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There’s so much more to George Takei, beyond his role as Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise. Born Hosato Takei in Los Angeles to Japanese-American parents, he was renamed George by his father after King George VI’s coronation. He and his family were forced to live in various US Japanese concentration camps during the second world war, after which Takei went on to study architecture and theatre, including time at the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon.
Takei’s early acting career included providing English dubbing voices for 1950s Japanese monster films, including Rodan and Godzilla Raids Again. He got a few small roles on the big screen, largely in war films (including Never So Few and Hell to Eternity), but was more successful on TV, getting cast in a number of popular shows including Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, My Three Sons and Mission: Impossible. In the same year as his M:I role – 1966 – Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry cast him as physicist Hikaru Sulu in the second pilot episode, leading him to play Lieutenant (later Captain) Sulu in all three seasons of the original 1960s Star Trek series and in the first six Star Trek films between 1979 and 1991.
Since then, it’s almost a case of “where hasn’t he popped up?” On TV, he’s appeared in Miami Vice, Scrubs, Will & Grace, Malcolm in the Middle, and five episodes of The Simpsons (most famously as the sushi chef who nearly kills Homer with the deadly fugu blowfish). He came third on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, where he gamely ate a kangaroo penis during a bush tucker trial, but was fired early in the US Celebrity Apprentice by Donald Trump after taking the fall as project manager on a task promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.
On stage, Takei starred with Martin Sheen and Jamie Lee Curtis in the play 8 about the Proposition 8 same-sex marriage trial, and in the musical Allegiance, which ran on Broadway and in the West End, inspired by his own experiences in the camps. He’s written seven books, including his autobiography and an award-winning graphic novel memoir. He voiced Emperor Yoshiro in the video game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and is so well known for his catchphrase “Oh my” – which originated from an accidental exclamation on a US radio show – that he even starred in a 2017 Pizza Hut Super Bowl ad riffing on it. He is also a prominent advocate for the LGBTQ+ community; Takei came out as gay in 2005, prompted in part by then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of same-sex marriage legislation.
So, that should be more than enough for when Takei sits for the next reader interview. We’re back to his specialist subject, Star Trek, as he appears in Beam Me Up, Sulu, a documentary about a long-lost Star Trek fan film created in 1985 that, in the words of the producers, “becomes a gateway into a much larger conversation about representation in Hollywood, the evolution of fandom and the enduring power of science fiction to inspire social progress”.
So please get in your questions by 6pm on Thursday 12 February, via subspace radio, flip-phone communicator, patching through to Lieutenant Uhura, or ideally by posting in the comments below, and we’ll print his answers in Film&Music.
