Interview with George Takei of Heroes

It’s time for the fourth conference call for Heroes. This time we talk to one of the newest additions to the cast in this first season. He may only be in a handful of episodes, but he is without a doubt, the most “famous” member of the Heroes cast. This call featured the legendary George Takei of Star Trek fame.

If you don’t know, haven’t seen the show, or haven’t read my last three conference calls, Heroes is basically a show about ordinary people, like you or me, learning that they have extraordinary abilities. You might even call these people “superheroes”. As we have learned and will continue to learn, though, some of these people may not be “heroes” after all. They may use their new abilities for evil.

George Takei (Kaito Nakamura)

George Takei guest stars as Kaito, Hiro Nakamura’s (Masi Oka) father. Takei is best known for his portrayal of Mr. Sulu in the acclaimed television and film series Star Trek. He has more than 30 feature films and hundreds of television guest-starring roles to his credit. Recognized worldwide as a member of the original Star Trek cast, George received a star on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame in 1986 and he placed his signature and hand print in the forecourt of the landmark Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood in 1991.

In 2006, George became a semi-regular on “The Howard Stern Show” on Sirius Satellite Radio. George was the announcer and on-air personality during Stern’s debut week in January. George appeared for an additional four days in June, two days in September, and four days in December. Among his credits is a music industry accolade — a 1987 Grammy nomination in the “Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording” category. George’s distinctive voice is featured in Walt Disney Pictures’ full-length animated features, Mulan and Mulan II, Star Trek audio novel recordings, Fox Television’s The Simpsons, Futurama, and in numerous voice-overs and narrations.

Widely recognized for his vocal talents, George has been a guest narrator for several symphony orchestras. In November 2004, George narrated Copeland’s Lincoln Portrait with the Honolulu Symphony conducted by Samuel Wong. He has narrated Johan de Meij’s Symphony No. 1: The Lord of the Rings with the Long Island Philharmonic, Denver Symphony Orchestra, Orange County California Wind Orchestra, and the Imperial Symphony Orchestra of Lakeland, Florida, all conducted by David Warble.

And now here are the highlights of what was said in this fourth conference call for Heroes…

Is it safe to say you’re not playing one of TV’s more loveable dads?

George Takei: Well, you know, it’s hard to make any judgment yet. I’ve said that to some reporter a few weeks ago, I am making discoveries with each script. I thought he was just a very concerned father who is very powerful, but I’m discovering various other dimensions to him, which makes it – the character even more ambiguous. Why am I doing what I’m doing? What’s my motivation? Where do I want to go? So, I’m like these fans on the Internet, you know. I’m learning more with each episode myself.

Would you ever have imagined you’d find yourself so much in the public eye again as you are now?

GT: Well, I never dreamt that I’d be doing Heroes. Of course, two years ago, Heroes wasn’t around. But I guess it was two years ago when I spoke to the press for the first time about me being gay. I’ve been “out”. People refer to that as my “coming out”, but my partner and I have been together for almost 20 years now, and we’ve been “out” certainly with our families and friends and me with my Star Trek colleagues as well, you know. We’ve had Walter and Michelle and Jimmy over to our house for dinner and we’ve been over to their place. So, I’ve been “out”.

But in 2005, the California Legislation did an extraordinary thing. They passed the same-sex marriage bill, something that 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 a very famous actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And when he ran for office, he made all these moderate statements, 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 book in the United States with Massachusetts with the Same-sex Marriage Act. But when he details the bill playing to the most reactionary segment of these very conservative days, I felt I need to speak out and my voice needed to be authentic. So, when I spoke out and spoke to the press — you guys — for the first time, I knew that there would be a lot of noise, opening a Pandora ‘s Box with you guys. And so, I did expect to get a lot of the coverage, but the industry, the Hollywood motion picture industry, I guess responds to press interest. And so, yes, I have been very active since my conversations with the press.

How did it work out that you were cast as Hiro’s dad? Was it a surprise call from out of the blue, did you reach out to the show, or what?

GT: No, it was that 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 who’s a Star Trek fan and so I thought I better check this out. And so, I’ve been watching it but I never expected to be recognized. But 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.” They usually cast me without audition because they know what I can do. But they wanted me to audition this time.

I’m not, you know, one of these tough guys who don’t like the audition, so I said, “Sure.” I have them sent over the script, and they emailed the side to me, and I looked at it and I 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, but it’s a little bit of the extra work but let me take it on.” And so, I translated that and went and auditioned, and they were very happy with it. And it turns out they wanted to make sure that my command of Japanese was credible. I do 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, which was great fun.

I’ve had a lot of back and forth with Japan. I was appointed by President Clinton to the US-Japan Friendship Commission, and it was at that time that I happen to be the Chairman of the Board of the Japanese-American National Museum here in Los Angeles. We have exhibits throughout the country. And we learned that people of Japan are rather uninformed on the history of Japanese-Americans. And so, the Japanese-American National Museum decided to travel one of our exhibits to Japan for two years, the first in Okinawa and then Osaka, Hiroshima, and then Niigata in Northern Japan. And my being the chairman at that time, I went to each of those openings and I did my ceremonial speeches in Japanese, and of course, with the commission, too, I had many conferences there in Japan. And that was recognized by the government of Japan. And in 2004, I think it was, I was very much honored. I was granted the high honor, the Order of the Rising Sun with gold rays from Emperor Akihito himself at the Imperial Palace. So, my command of Japanese is fluent.

