WiC Exclusive: Lee Shorten (Walt Yoshida) talks The Terror: Infamy

If you’re watching AMC’s The Terror: Infamy, you’re familiar with Walt Yoshida, one of the many denizens of Terminal Island. Walt is portrayed by Asian-Australian actor/writer/director Lee Shorten, who before this spent two seasons playing Sgt. Yoshida on Amazon Studio’s The Man in the High Castle (2015-2016). He also appeared as Master Tsui in Van Helsing (2018), among other projects. WiC was able to grab an exclusive interview with Shorten to discuss acting, characters and the importance of bringing history to life on Infamy.

Raised in Australia (and yes, he has the Down Under accent), Shorten originally intended to become a lawyer. After graduating from the Australian National University in 2013, a few years in the profession proved it wasn’t for him. The move to acting felt like a bit of a “snap decision,” though he had earned an undergraduate degree with a major in Liberal Arts and was that guy “that always watched the DVD commentaries,” so it’s not like he did no preparation.

Lee Shorten in Van Helsing 2016

“I thought I’d like directing,” Shorten laughs. “But in a film there’s only one director and 50 actors, so acting seemed like better odds. But when you get in (the audition process) that makes no sense.” Shorten stuck with the acting and got his first part on the TV mini series short Keep with Coffee in 2014. He’s worked steadily since then, picking up roles on TV shows like The Flash (2015), Supernatural (2015-2016), Average Dicks (2015-2016) and Arrow (2018).

For Shorten, landing the part as Walt Yoshida was something special. It’s a minor part and a bit of a “tough one,” since the character goes to war and doesn’t return for two years. “How much has he (Walt) changed in those two years,” Shorten asks. “How much has war changed him?”

"Looking at Walt’s journey, having seen the horrors of war–no matter what happens to him, he puts on a brave face and ‘it’s all good.’"

In the show, Walt serves in the American 442nd Infantry Regiment, an outfit made up almost entirely of second generation Japanese-American (Nisei) recruits. As they served overseas, many of the soldiers had family in the stateside internment camps. Deployed mostly in the European theater and seeing heavy combat, the 442nd became the most highly decorated regiment in US military history.

Shorten was thrilled to bring the memory of the 442nd to life on screen. “The 442nd was a big part of why I said ‘yes’ to the role,” he says. “Even to be a small part of the story of the 442nd was a great honor.” Walt has a great scene in “My Sweet Boy” as he returns to the internment camp a war-hero lieutenant, ready to enlist new recruits for his unit. But Walt’s facade of bravado cracks when his young friend Toshiro is determined to join up. Knowing the brutal realities of the battlefield, Walt tries to dissuade Toshiro but fails. The pain we see on Walt’s face is palpable.

As with all things World War 2, the experience of the Japanese-American internment camps is fading out of living memory with the passing of the people who lived it. Actor George Takei (Star Trek), who plays on elder Yamato-San on Infamy, was incarcerated in several camps with his family when he was a little boy and he is 82 years old now. What does Shorten think of the continuing historical legacy of the camps, and how might The Terror: Infamy contribute to it?

"I don’t think the legacy of the Japanese-American internment camps has ever before been told on this scale. I always hope to think it spurs conversation, and sparks enough interest that you go down the rabbit hole (of learning about it) on your own. History is so huge and vast … it’s hard to predict which events become huge and which become a footnote."

INDEPENDENCE, CA – DECEMBER 09: A sign is posted at the entrance to Manzanar National Historic Site on December 9, 2015 near Independence, California. Recent presidential campaign rhetoric against Muslims in the wake of terror attacks has drawn comparisons to World War II era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten internment camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were incarcerated from 1942 to 1945 during World War II. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The Terror: Infamy is a very personal story for many of the cast and crew. The production hired a lot of people with Asian ancestry, and showrunner Alexander Woo later found out that 138 of them had immediate relatives who were interned. As a California resident, I hadn’t realized the Los Angeles Santa Anita racetrack had served as an assembly facility during the state internment process. “The racetrack we shot at in Canada was where Japanese-Canadians were interred,” Shorten says. The cast and crew members “felt the weight” of the responsibility to tell their story properly.

Shorten had already dug deep into this subject matter during his stint on The Man in the High Castle, which is set in a post-WW2 alternate future where the German Nazis and Imperial Japanese have won the war and now occupy the United States. “I had done a lot of research on the interment camps ,” Shorten says, “…in the first season I was the only Japanese-American character on the show.” And yes, Shorten played a character named Yoshida in both The Man in the High Castle and The Terror: Infamy. At first glance the brutal High Castle Yoshida and the affable Infamy Yoshida appear to be entirely unalike. But Shorten found their connection.

Lee Shorten as Sgt Yoshida in The Man in the High Castle Amazon Studios Photo by Liane Hentscher

"(The two Yoshida characters) are two sides of the same coin. As an actor you look for the thing that drives them. Both Yoshidas are driven by the same true north, but events have put them at opposite ends of the spectrum … both are doing everything in their power to protect the people around them."

Shorten wrote and acted in the film short “The Day We Met” (2018), about a couple struggling with infertility issues and the emotional landscape of the adoption experience. Shorten is an adopted child, but he explains that the film contains little of his own biography. He describes it as “my love letter to the adopted community,” a synthesis of issues and concerns he’s heard from other people who were adopted as children.

“It takes a bunch of people’s stories and folds them into one,” Shorten explains, “to suggest that whatever you think of adoption, it’s not as clean and simple as you’ve been led to believe.” “The Day We Met” is a lovely contemplation on life and feelings wrapped up in the legacy of adoption, and it is certainly worth a watch.

What’s next for Lee Shorten? He’ll be appearing in the Bill Hader/Anna Kendrick comedy feature Noelle at Christmas, along with a number of other projects, and he plans to keep writing up a storm.

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In closing we have to ask: will we see more of Walt Yoshida in the final two episodes of The Terror: Infamy? The actor isn’t at liberty to give anything away, but he does confirm that Walt will appear onscreen again. As for Lee Shorten the actor/writer/director, it seems certain that we’ll be seeing a lot of his work in the future, and we wish him the best of luck.

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