Tamlyn Tomita

“Barbara Feldon on 'Get Smart,' I wanted to be her.”

“I knew I looked kind of ridiculous, in my personal opinion - Tamlyn Tomita's opinion - a Vulcan in sunglasses and ears is a little too much, but I knew I just had to play it seriously.”

“The wonderful John Avildsen was a hero and father figure who was really present in my life even though we didn't have day-to-day or year-to-year.”

“The scope of the history of women is so underplayed and not told as often as it should be.”

“Aren't we all 'Star Trek' fans? That's the show that captured our imaginations after cartoons and everything!”

“For me, for every single job, I don't care if it is a reading, I don't care if it is a guest spot on a TV show, or a film. I always get the heebie jeebies.”

“It's always the great thing about being involved in such a legacy series such as 'Star Trek' is you'll always want to know more about the characters that you love.”

“So if they happen to be over the age of 35 and they're male? They're probably going to recognize me from 'The Karate Kid Part II.'”

“We can serve as bridges, we who identify as hyphenated Americans, because we are all global citizens, and that's why being cognizant of our histories is important.”

“We are a part of this unique, complex, and complicated fabric of what it means to be an American. Americans come in all colors, creeds, and colors of the rainbow, and we can celebrate this together.”

“Of course, if you're going to enter the 'Star Trek' Universe, you want to work with Spock, you want to work with Kirk, you want to work with McCoy, and Scotty, and Sulu, and Uhura. The next one for me would have been Picard.”

“I remember reading one of those big history texts in elementary school, and in that whole book there was one paragraph that mentioned that Japanese-Americans were interned. I went home and asked my father, 'You weren't, were you?' He said, 'Yes, I was.' I was shocked.”

“It's funny you can pretty much substitute the same actors in that top tier, whether it's a Chris Evans or a Chris Pratt or a Chris Pine, for different movies and it becomes almost a joke. But it doesn't happen that way for people of color.”

“In period pieces or genre pieces, those have to be set in historical truths. But, science fiction has different game pieces. And with those game pieces come other stories we're not familiar with. So, science fiction teaches us how to relate to outsiders, to foreigners, and to not approach any of that with fear, but a genuine curiosity.”

“I'm interested in Native American and African American stories, and LGBTQ stories and stories of persons of mixed heritage. These are the stories I want to see onscreen and on the pages.”

“But I'm proud to come from a family of Republicans and, yes, we have some spirited discussions in our family.”

“I don't think as a society, as a nation we would ever wear swastikas openly again, but aligning ourselves with the kind of rhetoric or the the the kind of language that's being used and ascribed to certain groups of people or certain religions can be repeated.”

“I'm looking for projects where race is not an issue.”

“I think you can assume because our pool of Asian-Americans actresses or actors - men and women - is pretty small, that whatever project is out there I probably have been asked to audition or I probably chose to not go in it for various aspects.”

“Growing up with my mother who grew up during World War II being half Filipina, half Okinawan, and literally running around the jungles in the Philippines escaping Japanese military chasing after them - I grew up with what they deem now as trauma, generational trauma.”