Heroes has as an online comic and all sorts of additional things to enhance the viewers’ enjoyment and excitement about the show. If Star Trek four decades ago had that kind of marketing tools and technology and what not that exist today, what do you suppose it might have done for the initial life of the show?

GT: Well, I blame the ratings of Star Trek on confused programming people. They didn’t know how to deal with Star Trek because it was so original, so fresh, and they put us on at the worst possible time. So, even if we had the technology that we have today, you know, the Internet and all the other various forms of getting the word out, I don’t know whether we would have enjoyed higher ratings. That’s why I’m, you know, really impressed with the high ratings for Heroes on its first season. I mean, we were on for three seasons working our tails off trying to get the ratings to move up a little bit and it just didn’t work, you know. Once we went into syndication, the programmers put us on at the kind of hours that Star Trek fans were watching.

The last season in 1969, we were on Friday night at 10 pm and, you know, I’d like to think of Star Trek fans as intelligent and hip, and with it the show airing on Friday nights at 10 o’clock, Tthose intelligent, hip people are out of the house. They’re not watching television. They’re out being intelligent and hip. And so, our ratings were very bad.

Can you tell us what direction the relationship between Hiro and Kaito is going in?

GT: Well, you know, everything in life has consequences and one of the most consequential act is creating another human life. Kaito Nakamura is a father and with it comes consequences. And I’m discovering that there’s a whole different kind of consequence with my particular son. And you know what’s intriguing about Heroes is that it examines those consequences of life. You know, there’s Claire whose Godfather responded to his consequences in a different way and therein lies a whole different drama. So tune in and keep tuning in to find out what the consequences of the various consequences of life are on Heroes.

Since your character interacts with a character that likes Star Trek, did you see this as a way to both honor your legacy as Sulu, but also kind of move far from it as well?

GT: Well, you know, it’s some kind of a completion of the circle, isn’t it? Here’s this character who is a Star Trek fan and supposedly that, you know, he saw me younger on the good ship Enterprise and here I am playing his father. So there is a wonderful circle here that could turn into another interesting kind of spiral. You know, Heroes is very much like science fiction or Star Trek in many ways. It’s more fantastical but it’s contemporary. And so, I told Masi, “Well, actually you guys of the 21st century are the progenitors of the characters on Star Trek because they come two centuries after you do that.” So there again is a whole idea of paternity continuing on.

what did you find interesting about Masi Oka (Hiro Nakamure) as a person and as you talk to him and so on?

GT: When I first met him, we started briefly chatting and, you know, was commenting on how interesting it is that we’re going to be working in Japanese and then we talked about languages. I discovered that he speaks Spanish and so do I. I was born in East LA and, you know, that’s Mexican-American body. And I grew up hearing the language all around me and I love the language. So I studied it in junior high school and high school and my minor in college was Latin American Study which included the language, of course. So we started conversing in Spanish and blew the minds of all the people sitting around us, you know. We’re two characters that we’re going to be playing people of Japan and our dialogue is all in Japanese. And here we are off the set, chatting in Spanish.

A large portion of the success of Heroes comes through some of the elements of comedies that the writers are able to incorporate into each script. Now, does you character allow for you to have any of these moments of levity and these hilarious little punch lines, even though your character is a very serious man?

GT: There’s a just a hint of the humor, more in the ironic sense, in Kaito Nakamura that I’ve detected in the script so far. I’d like to see more of that developed. But the keeper of my destiny are the writers. They bill out to me who I am and why I do what I do and what my intents are.

Now, other than Hio and Ando, does your character get a chance to interact with any others in the cast?

GT: Oh, yes, and that’s part of the surprise. You know, 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. And so, when there are football games or baseball games, you know, we don’t like our East Coast friends to phone us and tell us how it turned out. And I think it’s the same with fans of Heroes. 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 last shot in last week’s episode where the guy who ordered the kidnapping of Hido and Ando turns out to be his father. I think some of the surprise element there was lost. So I won’t reveal too much so that the fans can enjoy their anguished tension.

You said you were in imprisoned in America as child during World War II. Can you tell us more about that?

GT:: We’re Americans citizens. My mother was born in Sacramento. My father was a San Franciscan. I was born here in Los Angeles. This is where our home was. We were first taken and I still remember that scary day when American soldiers had a gun and came to our front door and ordered us out. I was four then but almost five. That was in March and I turn five in April. And we were taken from our home to the horse stables of nearby horse race track, the San Jose race track. And we were housed there temporarily while the camps were being built. And once the camps were built, we are put on a train and transported 2/3 of the way across the country to the steamy swamps of Arkansas — southern Arkansas. And 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. But by that time, I was eight years old.

