Many people adore Collins and Takei, but do not understand them. They look at the (always popular) causes they support, but they refuse to see what they are really doing and why.
Let's get one thing straight about George Takei. He's not a good actor. He's not even a good actor in the sense that DiCaprio or Reeves were - they could do ennui, the emotional lacuna, staring at the camera with jaw slack and a vacant look on their face.
Absolutely no one would pay to look at Takei, because Takei is a flatly bad actor. So Takei's entire career has been being a minor supporting character on classic Trek, half a century ago, and since then, doing the occasional Troy McClure-style has-been Hollywood bits.
Takei's incompetence at acting is perhaps most noticeable in his appearance in Command & Conquer 3, as the Emperor of the Rising Sun. The antagonists of previous C&C games - Anton Slavik (Frank Zagarino) and Alex Romanov (Nicholas Worth) - were played by actors who had great emotional depth and variety.
As Slavik, Zagarino could appear by turns fierce and determined, surprised and hopeful, fearful and depressed, obsequious and subservient. His actions, from shooting people to delivering speeches to simple dialogue with the other characters, were dealt with just the appropriate inflection and facial movement that imparted pathos and suspense into his every move, made him amazing to just watch. This is the same gift for subtlety that makes Reeves, who is otherwise an unremarkable actor, fun to watch.
Romanov, unlike Slavik, was a comic villain. Yet Worth, again, demonstrated great emotional diversity and spontaneity that made him fun to watch. A good actor is never boring to watch - his every gesture brims with pathos, with suspense, keeps the viewer on seat's edge.
Takei has none of that charm. Takei is a one-trick pony. Takei does the super-stoic overaffected Asian dude thing, which itself is a superficial and tasteless appeal to racist caricatures, and he does it badly. Everything Takei says and does, he does with the same inflection, same word pacing, same over-affected facial immobility that makes him dreadful to watch. When a viewer watches Takei, the first thing he can think is "get the hell off the screen" - and even in his best moments, e.g., Star Trek VI, that is the role he is cast in, a bunch of eight-second intermissions (mostly telling people to go away). This is also why the "You Are A Total Asshole" clip of Takei has its appeal; Takei is good at nothing so much as driving viewers away.
As the Rising Sun Emperor, Takei could only affect facial immobility, pseudopathos, grating false bravado and a very bad impression of a Japanese accent that betrayed only Takei's total reliance on White racism and not any insight he possessed into the Japanese culture for his presentation as a Japanese. Perhaps most importantly, he lacked what the Japanese call "tsundere" - the shadow of the "stoic Asian" archetype, the ability of a stoic and unapproachable character to reveal depth of character. Even in scenes that seemed to call for it, Takei proved incapable of breaking his monotone, making the slight grimaces and eyeblinks that are the magic of a skilled actor.
There is Star Trek: Shattered Universe, an obscure PS2 game featuring Sulu as the main character. The game's cutscenes are poorly scripted but even more dreadfully narrated. The cutscenes seem to drag; through the ups and downs of the plot, Takei never breaks his monotone. Compare the quality of the cutscenes and narration to, say, Starfleet Command I: even the tutorials are interesting because the narrators have good inflection. Even the Romulan tutorial, narrated in the stereotypical super-stoic Romanesque style, entertains the listener.
The latter comparison, though, touches on what is Takei's real weakness. A Hollywood-grade thespian must have not only excellent acting skills, but also a willingness to work with the director and stage manager, to critique plots and casting, and to alter the script to fit his skills. This is a skill that both Shatner and Stewart had in abundance - almost all episodes of OS/TNG deviate substantially from the final script, because the actors would say, "I don't like this, it's awkward", or "I have a better idea". This is perhaps best demonstrated in the dialogue between Picard and Sarek in "Unification", a powerful scene that is substantially different on screen than in the script.
And this is also why Takei has what Shatner (who is, admittedly, both an uxoricide and a self-centered douchebag) described as a "psychosis" regarding his person. Takei is psychotically jealous of not only Shatner's skills and prestige, but also his assertiveness on the stage that is necessary to turn otherwise unremarkable productions into memorable entertainment. Original Trek was tedious and poorly written, and whatever else may be said of it, Shatner was the only reason anyone could stand to watch it.
For half a century, Takei held a pathological grudge against Shatner - snubbing him at reunions, making public statements about perceived slights, complaining that the talents and personhood of the star of the show were a particular affront to one of several dozen supporting actors, that is to say, George Takei.
All of which brought Takei to the GLBT movement. Takei says he's gay, he's been in a relationship for 18 years. Maybe. By that estimate, however, Takei began the relationship in 1995, when he was already 58 years old and the GLBT movement was well "over the hump", the movement had broad support and being gay was not only accepted but even seen as trendy.
Trek's flirtation with the GLBT movement began before Roddenberry died, with the rather unremarkable TNG episode "The Outcast", an allegory about homosexuals' desire for freedom of lifestyle. Through TNG, at least half a dozen TOS stars were given guest appearances at their request, but Takei made no such request to appear in "Outcast", demanding to be the main character for a movie or series of his own -hence "Shattered Universe".
Gay or otherwise, gay advocacy was never Takei's interest - only self-promotion.
The gay rights' movement achieved its legitimate aims in the 90s, but the radical GLBT crowd, which wasn't, hasn't ever been, interested in real equality, began to exert its influence on the franchise via crypto-feminists like Jeri Taylor, who began to ascend in the franchise after she wrote an episode, "Suddenly Human", about the divorce industry. The episode was written before Roddenberry died, and its script is a contrived, bizarre mix of pro-family values and stereotyped misandry. Tellingly, the episode itself is not even considered one of the worst, but most forgotten.
It was Taylor who contrived the character of Ro Laren (Michelle Forbes), whom Taylor conceived as a misandrist lesbian butch, but was softened into a troubled young woman seeking to find her place in the world, and actually turned out to be one of the most well-balanced and compelling characters in the series. Ro was to be a main character in DS9, and with Roddenberry dead and the power struggle at Paramount over, Taylor intended to remake the character closer to her initial notions, but Forbes refused to play the character as Taylor intended it and left the franchise.
So Kira Nerys' (Nana Visitor) character was conceived. Kira was the character Taylor wanted - a misandrist butch whose stock MO was waving a pistol around, shooting at walls, ranting and raving at nonplussed white males, and holding her hands akimbo while doing her best to puff out her torso and shoulders (to which padding was added in some early episodes) in a classic "womyn" pose (best example: DS9, "Shelter"). In classic feminist/GLBT style, Kira was consistently associated with motherhood, while never actually being a mother herself; a histrionic, confused woman who only appeared sexy for the purpose of deceit and never out of actual desire, a schizoid icebox the rest of the time. And of course every woman in her field of vision was a natural victim.
Kira the Butch was such a repulsive character it nearly killed DS9 before the first season was out; so once more pressure came in on Taylor to moderate her misandry. So Kira the Butch became Kira the Tuff Girl - a swooning heterosexual porcupine who beguiled stoic characters to confusion, and her life and career came to mirror Jeri Taylor's own self-image: delusions of violent oppression by arrogant males, finally bested and only by gaining the mantle of some naive higher authority not interested in her personal demons. Taylor went on to miswrite Voyager, which needs no mention here.
Through all this, Takei continued to occupy himself with his own non-career. Never interested in going to any trouble for anyone or anything but himself, the talentless, grasping, disgrunted has-been finally managed to ingratiate himself with a cast of similarly inept and disreputable and seek the attention he craved with the demagogical and piratically minded GLBT movement.
And Misha? Well. I'll get to him later. =)
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