George Takei said he subscribes to the famous words of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when it comes to his tumultuous relationship with his former Star Trek shipmate William Shatner: “In every good marriage, it helps to be a little deaf.”
Still, the 83-year-old sci-fi icon and political activist couldn’t help himself upon hearing comments Shatner made recently in response to Takei’s claim that Shatner was envious of the amount of fan adulation their late star Leonard Nimoy received. “George needs a new hobby. Now he’s making things up,” Shatner tweeted in August. “The only person with jealousy is George.”
During a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment promoting two stories he narrates for the genre audio and ebook site Serial Box, Takei laughed loudly as we read him Shatner’s words.
“Well, you can tell by those words that he is upset, to put it mildly,” Takei says. “All that is bile. He’s had that same kind of relationship with everybody.”
Takei points to their co-star James Doohan, who played Commander Scott opposite Shatner’s Captain Kirk, Takei’s Sulu and Nimoy’s Spock in the original television series launched in 1966 and subsequent film spinoffs, and died in 2005.
“Jimmy Doohan used to rail at Star Trek conventions about Bill and the latest offense that he committed on him,” Takei says. “Every one of us had experiences.”
Takei, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump and highly engaged social media presence who recently made headlines for trolling the far-right group Proud Boys, also weighed in on Black Lives Matter, the coronavirus and next month’s presidential election.
“This is a confluence of so many cataclysms. We have Black Lives Matter, racial injustice that we see now because of technology. The public has cameras with them and they record the kind of brutal outrage that is happening against people just because they’re Black. There used to be this saying, ‘Driving while Black.’ Well these people are living while Black and they’re killed for it by law enforcement officers. [It’s] outrageous.
“And this pandemic. It’s been a six-, seven-month period, 200,000 people have died and it’s because of our so-called ‘mad leader’ and our Republican senators turning into zombies. They have no mind of their own. When we had the impeachment, it was as if they had taken their minds out, and given it over to the mad dictator. That’s the climate we’re living in now. It’s a test of us.”
