Post your questions for George Takei | film

There’s much more to George Takei than his role as Sulu, captain of the USS Enterprise. Hosato Takei was born in Los Angeles to Japanese-American parents, and his father renamed him George after the coronation of King George VI. He and his family were forced to live in several Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, after which Takei went on to study architecture and theatre, including time at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Takei’s early acting career included providing English dub voices for Japanese monster films of the 1950s, including Rodan and Godzilla Raids Again. He had some small roles on the big screen, mostly in war films (including Never So Few and Hell to Eternity), but was most successful on television, where he was cast in a number of popular shows including Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone, My Three Sons and Mission: Impossible. In the same year he played M:I – 1966 – Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry cast him in the role of physicist Hikaru Sulu in the second pilot episode, leading him to play Lieutenant (later Captain) Sulu in all three seasons of the original Star Trek series in the 1960s and in the first six Star Trek films between 1979 and 1991.

Since then, it’s almost been a case of “Where hasn’t he shown up?” On television, he has 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 a deadly blowfish). He came third on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, where he gamely ate a kangaroo penis during a bush trial, but was fired early from America’s Celebrity Apprentice by Donald Trump after falling down as a project manager on an assignment to promote Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.

On stage, Takei starred with Martin Sheen and Jamie Lee Curtis in the play 8 about the Proposition 8 trial of same-sex marriage, and in the musical Loyalty, which ran on Broadway and in the West End, inspired by his own experiences in the camps. He has 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 an American radio show – that he starred in a 2017 Pizza Hut Super Bowl ad parodying 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, this should be more than enough when Taki attends the next interview with the reader. We return to his niche subject, Star Trek, as seen in Beam Me Up, Sulu, a documentary about a long-lost 1985 Star Trek fan film that, in the producers’ words, “becomes a gateway to 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 answer your questions by 6pm on Thursday, February 12, via subspace radio, flip phone, call Lt. Uhura, or better yet post comments below, and we will print his answers in film and music.