George Takei, the Sulu who turned Star Trek fame into a witness stand

George Takei

Photo: John Manard / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 20, 1937 Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Mulan, Kubo and the Two Strings, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Awards	Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette · GLAAD Vito Russo · American Book · Inkpot · Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

For a long stretch of American pop culture, George Takei was two syllables stretched to breaking point: “Oh myyy.” The phrase sold sofas in television commercials, anchored a Facebook page followed by millions of people who had never watched Star Trek. The joke has always carried a harder cargo. Takei has spent the affection owed to Hikaru Sulu, the unflappable helmsman of the Enterprise, on two stories his country was in no hurry to hear from him: what was done to Japanese American families during the war, and what it cost a working Hollywood actor to stay in the closet.

The first story starts at a racetrack. After Pearl Harbor and the presidential order that followed it, the Takei family was removed from Los Angeles to Santa Anita Park, where they slept in converted horse stables, and then sent to Rohwer, a camp in the Arkansas swamps ringed with barbed wire. They finished the war at Tule Lake in California and came home with nothing to return to. For five years they lived on Skid Row. An aunt and an infant cousin who had stayed in Hiroshima were killed by the atomic bomb.

He had been born Hosato Takei in Los Angeles on April 20, 1937, to a mother from Sacramento and a father from Yamanashi Prefecture, who named the boy George after King George VI, crowned a few weeks later. Takei went to Berkeley to study architecture, switched to theater at UCLA, where he took a bachelor’s degree in 1960 and a master’s in 1964.

Hollywood met him first as a voice, dubbing Japanese monster pictures such as Rodan into English, and then as a face fitted into the narrow range of parts open to Asian American actors. In “The Encounter”, a 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone, he played a Japanese American gardener facing a veteran’s hatred; CBS judged the episode too disturbing for syndication, and it was not seen again until a video release in 1992.

Gene Roddenberry cast him as Sulu in the second pilot of Star Trek in 1965, and when NBC picked up the series the character moved from the physics lab to the helm. A war film nearly cost him the seat. Shooting The Green Berets with John Wayne kept Takei away for half of the second season, and Walter Koenig’s Chekov filled the empty chair; when Takei came back, the two men were made to share a dressing room and a single script. He admitted feeling threatened; the rivalry became a lasting friendship. Sulu returned in the animated series and in six feature films, and the last of them, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991, finally gave him the captain’s chair of his own starship.

Between missions he tested how far that fame could travel in civic life. In 1973 he ran for the Los Angeles City Council and finished second, 1,647 votes short, during a campaign in which local stations pulled Star Trek reruns to stay clear of equal-time rules. Mayor Tom Bradley then appointed him to the board of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, where he sat until 1984; he was once called away from the set of the first Star Trek feature to cast the tie-breaking vote that set the Los Angeles subway in motion. He published an autobiography, To the Stars, and gave his voice to the First Ancestor in Disney’s Mulan.

The second story took far longer to tell. His sexuality had been an open secret among fans since the 1970s, but he did not say it in print until October 2005, at 68, when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of a same-sex marriage bill pushed him to tell Frontiers magazine about Brad Altman, his partner of 18 years. He described it as less like stepping through a door than “a long, long walk through what began as a narrow corridor that starts to widen.” The late disclosure opened a second career. He joined Heroes as Kaito Nakamura, a businessman whose limousine carried the license plate NCC-1701, and he built a social media audience that came for the jokes and stayed for his family history.

Not every part of that second act has aged well. Allegiance, the musical built on his family’s internment and the project he called his legacy, opened on Broadway in November 2015 to reviews that respected its purpose more than its craft: The New York Times found it unable to balance history and entertainment, and Variety said it had reduced complex material to generic themes. His online persona misfired as well, notably with a meme about wheelchair users that he deleted and apologized for. In 2017 a former model, Scott Brunton, alleged that Takei had drugged and groped him in 1981. Takei denied it and several digital outlets cut ties with him; in 2018 the New York Observer reported that Brunton had changed his story, and Takei said publicly that he wished him peace. The cheerful public figure and the man have never been quite the same thing, and Takei has rarely pretended otherwise.

The internment story found its widest audience on the page. They Called Us Enemy, the graphic memoir drawn by Harmony Becker and co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, came out from Top Shelf in 2019 and won an American Book Award. A children’s book, My Lost Freedom, followed in 2024, and in June 2025 the same team published It Rhymes With Takei, a second graphic memoir about the decades in the closet.

At 89 he still works the convention circuit and in July 2026 he joined the 60th anniversary panel for Star Trek at San Diego Comic-Con to honor Nichelle Nichols, who had been the self-styled “best woman” at his wedding. He is one of three surviving stars of the original series interviewed in Mark A. Altman’s documentary The Sixty Year Mission, which opened in Regal cinemas on October 9, and the film hands him an unbroken stretch to describe the camps on camera. In September he and Brad marked 18 years of marriage and 40 years together; they wed in 2008 at the Japanese American National Museum, which Takei helped found, with Walter Koenig as best man.

Rhode Island Comic Con is next on the calendar, in November. What he brings to those stages has barely changed in decades: the horse stables at Santa Anita and the corridor that took him until 68 to walk. The audience is what has changed, large enough now that the actor first hired to read out headings from the helm gets the closing word on two of the hardest chapters in his country’s history.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, Star Trek, George Takei, Heroes, Walter Koenig, Gene Roddenberry

Related People

Jo Koy

Rentaro Mikuni

Koji Yakusho

Sam Richardson

Kenji Mizoguchi

Anne Rice