Oh Myyy! (12 page)

I did take the time, as I usually do, to read through a great deal of the comments below my posts. To my dismay, most of the 4000+ comments expressed on the first video expressed disappointment; indeed many were highly critical. Hundreds questioned how I could speak so passionately in the video about how my family was incarcerated in camps during World War II simply because we were of Japanese descent, yet support a President who had signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — a provision in which grants him the very power of indefinite detention without trial that I had just condemned. For the record, I had blogged about my opposition to the NDAA earlier and was dismayed that the President had signed it. It had been passed by veto-proof majority of 93 out of 100 senators, which may explain but doesn’t excuse his signature.

So this wasn’t just a case of shaking the tree and having a lot of nuts fall down. Thousands of my fans on the opposite end of the political spectrum were genuinely upset and were citing valid concerns. While I was happy that my “push” on my Facebook page ultimately lifted the number of YouTube views on the first video to over 175,000, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d pulled a Sinead O’Connor on some lesser scale (you might recall, on
Saturday Night Live
Ms. O’Connor had ended a performance by ripping a picture of the Pope in half — a highly controversial statement that cost her significant goodwill with many fans, some of who began booing her at concerts).

But another part of me was upset that I had somehow managed to turn myself into some kind of Internet personality who wasn’t allowed to have real world opinions anymore. Every engaged adult citizen has the right to vote in this country, and all of us are supposed to be guaranteed freedom of speech. How could the Internet manage to censor, through public opprobrium, what the government itself had no power to silence? Was I to curtail my own outspoken nature in order to keep a portion of my fans on board?

It struck me that, in the minds of many fans, I am an actor and an entertainer, and it is therefore presumptuous of me to use whatever popularity I have to push a social or political agenda. This is why Richard Gere’s decision to talk about Tibet on the Oscars raised a collective sigh of exasperation. Actors aren’t any smarter than anyone else, so the thinking goes, they’re just more popular. But their fans made them popular so they could make movies and TV shows, not so they could lecture the world.

So let me be clear. I am an actor, yes, but I am also an activist. Indeed, the “golden” years of my life have been marked more by the latter than the former. As I write this book, I am starring in a musical called
Allegiance
which I consider my legacy project.
Allegiance
is set during World War II and the Japanese American internment, and it’s the first time such a story will be told on the Broadway stage. I want this story told because I want it remembered.

The internment, you see, was not just a Japanese American story; it was an American one. It was the U.S. Constitution that was violated by the detention of over 120,000 persons of Japanese decent, without charge or trial, and it was our nation’s promise of due process that was eviscerated. One of the reasons I believe
Allegiance
will succeed, where other internment stories have failed, is that it entertains as well as educates. It lifts the spirit, its music soars, and our hearts break together, actors and audience, as we participate in the story eight times a week.

I truly hope my social media work has the same ultimate effect. Sure, it’s primarily entertaining, but it’s also educational. I want people to not only laugh, but to think, to not only be inspired, but to participate. Fans may not always agree with me, but they will know I have an opinion, as will they, I’m sure. My Facebook page will remain a place where those opinions are hashed out freely and openly on the Internet.

About a week later, I released my second Obama endorsement video, joining with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Lynch, Wanda Sykes, Billie Jean King, Chaz Bono and Zachary Quinto in praising the administration for its strides forward on the question of LGBT equality. I told the story of how moved I was to hear the President say that he believed gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. And I expressed my firm belief that we have to keep fighting for our rights, which means not supporting the party that would take us backwards — in this case, the Republican ticket.

It came as no surprise that this second endorsement video raised another hoopla, though smaller than the first. It seems my fan base is less surprised that I would endorse Obama on account of his stance on gay rights than on account of his support for the Asian American community. Or perhaps the fans have just gotten more used to me speaking my mind on a political matter. I began to feel a bit of what the candidates themselves must feel each time they take a position that threatens to alienate their base. Ultimately, you must take a position, and accept the consequences of that decision, even if it means losing some support. If people truly support you, they’ll come back around, and even hold their nose and vote for you (or in my case, reluctantly start clicking like and sharing my funnies again).

It may seem I’ve gone full circle, arguing that to build a fan base it has to be about them, but to reach them with any kind of message, you have to be willing to sometimes make it about you. I suppose in the end it’s all about the balance and the timing. Fans will forgive the occasional self-promotion (after all, it’s what’s selling this book) and even forgive the politics in a political season. As far as I can tell, few of my fans “unfollowed” me for the sin of expressing my opinion, and if they did, well, I hope they miss the laughs and come back. I’ll keep the light on for them.

Spider-man, Spider-man, George Takei should be Spider-man

I’ve come to understand, in a small way, the demands that humanity puts on its superheroes. Allow me to explain.

The producers of
Allegiance
approached me with the idea that we should do a video series called, “The Road to Broadway,” with me auditioning for various shows currently playing. I thought it sounded like a splendid idea. We were years away from our own Broadway debut, but I understood that to get there, we needed to build buzz early for the show. So I was all for it.

Then they told me that the first show I would make a video about was
Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark
. Now, if you haven’t been paying attention,
Spider-man
on Broadway is a multi-million dollar extravaganza that was plagued from the outset with numerous technical difficulties and injuries, some very serious. So I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull off my own Peter Parker. “Don’t worry,” they assured. “We’ll do everything on green screen, and we’ll have professional stunt people there to help.”

When I got to the sound studio, I learned that I would be spending much of my day in a body harness, dangling several feet off the ground. Now, this may not sound like that big of an ordeal, but try doing that after over seventy years spent with your feet mostly on the ground. I had done some of my own stunts for my appearances on NBC’s
Heroes
, including one where I had to lie on my stomach — on a body-form pedestal — nearly horizontally in mid-air with my arms and legs suspended by thin wires for quite some time, and I knew how exhausting it could be.

My Spidey costume was something our production assistant had purchased online as a one-size-fits-all, so to make it look like I wasn’t wearing a pillowcase, it had to be stretched taut around my arms and legs and safety-pinned in the back. Brad, who is used to dealing with such last-minute fixes, set out immediately to find some pins, while I practiced singing the theme song: “Spider-man, Spider-man, George Takei should be Spider-man!” I wanted to prove I really had the chops for a Broadway audition.

The truly hilarious moment came when they finally got the harness on me. It accentuated, shall we say, certain parts of my body that no one had expected. You see, the straps came under each leg right around the crotch and tended to push everything else forward.

When they lifted me up, there was an embarrassed silence for about five seconds before the entire team burst out laughing. It was decidedly absurd. But the producers loved it, so rather than adjust the harness (or get me some kind of dance belt), we decided instead to run with it, adding a line to have me say, “As you can see, I’ve got the whole package!”

There was another unexpectedly hilarious aspect of this. Once I was airborne, there was no way to predict which direction I would be facing. So I literally had to “swim” my way around to face forward. The mechanics of that were so awkward that, again, the producers decided to use it to underscore the absurdity of the shot.

The video (which you can see at
allegiancemusical.com/Road-Broadway
) has me fending off some super-villains, all of whom were played by the same volunteer (thank you, David Rae from Los Angeles). Because we were improvising the way the hoist was positioning me, the fight choreography was also something we had to invent on the spot, and given our budget, had to shoot again and again from different angles. Here are some of my favorite screen shots: