Greeting me over Zoom with a big grin and Star Trek’s famous Vulcan salute, George Takei could hardly be a more genial interviewee.
Yet the chipper demeanour of the veteran star – who played Lieutenant Sulu in the original cast of the iconic sci-fi show – belies some of the incredible life challenges he has faced, stretching back to his early childhood. That, in fact, is the prime topic of conversation today, as the inspiration for a musical, now opening in London, in which he stars.
Allegiance explores the shocking experience of the approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in concentration camps in the US during World War Two, among their number George and his family, who had been living in California and were incarcerated in Arkansas.
‘My father said we were going on a long vacation in the country,’ George recalls, ‘and my brother Henry and I were really excited because we’d never ridden in a train.’
Indeed, despite the bleakness of their situation, his memories of the time are of incongruously ordinary childhood moments, like adopting a dog that was sniffing around the camp kitchen and fishing tadpoles from the swamp that came under the barbed wire fence.
It was only after his family were released and had to rebuild their lives again in Los Angeles that a teenage George began to reckon with what they had endured.
‘I became intensely curious and thought: how could the government that’s supposed to be a democracy treat innocent people that way?’ It was this formative understanding of injustice that has driven George to get involved in social activism throughout his life, from the 1960s civil rights movement and Vietnam war protests onwards.
The show came about after George met its co-writers Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione while watching a Broadway show and got talking to them about his experiences. George plays the grandfather of the fictional interned family the story focuses on.
Such a dark chapter of history may seem like surprising material for a musical but, as George explains, it is a fitting medium for the story, given that music was one of the ways in which people found some small joy amidst the suffering.
‘My father was a block manager, and he arranged with the camp authorities to borrow a record player and we had dances for the teenagers. I was too young to be going to them, but I remember hearing the big band sound of Tommy Dorsey or Duke Ellington wafting over in the night air as I dropped off to sleep,’ the actor recalls.
George has had an extraordinary life in more ways than one: starting out in showbiz, he became a star at a time when there were very limited opportunities for Asian-American actors. In fact, he had originally studied architecture but, while at university, he got a summer job as a voice actor helping to dub a Japanese monster movie into English – and that led to him deciding to switch to drama instead.
Some small film and TV roles followed, before he was cast in Star Trek in his late twenties. From the off, he recognised it as an extraordinary opportunity, not just for the fact it gave him that rare thing for an actor – a regular pay cheque – but because of how progressive the show was.
‘The captain of the ship was North American, the engineer was European, the communications officer was an African woman, and the helmsman was an Asian man, all working together as a team,’ as George says. ‘That was [creator] Gene Roddenberry’s philosophy: our strength is in our diversity.’
Some 57 years on, it’s a series whose fiercely devoted fanbase precedes it – and that Trekkie culture is something George only has appreciation for, he says.
‘Some of my colleagues talk about getting tired [of being linked to the show] or the fact that Star Trek’s popularity has limited their employment potential [but] I’m proud of my association. I feel as someone so blessed, I have a responsibility to do Star Trek conventions and thank the fans in person.
‘And now it’s their children and grandchildren and in some cases great-grandchildren that are coming to them,’ he says, delightedly.
Another adversity that George has faced in his career was, as a gay man, having to hide his sexuality for many decades. ‘The thing that made that so anguishing was that I was protecting my [livelihood] when all these guys and gals were out there campaigning for equality for LGBTQ+ people,’ he reflects.
In 2005, however, he decided to come out publicly, in anger at the then-California governor Arnold Schwarznegger’s vetoing of a marriage equality bill, and since then he has been extremely vocal on LGBTQ+ rights. ‘Once I came out, I came out roaring,’ as he puts it. As for how Hollywood treats gay people now? ‘The advances have been made in inches but now we have made great strides,’ he says, hopefully.
‘And I look forward to taking even greater strides in the future.’
If George has achieved plenty enough for multiple lifetimes, then at 85, there’s no stopping him: Allegiance aside, he’s got two books in the works, a children’s picture book and a second autobiography. As for any regrets? Not one, he says.
‘It’s been a fantastic career, and it’s still rolling along, with substance as well as fun. What a blessing it is to be able to do what you enjoy doing, and have audiences clapping at the curtain call, and taking those bows. It’s a joyful thing. Why should I have regrets about that?’
Allegiance is at London’s Charing Cross Theatre until April 8.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/27/george-takei-recalls-revisiting-his-past-in-new-musical-allegiance-18173597/
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