FE ATU REFlags of His
Grandfathers
Funny man Derek Mio’s career turned serious when he
reached into his family story to tell a tale of Japanese
internment-camp horror.
TEXT BY MAE HAMILTON
The second season of AMC’s anthology series The Terror begins not with a bang, but a
squelch. On Terminal Island, just off the coast of Southern California, a woman dressed in
a formal kimono walks down a long dock, her neck bent at an unnatural angle as she forces
her possessed body to sit. Then, she takes a pin from her hair and jams it into her ear canal
until it pierces her brain. Cue the disgusting sound effect. After her perceived “suicide,”
strange things begin stirring on the island. And it’s all up to Chester Nakayama to pick up
the pieces. But somehow, even when he tries to run away from them, all of those pieces
ghoulishly haunt him.
Derek Mio plays the ill-fated Nakayama on The Terror: Infamy. Developed by Max Boren-
stein and Alexander Woo and executive produced by Blade Runner legend Ridley Scott,
Infamy follows the Japanese American community of Terminal Island as they’re afflicted
by a chain of supernatural events that is somehow connected to their homeland of Japan.
Even when they’re shuttled off to an internment camp, the spirit follows.
This isn’t Mio’s first time around the TV block—he’s appeared on shows like SEAL Team
and Spooked. But this is his first lead role in a television series, and he’s waiting on pins and
needles to see how this second season of the horror series will be received by audiences. “It
was a lot of pressure,” Mio says. “I feel like I have such a strong connection to the character
that I’m playing. It wasn’t just another acting role to me.”
Mio has real roots embedded in the era of Japanese internment. During the recon-
struction of Japan after World War II, Mio’s maternal grandfather, who was proficient in
Japanese, was sent to the country to monitor kabuki scripts for anti-American messages.
In the process, he ended up befriending some of the country’s most famous kabuki actors.
“He became an expert,” Mio says. “There’s testimony from actors saying that my grandfa-
ther was instrumental in preserving the art. Japan was war-torn and destitute at the time,
so he often gave them cigarettes, liquor and food. I feel like this craft of mimicry and doing
impressions was passed down from him.”
Then there’s Mio’s paternal grandfather, who actually grew up on Terminal Island, a
small islet between the harbors of Long Beach and Los Angeles that was home to about
3,500 Issei and Nisei pre-World War II. But after Pearl Harbor, all of the adult, first-gener-
ation men on the island were forcibly incarcerated and sent to internment camps by the
FBI—including Mio’s great-grandfather. “It’s crazy the connections I have with this proj-
ect and my character,” Mio says. “There’s so many similarities. There’s a testimony online
by my relatives saying how my grandfather was pleading with [the authorities] to take him
instead of his dad. I really drew from learning about that. Chester is like a composite of
both of my grandfathers wrapped up into one.”