about languages, I discovered that he speaks Spanish, and so do I. I was born in East LA., and I grew up hearing the language all around me, so I love the language. I studied it in junior high and high school, and my minor in a college was Latin American Studies, which included the language. We started conversing in Spanish and blew the minds of all the people sitting around us.
MediaBlvd> Other than Hiro and his friend Ando, will your character get a chance to interact with any of the other cast members?
George> Oh, yes, and that's part of the surprise. I've been reading back and forth on the Internet, amongst the Heroes fans, and they like to be surprised. On the West Coast, we get time delay. When there are football games or baseball games, we don’t like our East Coast friends to phone and tell us how it turned out. And, I think it's the same with Heroes fans. They enjoy the suspense and they really revel in the surprise. When they learned that I was cast a couple of months ago, they were expecting that, when the guy who ordered the kidnapping of Hiro and Ando, that it would turn out to be his father. Some of the surprise element there was lost. I won't reveal too much, so that the fans can enjoy their anguished tension.
MediaBlvd> Star Trek was one of the pioneering shows, in terms of having a multiracial cast, and Heroes is carrying that tradition even further. How far do you think we’ve come, in that regard?
George> I’m absolutely astounded, fascinated and proud that here is an enormously popular and highly-rated network primetime TV show that plays entire sequences in Japanese, a foreign language, with English subtitles. This is popular television. Sophisticated people used to go to art houses to see foreign movies with subtitles. To play to the mass television audience with the sequences like this is a real advance and a complement to the sophistication and the global nature of the audience. I understand that the show has been sold in Britain and Japan, and I’m already getting emails from Japan.
MediaBlvd> Heroes has a very active presence on the web to enhance the viewers’ enjoyment and excitement about the show. If they had those kind of marketing tools and technology four decades ago for Star Trek, what do you think that might have done for the initial life of the show?
George> I blame the ratings prevail of Star Trek on confused programming people. They didn’t know how to deal with Star Trek because it was so original and fresh, and they put us on at the worst possible time. Even if we had the technology that we have today, with the Internet and all the other various forms of getting the word out, I don’t know whether we would have enjoyed that rating. That’s why I'm really impressed with the high ratings for Heroes, in its first season. We were on for three seasons, working our butts off, trying to get the ratings to move up a little bit and it just didn’t work. Once we went into syndication, the programmers put us on at the kind of hours that Star Trek fans are watching. With the last season in 1969, we were on Friday night at 10 pm. I'd like to think of Star Trek fans as intelligent and hip, and out on Friday night. They’re not watching television because they're out being intelligent and hip. And so, our ratings were very bad.
MediaBlvd> Heroes also has following with the online comic. Have you ever followed comic books or are you interested in any now?
|
|
George Takei at Dragon*Con held at the Atlanta Hilton Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia from September 1-5, 2006. | George> When I was a kid, I had a collection of Superman comics and Batman comics. But, when I went off to college at the University of California at Berkley, I wasn’t home to guard my collection, and when I came back home for summer vacation, it wasn’t there. I said, “Mama, what happened to my comic book collection?” And she said, “Oh, I gave it to the trash man.” It was a fortune that she gave away, and a big chunk of my boyhood. Mothers don’t understand their son’s passion for comic books.
MediaBlvd> Do you believe that there could be time travel over different dimension, like on Heroes?
George> Absolutely. Some of the things that seemed absolutely inconceivable to people, at a certain point in history, seem possible now. For example, my grandmother came to the United States in the early part of the 20th century and my grandfather came in the 19th century. She said that that trip across the Pacific took her something like six weeks, walking around on that ship. She said if anyone told her that you could get in a steel machine and fly over the Pacific, she would have said, “You’re crazy!” In her lifetime, she ended up doing it many times, going back and forth between California and Japan. She lived to be 105 years old. Here we are in the year 2007, and what may seem fantastical to us right now, will probably eventually happen. When Star Trek came on in 1966, that was pure science fiction and the technology was just mind-boggling. In 40 years of time, astounding technological advances can be made. Because time travel has been imagined, I think it will eventually happen. It takes the imaginers to set the fantastical goals. With the goal set, the inventors, the innovators and the technicians start working toward that goal and it becomes possible. We’ve landed human beings on the moon. We’ve got robots roaming around the circles of Mars. At one point, that was pure, absolute, fantastical science fiction, and now we’ve done it. It is an exciting time to be alive. We need to really enjoy the time that we’re blessed with on this planet.
MediaBlvd> You’ve said you have a real interest in education and learning things. What has propelled you to be so interest in always expanding yourself?
