Variety reports that George Takei has highlighted the horrors of internment camps for Japanese Americans in AMC series The Terror: Infamy.
The first season of The Terror focused on Captain Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to the Arctic in 1845–1848.
Now in its second season, The Terror: Infamy is set during World War II in an internment camp for Japanese Americans.
Takei plays 80-year-old fisherman Yamato-san who is among the Japanese American immigrants who are haunted by bizarre deaths.
The Star Trek actor is well-known for having lived through Japanese internment. At age 5, Takei and his family were forced from their home in California and sent to live in internment camps during the war because of their ethnicity.
“It turns out that [showrunner and co-creator] Alexander Woo is a neighbor of mine,” Takei says. “He lives about five blocks away from me and said he wanted to come over and talk to me about something. So he came over and told me about this project that he’s working on.”
As Takei had personally experienced the horrors of Japanese internment, the 82-year-old was asked to consult on the show.
“Alex said, ‘We’d like to have you as a consultant on this.’ I said that I would be more than happy to participate, and then he says, ‘You’re also an actor, aren’t you?’” Takei said. “He started sending me script after script, and the horror story part is so gripping.”
Takei went on to compare the Japanese internment with Trump’s administration policies of separating immigrant children from their parents.
“The current situation is a new low,” he said. “I was a child of 5 when I went in and 8½ when I came out. We were always with our parents. Now, children are being scattered to the far hinterlands. That is deliberate, conscious evil. It’s really unbelievable what’s happening now. I don’t know what kind of person I would be if I had been separated from my parents.”
The Terror: Infamy premieres 12 August.
