How Shogun’s Tadanobu Asano became Japan’s most loved cult star

I still remember the day in the early 00s, when I walked into HMV in search of Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson CDs, only to be met with the sight of a severed head peering out from racks of the world cinema aisle. 

The film in question was Ichi the Killer – an absurdly gory gangster movie from Takashi Miike banned in Germany and Malaysia, which required three-and-a-half minutes of cuts by the BBFC to secure release in the UK. The face on the cover was that of sadistic, self-mutilating antagonist Kakihara, played by Tadanobu Asano: an actor whose magnetic presence would elsewhere court interest from everyone from Wong Kar-wai to Martin Scorsese across a career that resembles a cineaste’s Letterboxd watchlist.

Two decades since our shock encounter among the DVD shelves – a time during which Asano has endured as a presence at Europe’s biggest film festivals, cracked Hollywood, and yet somehow remained largely peripheral in Western mainstream discourse – the one-time “King of the Indies” is having a major late-career breakthrough in the West in another savage role. As the scheming, man-boiling warlord Yabushige in FX/Disney+’s hit series Shogun, Asano has won clamour from critics and fans alike, to the extent that a major awards nod now seemingly beckons. 

“I wanted to be famous. It didn’t really matter if it was as a musician or an actor, I just wanted to stand out” – Tadanobu Asano

Revered filmmakers like Nagisa Ôshima (Gohatto) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (Café Lumiere) then utilised his scenery-chewing charisma in works that competed for the top prizes at Europe’s most prestigious film festivals. It was around the time that Asano won Venice’s Upstream Prize for Best Actor, for Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, in 2003, that the actor’s most unsettling performance started to appear in the UK via gruesome ads in the pages of Kerrang! and wary newspaper reviews.

“It’s so ultra-violent that when I read the script itself, I initially wanted to avoid it,” Asano says with a grin, referring to Ichi the Killer, a film that The Guardian called “truly nauseating” and “deeply horrible” in 2003. Though the movie did find Kakihara torturing foes with fish hooks, tempura oil and knitting needles, its greatest assets would be Asano’s incredible posturing in outrageous tartan suits and shimmering sequinned shirts (the work of prestigious costume designer Michiko Kitamura). “What changed my mind,” he continues, matter-of-factly, “was that I began to actually look at it as a comedy.”

My school teachers failed to see the funny side when I was caught showing the uncut version of the movie’s grisly trailer to my IT class – and Asano does appreciate the shock factor. “I have a very strong memory of a scene in the yakuza headquarters where [the gang] has all been slaughtered,” he says. “The art department went to the local butcher and got actual beef organs and half-digested, half-poop intestines [to use in the scene]. The assistant director said ‘if we just use some vanilla essence, it’ll make it smell better’. It just made it worse.” 

Hard to stomach, no doubt, but Ichi the Killer was also a film that put Tadanobu Asano on the map in a way that even his absurdly stacked CV elsewhere hadn’t. Kakihara’s gaping Chelsea smile and peroxide-blonde hair, for one, can now be found alongside Lady Gaga and Bruce Willis at Tokyo Madame Tussauds – while debate goes on as to whether the character inspired the look of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight in 2008. Either way, the 23 years that separate Kakihara from Asano’s latest brooding role, as Shogun’s devious Yabushige, have been convoluted. “In my twenties, arthouse cinema was popular,” he says, “but in the 00s, the trend was declining in Japan. I started to ask myself: where am I needed? And even, am I still needed as an actor?”

With a mid-career defined by “constant re-examining and questioning of what I can do as an actor”, Asano began to balance projects like Koji Fukada’s 2016 Cannes Jury Prize winner Harmonium with meaty roles on the far side of the Pacific. And increasingly, he’d find himself flanking major Hollywood heavyweights — Keanu Reeves (47 Ronin), Woody Harrelson (Kate), Jared Leto (The Outsider) and Rhianna (Battleship) included. But the transition also placed him in the territory of uninspired mainstream genre fare; B-blockbusters at odds with the inspired works that had made his name. The oversight was not lost on Shogun showrunner Justin Marks: “So many people don’t know what we call the ‘Ichi the Killer’ side of him,” he rued in a recent Rolling Stone interview — “where he’s practically breaking the frame around him because he’s so dynamic.”

