Is Heroes a way of honouring the Star Trek legacy or distancing yourself from it?
“It’s funny — it’s kind of a completion of the circle, isn’t it? Here’s this character, who is a Star Trek fan, who supposedly saw me as younger man on the good ship Enterprise. And here I am, playing his father. There is a wonderful circle here, that creates its own interesting spiral.” What drew you into sci-fi? “It was employment that drew me into sci-fi. You go where the work is.” Heroes has a mixed-race couple with a child, a pair of Japanese-speaking would-be superheroes, a South-Asian hero — how far has television come, in terms of diversity casting? “I’m absolutely astounded and fascinated and proud that here’s this enormously popular, highly-rated, network prime-time TV show that plays entire sequences in Japanese, a foreign language, with English subtitles. I mean, this is popular television. Sophisticated people used to go to art houses to see foreign movies with subtitles. To play to a mass television audience with subtitles, I think, is a real advance, an accomplishment fo
