"If the script is good, the cast and director good, I'll go anywhere."
Ken Watanabe ((渡辺 謙, born October 21, 1959 in Koide, Niigata Prefecture) is a Japanese actor.
He started his acting career in the Land of the Rising Sun in The '80s. Internationally, he is certainly one of the best known current actors from there, due to his prominent parts in a number of high profile Hollywoodian productions starting with The Last Samurai.
Not related to Akeno Watanabe.
Partial filmography:
- Tampopo as Gun
- Dokuganryu Masamune as Date Masamune
- The Last Samurai as Katsumoto
- Memoirs of a Geisha as the Chairman
- Batman Begins as Ra's al Ghul's decoy
- Letters from Iwo Jima as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi
- Inception as Saito
- Unforgiven (Japanese remake) as Jubei Kamata
- MonsterVerse as Doctor Ishiro Serizawa
- Transformers Film Series as Drift
- The Sea of Trees as Takumi
- Isle of Dogs as Head Surgeon
- Segodon as Shimazu Nariakira
- Pokémon Detective Pikachu as Detective Hide Yoshida
- Tokyo Vice as Hiroto Katagiri
- The Creator as Harun
Tropes to be found in his works:
- The Big Guy: At about 6'1, he's very tall, especially by Japanese standards where the average male height is about 5'7.
- Samurai: His most famous Japanese role was as Date Masamune in the 1987 NHK drama Dokuganryu Masamune. And his most famous international role was also a samurai, Katsumoto, in The Last Samurai. 2018 sees this piled up with another NHK drama, Segodon, where he plays 19th century Satsuma daimyo Shimazu Nariakira — who, coincidentally, was the lord of Saigo Takamori, the Real Life basis for The Last Samurai. Even Drift, a voiced character in the Transformers film series, is deliberately samurai themed.
- "We call him...Gojira."