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be abnormal at “normal” times became my normality in camps. You know, normal for me is to line up three times a day and even a noisy missile. It became normal for me to go with my father to base and then come in with a shower, you know. But 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. And the first place that my parents found home for us was on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and that was terrifying to us. I mean, we’ve never seen such ugly and scary looking people, you know, staggering around and falling down right in front of us and barfing and then prowling around and that barf, you know, and the stain of urine and all of that. My little sister said, “Mama, let’s go back home,” meaning behind those barbwire fences again. So for us, the children, the most traumatic part was ironically coming back home.

what got you into science fiction? Was there anything, any incident or particular show that grabbed your attention and drew you into the Sci-Fi thing?

GT: Well, it was employment that drew me into Sci-Fi. You know, 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 onto Star Trek. Even before that though, I did do an episode of, I guess what’s considered a Sci-Fi show, Twilight Zone. It was a wonderful experience working with the Neville Brand. It was a two-character show.

So starting with Twilight Zone and then Star Trek, which became a series of movies as well, and now, this exciting new project, Heroes, which I think is going to have a lot of legs. In Star Trek, we had that saying, “live long and prosper”. That didn’t quite work with Star Trek. But I think with Heroes, it will “live long and prosper” indeed.

Do you believe that there could be time travel over different dimensions one day?

GT: Absolutely. I think so. You know, some of the things that we have done so far was absolutely inconceivable to people at a certain point in history. 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 came in the 190something year there and she said that that trip across the Pacific Ocean took her something like six weeks walking, you know, around on that ship. She said that if anyone told her that you could get in a steel machine and fly over the Pacific, she would have called them crazy. Well, in her lifetime, she did it many times going back and forth between California and Japan and she lived to 105 years old.

Here we are in the year 2007, and what may seem fantastical to us right now, can be conceivable. Anything that’s conceivable I think will eventually happen. I mean, I’m kind of amused by the fact that when Star Trek came on in 1966, that was pure science fiction and the technology was just mind-boggling science fiction. You know, we have the counsel that we communicated with the various other ships across the galaxies. I mean, that’s our computer today. We had another amazing Sci-Fi device that we wore on our heads. Every member, the crew wore this device and we walk around on the set and whenever we wanted to talk to someone, wherever we were, we would take off this amazing device, slip it open and start talking. And today, it’s of their real (nuisance) in our lives, you know. In 40 years of time, astounding technological advances can be made. So, yes because what you said, time travel, it has been conceived, I think it will happen eventually.

It takes the imaginers to set the fantastical goals. And then with the goal set, the inventors and the innovators and the technicians start working toward that goal and it becomes possible. I mean, you know, we’ve landed human beings on the moon. Now, we’ve got robots roaming around the circles of Mars. I mean, at one point, that was pure, absolute, fantastical science fiction. We’ve done it already. It’s passé.

At any point in your life, did you ever follow comic books or are you interested in any of them now, because I know there’s been some Star Trek ones as well?

GT: Yes. When I was a kid, I had a collection of Superman Comics and also the Batman Comics, but when I went off to college up to the University of California at Berkley, you know, I wasn’t home to guard my collection and when I came back home for summer vacation, it wasn’t there. And I said, “Mama, what happened to my comic book collection?” And she said, “Oh, I gave it to the trash man.” It was unfortune that she gave away, and a big chunk of my boyhood, you know. Mothers don’t understand their sons’ passion for comic books.

In Heroes there’s a lot of family relationships between the “heroes” such that it implies that there is a genetic base to their special powers. Do you know of genetic base of Hiro through Kaito?

GT: Well, you know, there’s an interesting thing with the name of my character. My mother’s maiden name was Nakamura before she married my father Takei. And my nephew has a 5-year old son, he just turned five and his Japanese middle name is Kaito. Marcus Kaito Takei and he’s the cutest in the kid. He is the apple of my eye. To answer your question, though, I know as much as what the script shares with me. So, I’m eager to know whether there are some genetic thing that I may have passed on to my son Hiro. You know, as I said earlier, inn life there are consequences and sometimes those consequences are passed on to one’s tragedy. So it’s an intriguing question you asked and I share that puzzle with you.

How many episodes are you on? You are in the tail end of the last week’s one and then you’re in this week’s. Any others?

GT: I have another one coming up in a couple of weeks. I think I’m not in the next episode, but then we discovered that I am more entwined in the intrigue than I initially thought.

Star Trek was one of the pioneering shows in terms of having a multi-racial cast and Heroes, you know, is carrying that tradition further. From your perspective, what is your take on how far we’ve come in that aspect?

GT: Well, you know, I’m absolutely astounded and fascinated and proud in fact 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. I mean, this is popular television. You know, sophisticated people used to go see foreign movies with subtitles. But to play to the mass television audience with the sequences like this I think is a real advance and a complement to the audience, the sophistication, and the global nature of the audience. In fact, you know, I understand that the show has been sold in Britain and in Japan and I’m already getting emails from Japan. Some fans in Japan are already asking me questions about Heroes.