George Takei Said His Star Trek Co-Star Lied About A Painful On-Set Injury

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In the "Star Trek" episode "The Naked Time," the USS Enterprise accidentally contracts a deadly virus from an abandoned research station on the planet Psi 2000. The virus has the same effect on its hosts as a huge amount of booze, causing everyone to slur their speech, lose the ability to concentrate, and begin behaving in a slovenly, kooky fashion. Some of the Enterprise crew members are happy drunks, while others get aggressive. 

Most strikingly in the episode, Sulu (George Takei) contracts the virus and begins living out his "Three Musketeers" fantasies, running around the corridors shirtless and threatening his crewmates with a fencing foil. In one scene, he breaks onto the bridge, takes Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) as his damsel in distress, and threatens Captain Kirk (William Shatner) with his sword, play-acting as if the captain were a foe. It's one of the more famous scenes to come from the original "Star Trek." 

According to William Shatner's autobiography, "Star Trek Memories," Takei lunged at Shatner in the scene in question, snagging him with a sharpened rapier point right in the nipple. Shatner claimed that Takei accidentally broke the skin. That sounds painful, of course, but it's likely not true. Takei wrote a conflicting autobiography, "To the Stars," in which he described the fencing scene in "The Naked Time" and explained that the tip of his foil, like all fencing foils, was blunted. This is something he had been saying for years, including in a 1996 article with Cinefantastique Magazine. He did not pierce William Shatner's nipple.

Now, it should be noted that Takei wasn't wholly ... un-playful with his sword. Yet another biography notes that Takei might actually have thwacked a few people. "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and co-author Stephen E. Whitfield once wrote a book called "The Making of Star Trek," and they recall that Takei had never handled a rapier before "The Naked Time," and spent a lot of time off-camera practicing his stage-fencing skills. During these drills, he would sometimes lunge at passing crew members, snagging them with his rapier. It seems that Takei was such a whimsical nuisance that the crew petitioned Roddenberry to never give Takei another fencing scene again.

But he never stabbed Shatner, calling Bill's claims "preposterous" in the Cinefantastique article. He continued:

"Why would they allow something that could hurt a person on the set? [...] It's like Majel said, the amazing thing about Bill's book is that it's under the category nonfiction."

Majel, of course, being Majel Barrett, who played Number One in the original "Star Trek" pilot, and Nurse Chapel on the eventual "Star Trek" series. She also would go on to marry Roddenberry and play both Lwaxana Troi and the computer voice on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Takei and Shatner have long had something of a sticky relationship, and most of Shatner's co-stars hated him. As recently as 2023, Takei referred to Shatner as "a cantankerous old fossil," saying "Bill is an egocentric, self-involved prima donna." It might have been casual lies like being stabbed in the nipple that attracted Takei's ire in such a fashion. Of the original "Star Trek" cast, only Takei, Shatner, and Walter Koenig survive, at the ages of 89, 95, and 89, respectively.

In the Cinefantastique article, George Takei also shared a few other details about the "Naked Time" fencing scene beyond the nipple piercing. It seems that the episode's writer, John D.F. Black, asked Takei whether he wanted to perform the sword-fighting scenes with a fencing foil or a samurai sword. Takei, a Los Angeles native of Japanese ancestry, didn't like the racial profile that came with using a samurai sword and asked for a foil instead. He said: 

"We talked about both and I strong lobbied for the fencing, as opposed to the samurai sword. [...] Those are the things I said that we are trying to get away from, the reinforcing of stereotypes. It's obvious with my face, the samurai sword. But in fact, that's not true. I grew with with [...] Errol Flynn. I'm certainly proud of my Japanese-American heritage, but at the same time, I'm the other part of that description, Japanese-American; I'm American. [...] The smaurai sword would be the expected. So motivated by that discussion, [Black] went off and developed that aspect of the script."

And, naturally, Takei had a great time using the fencing foil, thwacking aside. He also lied, saying that he had fencing training. The fencing scene in "The Naked Time" became so famous that Sulu's interest in fencing came up again in the 2009 "Star Trek" feature film reboot. In that film, John Cho played Sulu and openly stated that he was a fencing enthusiast, even engaging in a swordfight with a wicked alien in a precarious locale.

Takei's most recent role was playing Koh the Face-Stealer in "Avatar: The Last Airbender."