Star Trek’s George Takei joins new season of The Terror

Last Updated on July 21, 2021

As previously reported, the second season of AMC's anthology series The Terror will be taking place one hundred years after the events of the first season, which was based on a novel by Dan Simmons and told the story of a doomed journey to the Arctic in the 1840s. Season 2 tells an original story crafted by Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein, one that takes place

during World War II and centers on an uncanny specter that menaces a Japanese-American community from its home in Southern California to the internment camps to the war in the Pacific.

Last week, it was announced that Cristina Rodlo was the first cast member to sign on to appear in the new season. Her character is series regular Luz, "a nursing student who must make some tough decisions between her personal and professional life."

Now the names of six more cast members have been announced, all of them playing series regulars. Derek Mio will be playing Chester Nakayama, "a young man trying to understand and fight the malevolent entity responsible for a series of bizarre deaths in his community"; Kiki Sukezane takes on the role of Yuko, a mysterious woman from Chester's past; Miki Ishikawa is Nakayama family friend Amy; Shingo Usami is Chester's father Henry; Naoko Mori will be playing Chester's mother Asako; and George Takei – an actor who has over 200 credits to his name but is best known for playing Lieutenant Sulu in the original Star Trek series (pictured above) – is set to play Yamato-san, a former fishing captain and community elder.

Not only is Takei a cast member in the new season, he'll also be serving as a consultant on the story to help ensure historical accuracy. This is incredibly fitting because the Japanese-American Takei, who was born in Los Angeles in 1937, was forced to live in internment camps with his parents during World War II. The Takeis also had relatives in Japan who were killed when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Production on The Terror season 2 will begin in January, with Josef Kubota Wladyka directing the first two of its ten episodes.

An AMC Studios production, The Terror is produced by Scott Free, Emjag Productions and Entertainment 360, with Woo, Borenstein, and Simmons executive producing alongside Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, Alexandra Milchan, Scott Lambert, and Guymon Casady.