Tokyo Vice star Ken Watanabe talks Godzilla, Broadway, and highlights from his decades-long career

Tampopo (1985)

It only took three movies for Watanabe to end up in the world of classic cinema. In his early 20s, the actor played a supporting role in Juzo Itami's surreal comedic masterpiece about the relationship between food, sex, and happiness.

"I was such a young, young actor," Watanabe recalls. "I could not understand the style of the shooting, the acting, or anything. So I just followed the feeling of Juzo Itami's ideas. He imagined so many things about food, sex, and human beings, so I just followed."

Going forward, Watanabe says that the lessons he learned on Tampopo — about going with with the flow and placing his trust in a visionary director — served him later in his collaborations with Christopher Nolan.

The Last Samurai (2003)

Director Edward Zwick's historical epic, a box office hit at the time both in the United States and Japan, is sometimes dinged in retrospect for the incongruity of its title and the decidedly non-Japanese protagonist played by Tom Cruise. But the eponymous "last samurai" is actually Watanabe's character, Lord Moritsugu Katsumoto. Based on the real-life historical figure Saigo Takamori, Katsumoto leads an uprising against Japan's Meiji restoration in order to preserve the samurai way of life. The film spared no expense in staging the battles of that conflict.

"We spent a month and a half shooting the last battle," Watanabe recalls. "Every day it was the same enemies on the same field. We could've shot a whole film in a month and a half!"

In the film, Katsumoto forges an intense friendship with Cruise's character Captain Nathan Algren, an American military veteran haunted by his role in the massacres of Native Americans. Behind the scenes, Watanabe gained much respect for Cruise's commitment to his craft.

"He was a hard worker," Watanabe says. "Day by day, scene by scene, he tried to learn the Japanese language, culture, sword work, and everything. He had lots of Japanese actors supporting him. We had a great connection, and a relationship to the samurai feeling."

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Released nearly simultaneously with Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers in order to show both sides of a major World War II battle, Letters from Iwo Jima was originally supposed to be helmed by a different director. When Eastwood took over the project himself, Watanabe wrote the Hollywood icon a letter asking for the role of General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.

"Clint's movies are the fastest shoots in Hollywood," Watanabe says. "Sometimes there wasn't even rehearsal, we'd just do one or two takes and then onto the next. But it's so deep. Sometimes I would suggest changes to the scene or the blocking, and Clint was always open to my ideas."

Inception (2010)

After a fake-out role in Batman Begins — where he initially seems to be portraying big bad Ra's al Ghul only to be revealed as a decoy — Watanabe took on a more important character in his next collaboration with director Christopher Nolan. As businessman Mr. Saito, Watanabe is in charge of the whole dream-thief operation, and his relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb ends up becoming an emotional engine of the film.

Inception is certainly a high-concept movie, filled with cities made of dreams and multi-level subconscious worlds. In fact, Nolan guarded its secrets so closely that Watanabe had to read the whole script in his office before accepting the role. But for all of the director's cerebral ideas, the sets were practical — which Watanabe credits for allowing him to deliver a genuinely emotional performance amidst all the spectacle.

"Everything on the set was real," Watanabe says. "The background may have been CGI or something, but everything close to the actors was real: All the props and the set design. He might turn the set 360 degrees or create a lot of shaking, but it's so much easier to act when you're reacting to something real."

Godzilla (2014)

In the latest American reboot of the Godzilla franchise, Watanabe plays Dr. Ishirō Serizawa, a kaiju expert. Upon being informed that Godzilla has started battling other unidentified gigantic monsters, Serizawa declares, "let them fight."

You know this scene — Watanabe's delivery of that line has since become one of the most popular gifs on the internet. But the actor himself was already using it for jokes on the set of the film.

"The day we shot that scene was a great evening in Vancouver," Watanabe recalls. "We didn't have much more to shoot, just five or 10 minutes. But then so many mosquitoes started landing on our food, our arms and neck. But I didn't care. I said it: 'Let them fight.' [Director] Gareth Edwards was so happy. Speaking of all the mosquitoes coming, I just said, 'let them bite.'"

Watanabe's presence, both in this film and its 2018 sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters, provides a link between the new franchise and its Japanese origins. In fact, his character's name is a portmanteau of original Gojira director Ishirō Honda and the 1954 film's hero, Dr. Daisuke Serizawa.

"Gojira is an icon in Japan," Watanabe says. "I remember watching the original movie and then so many others over the years. Sometimes he's a friend, sometimes he's an enemy, but in the beginning Gojira was completely nature-based. He remind us we need to think about nature when we try to build the future. It's a good lesson from Gojira."

The King and I (2015)

Though he is best known for his work in film and TV, Watanabe started his acting career on the stage — and when he returned to it with a starring role in the 2015 Broadway revival of The King and I, he became the first Japanese actor to earn a Tony Award nomination in the Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical category.

"In movies and TV, you can make a lot of mistakes," Watanabe says. "They can add to the storytelling, or get fixed in the editing. But acting on the stage does not allow for mistakes. It's a completely different way of acting. And I thought I completely understood stage acting, but doing it in English involved so many different kinds of feelings."

The past few years have not been easy for theater, since in-person performance is particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 transmission. But Watanabe says he's looking forward to coming back to the stage someday.

Tokyo Vice (2022)

With his starring role on Tokyo Vice, Watanabe plays Hiroto Karagiri, an accomplished detective in the organized crime division of the city's police force. But as Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) comes to learn over the course of the series, the line between cop and criminal in '90s Tokyo is blurrier than it seems.

"He has two faces," Watanabe says. "He's a good husband and father to his family, and he's so gentle with them. But when he interacts with the gangs, he has a different face: So scary and very strong. He's a very interesting character; he lives in the color gray, not white or black."