Here's why John Cho insisted that Sulu's husband would also be Asian in 'Star Trek Beyond'

In case you’ve had blinders on the Venn diagrammatic center of “gay stuff,” “nerd stuff,” and “Asian representation stuff” this month, here’s a quick summary: John Cho‘s Star Trek Beyond character is gonna be gay and his onscreen husband will be played by another Asian man.

And according to a pair of recent interviews, the idea of casting an Asian actor—or in this case, Star Trek Beyond screenwriter Doug Jung—as the husband of Cho’s character, Hikaru Sulu, came directly from the onetime Harold & Kumar star himself.

“I had requested that my husband be Asian,” the actor told The A.V. Club.

“Basically it was a little Valentine to the gay Asian friends that I grew up with,” Cho explained in a Vulture interview. “This may be presumptuous, but I always felt the Asian gay men that I knew had much heavier cultural-shame issues… I felt like those guys didn’t date Asian men because of that cultural shame. So I wanted it to seem really normal in the future. I thought that would be the most normal thing, that there was zero shame in the future. I don’t know if that hit or not, but it was something that I felt in my gut and asked for that.”

George Takei, the actor who originated the role of Sulu on NBC’s Star Trek back in the late ’60s, disagrees with the decision to make the captain gay in the reboot series of films. “It’s a twisting of [Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s] creation,” Takei, who is gay himself, told The Hollywood Reporter. “I think it’s really unfortunate.”