George> I guess it really is the guidance that my parents gave me when we were incarcerated in American internment camps during World War II. They keep referring to them as Japanese interment camps. We were not prisoners of Japan. We were prisoners of America, and they were Japanese-American interment camps. They did a lot of thinking, but there was a lot of anguish too. It wasn’t like being in the hospital and meditating. There was great uncertainty. When you have machine guns pointed at you from sentry tars and the guards are carrying rifles, they're not there for just decoration. It was a time of great anguish for my parents. I'm grateful that I was as young as I was. We began the school day with a pledge of allegiance to the flag, and there I was molding the words, “with liberty and justice for all,” surrounded by barbed wire fences and sentry tars, right outside of my school house window. Those were the circumstances under which we grew up, and that made my parents think intensely about our lives here in America. My father lost everything and then had to take his wife and three young children into a barbed wire confinement. He felt that both the strength and the weakness of American democracy was that it was a true people democracy and it can be as great as a people can be, but it can be as valuable as people. And, he felt that, once we came out, it was very important for us to be actively engaged in the democratic process where, if we default on that, then things like interment can happen because there will always be people that will exploit and use the process to their advantage. My father encouraged his children to be active in student government, and both my brother and I were student body presidents. He was the greatest admirer of Adlai Stevenson, and he was a volunteer in the Stevenson headquarters. Before I could even vote, he took me with him to Stevenson headquarters and volunteered me. To a kid that has a theatrical soul, the political process is very dramatic. There is excitement, there's tension, there's these debates, and then there's the election. The suspense of election night contains great elation, or abject tragedy. My father’s guidance got me involved in the political process, which also involves being up on the issues and knowing how to articulate your thoughts on issues. My parents both guided us into the kind of active engaged lives that we have.
MediaBlvd> Can you talk about what you were feeling the day you were taken to the Japanese internment camps?
George> I was born here in Los Angeles. This is where our home was. I still remember that scary day. American soldiers with guns came to our front door and ordered us out. I was four then, but almost five. That was in March, and I turned five in April. We were taken from our home to the horse staples of the nearby San Jose race track. We were housed there temporarily while the camps were being built. Once the camps were built, we were put on a train and transported 2/3 of the way across the country to the steamy swamps of southern Arkansas. We were there for about a year and a half, and then we were transferred to another camp in Northern California, almost on the Oregon border. When the war ended, we came back to Los Angeles. By that time, I was eight years old. Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in the camps. Normal for me was to line up three times a day. It became normal for me to go with my father to the base and then come in with a shower. Coming out was, for us, the most traumatic thing because we came back to Los Angeles, but the hostility to Japanese-Americans was still intense and housing was enormously difficult. The first place that my parents found a home for us was on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, and that was terrifying to us.
We’d never seen such ugly and scary looking people, staggering around and falling down right in front of us, vomiting and prowling around, with the stain of urine on all of them. My little sister said, “Mama, let's go back home,” meaning behind those barbed wire fences again. So, for us, the most traumatic part was ironically coming home.
MediaBlvd> Would you ever have imagined you’d find yourself so much in the public eye again, as you are now?
George> Two years ago, I spoke to the press, for the first time, about my being gay. People refer to that as my coming out, but my partner and I have been together for almost 20 years now, and we’ve certainly been out with our families and friends, and I was out with my Star Trek colleagues as well. We’ve had Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols and Jimmy Doohan over to our house for dinner, and we’ve been over to their places. But, in 2005, the California Legislation did an extraordinary thing. They passed the same-sex marriage bill, which had never been done in any state in the nation. In Massachusetts, they have same-sex marriage, but it came to the judicial process. All that was required for that to become the law of the state was the signature of our governor, who also happens to be the very famous actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. When he ran for office, he made all these moderate statements, but he is from Hollywood, he has worked with gays and lesbians, he is very comfortable with them, and so we felt surely that California was going to bookend the United States with Massachusetts, with the Same-sex Marriage Act. But, when he denied the bill, playing to the most reactionary segment of these very conservative days, I felt I needed to speak out and my voice needed to be authentic. So, when I spoke out and spoke to the press, for the first time, I knew that there would be a lot of noise because it would be opening a Pandora ’s Box. I expected to get a lot of coverage. And, I have been very active since my conversations with the press.
MediaBlvd> Because you have such a distinct voice, do people stop you all the time, once they’ve had a chance to hear you speak?
George> The people in my neighborhood know who I am and what I sound like. I could just be striding to the airport, dressed down, and people don’t notice me. But, when I stop to talk to somebody, that's when people turn around and say, “Oh, it’s Sulu.” Although, I think from now on, they're going to start saying, “It’s Mr. Nakamura.”
MediaBlvd> What got you into science fiction? Was there any particular show that grabbed your attention and drew you into the sci-fi genre?
George> It was employment that drew me to sci-fi. When you’re an actor, you go where the work is, and I was fortunate enough to get an interview with a man named Gene Roddenberry, back in 1965, and he cast me on Star Trek. Even before that, I did do an episode of Twilight Zone.
MediaBlvd> What was your first professional acting role in front of the camera like?
George> Back in the old days, we had what we called “live television.” It was like telecast theater. You rehearsed the drama and took it from the top to the end, in one shot. I was cast in a very distinguished and very high-rated, 90-minute live TV series called, Playhouse 90, which produced a lot of wonderful writers. That was exciting in more ways than just doing a wonderful piece of work. If you made a mistake, that would be caught by live camera and it would be seen by all of America. It was a very intensely exciting, and in some ways nerve-racking, way of working. That was my first paid professional job in front of the camera. But, I was paid for acting in another gig before that, where I dubbed English dialogue into Japanese for a sci-fi film. And, I was cast in a play called Made in Japan, where I played a young Japanese soldier who returned from the War, which led to tragic fate.
MediaBlvd> After all these years, what makes a career in this industry rewarding to you?
George> I think it’s the opportunity to sink your teeth into characters that have some dimension and heft to them. Certainly, there are unique challenges with doing Heroes because you don’t get a full grip on your character. But, Kaito Nakamura, the father of Hiro Nakamura, is an absolutely fascinating character with many intriguing dimensions to him. And, as long as I survive on the show, I will continue to make interesting discoveries about this man. |
