...Elsewhere in the land of comic-book protagonists, Malcolm McDowell has joined the cast of the NBC hit drama Heroes. In a recurring role, McDowell will play an ally of Nathan Petrelli (Adrian Pasdar). Petrelli is a politician who harbors a secret.

Hayden Panettiere, all of 17, has been in show business almost since conception.

"Eight months old I started in this nuts business," she says, referring to her first screen appearance in a Playskool commercial.

Fellow Heroes star Masi Oka, a comparatively grizzled 32, also knew the spotlight at an early age. As a 12-year-old, he appeared on a 1987 Time magazine cover titled "Those Asian-American Whiz Kids."

Still, both were more anonymous than not until NBC's Heroes became a breakout hit this season. Panettiere's seemingly indestructible Claire Bennet ("Save the cheerleader, save the world") and Oka's time-shifting Hiro Nakamura since have catapulted both actors to full frontal fame.

Oka already will be doing a sendup of his Heroes character on Monday's (Jan. 29) episode of NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. On the same night he'll be sharing scenes on a new Heroes episode with Star Trek's George Takei, who is playing Hiro's father

"I kind of wish it was gradual, so I had a chance to like acclimate myself," Oka says at a recent NBC party. "I've come from a zero to all of a sudden a hero in many ways."



Until Heroes, Panettiere's most visible TV role was leukemia victim Lizzie Spaulding on The Guiding Light. Much earlier, as a four-and-a-half-year-old, she played Sarah Victoria "Flash" Roberts on another daytime soaper, One Life to Live.

A small role in 2000's Remember the Titans brought her a bit of recognition, but Heroes is "the deciding factor that really got me over that hump, which often you catch yourself on."

She says this while surrounded two dozen or so TV critics after a crowded interview session packed with 10 Heroes stars and producer/creator Tim Kring.

"It's a new sort of thing," Panettiere says of the fame Heroes has wrought. "You know things are happening when you walk out of your apartment and there are two cars full of paparazzi who had followed me home. It was sort of a scary feeling... I didn't know whether to be completely flattered or kind of nervous about it. Then another person actually followed me all the way to work and started running red lights. I was calling my parents and going, 'Oh my God!'"

George Takei (Sulu) spoke briefly about his role on NBC's Heroes and how it fits into the Star Trek legacy, saying that he believes the new series follows in a tradition of science fiction challenging stereotypes.

"I'm delighted to be working on this show," Takei told The IESB. "There is a good fit there: science fiction of today as well as science fiction of the 23rd century coming together."

Takei described his character, the father of popular character Hiro, as a "powerful and wealthy industrialist in Japan and he wants his son back with the corporation." Hiro's father sees his son as his heir, "and I want him to get serious, so I hire some muscle to grab my son...I try to order him sternly to come back." The actor laughed that that was all he knew, and was as much in the dark about other surprises on the series as most fans.

The role of Sulu, he explained, was a breakthrough not only for him personally as an actor, but in terms of how Asian-Americans were characterized on teleivion. "Until then, we'd been portrayed in terms of two-dimensional stereotypes, either the quiet servant or the buffoon or the enemy," he said. "A character like Sulu was a real breakthrough and I felt very honored and privileged to be put in that position." Now, in part because of Star Trek's success, he has the opportunity to make a mark on another science fiction franchise.

Source: trektoday

TVGuide.com: Are you at all concerned about Hiro's much-improved English, that maybe he doesn't need Ando anymore?
Lee: Yeah, hopefully he doesn't learn too fast. [Laughs] We told the writers to slow it down a little bit. Right now, they see us as one entity, and we have created this great relationship where we balance each other in sort of a yin-and-yang kind of way. They created this interesting combination of a modern-day Odd Couple or Dean Martin-and-Jerry Lewis — or that's how they like to refer to it. I feel like we have a unique position in that we are able to bring comedic elements into the show, which separates us from some of the other heroes.