“In my twenties, arthouse cinema was popular. But in the 00s, the trend was declining in Japan. I started to ask myself: where am I needed?”

One filmmaker who saw through this was fortunately one of America’s all-time greats – though winning the approval of Martin Scorsese wasn’t as straightforward as Asano might have hoped. “Every male actor in Japan was auditioning for Silence,” he says, describing Scorsese’s passion project of some 25 years’ development: an epic historical drama about two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) who navigate a hostile, Christianity-persecuting 1600s Japan in an attempt to find their missing teacher (Liam Neeson). “I got through to the callback, and Scorsese himself was the reader — he started saying, ‘do it this way, do it that way’, and we ended up doing it three or four times.” The master filmmaker’s ability to access what an actor is bringing to a scene, and make it bigger, brought Asano great satisfaction. But the next day brought unwelcome news: “I didn’t get the role.”

Cast instead as the cowardly Kichijiro was Go star Yōsuke Kubozuka — while elsewhere, Asano’s Ichi the Killer co-star  Shinya Tsukamoto landed a pivotal role as an impoverished villager who meets a tragic fate. “My manager was like, ‘there are no other roles.’ But I couldn’t give up.” An opportunity arose when Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai) dropped out of the production; Scorsese returned to Japan to cast the role afresh, and found that Asano had been cramming English lessons. He landed the crucial role of a silver-tongued interpreter who taunts Garfield’s priest to renounce his faith. It was a performance that won Asano widespread plaudits – even if Silence’s bizarre release strategy (Paramount opted to release this three-hour religious epic in the middle of the holiday season) condemned it at the box office.

Like many of Scorsese’s best films, Silence and its superlative performances were overlooked at the Oscars, too. But for his latest role in the age of samurai and self-disembowelments, the odds now seem stacked in Asano’s favour. As the self-serving Lord Yabushige in the Game-of-Thrones-esque Shogun, the Japanese actor has been earmarked as a frontrunner by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for an Emmy Best Supporting Actor nod. It’s easy to see why. 

As a treacherous feudal warlord who “doesn’t live by the rules, or even just destroys them”, Yabushige transposes the cold ruthlessness seen in Ichi the Killer to a setting almost analogous to that of Silence (both Shogun and Silence take influence from real-life historical events in early 1600s Japan). But he’s also, somehow, proven the most relatable character on the show – “just a guy being a dude, a real dude’s guy”, as one X user aptly put it; “the guy you [could] go to the pub with for a beer.” Asano agrees. It’s a quality the actor eked out through careful development of the character: “I [would] just go back to the script and try to discover what’s interesting.” And in the case of Yabushige, it was his need to explore almost paradoxical “hobbies” of serious poetry and causing extreme human suffering that interested him the most.

Asano is rolling back the years elsewhere in 2024: he reunited with punk filmmaker Gakuryu “Sogo” Ishii for Berlin Film Festival-championed dystopian drama The Box Man in February. And in March he signed on for a new project by Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe), with psychological thriller Morte Cucina the latest in a string of Asano films to be shot by In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle. But whether it’s via zeitgeist-piercing TV hits or creatively-inspired arthouse fare, it seems the role of the lovable, terrible anti-hero will always be Asano’s true calling. 

“I figured out early in my career that my face was not a superhero face,” he tells me. “So I would look in the mirror and say, well, what about my face and my energy draws in the audience?” The answer can be found in the dead-eye glare of Kakihara; the clean-cut chonmage of Silence’s interpreter; and the unkept beard of Lord Yabushige. “In any story, there’s going to be a problem,” Asano concludes. “And I think it’s fun to be the problem.”