Chris Tashima
Chris Tashima is an actor, born 1960.
Chris Tashima's screen credits and his actual career barely overlap, and that gap is the story. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was working in Los Angeles through the mid-eighties, and what that meant for an Asian American actor of his generation is written plainly across the credit list: an uncredited student in A Nightmare on Elm Street, an uncredited extra in Once Bitten, in The Sure Thing, in Night of the Creeps, in Savage Dawn, a bag man in The Perfect Weapon.
So he built the alternative. He co-founded Cedar Grove Productions and its Asian American theatre company, Cedar Grove OnStage, and moved into directing and producing rather than waiting for the offered parts to improve. In 1998 he and producer Chris Donahue won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for Visas and Virtue, which he directed, co-wrote and starred in, about the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara and the Jewish refugees he wrote visas for.
He has worked on both sides of the camera since, largely in independent film and in Japanese American stories, and none of that is what the credits gathered here reflect. Read this list as a record of an industry rather than a record of an actor: the parts on it are the parts that were available, and his response was to go away and make something better.
Movies (6)
TV (1)
Where to start with Chris Tashima
There is an honest answer here and a fun one. The honest answer is Visas and Virtue, the short he directed and starred in, the reason his name sits in an Academy Award ledger, and it is not among the credits listed here, so you will have to go looking.
The fun answer is A Nightmare on Elm Street. He is in Nancy's English class, uncredited, in the film that launched a franchise, and once you know he is in the room the scene becomes a small piece of Hollywood archaeology. The Perfect Weapon is the only credit on this list that gave him a named part. The rest, Once Bitten, The Sure Thing, Night of the Creeps and Savage Dawn, are background work from the same handful of years, and the Unsolved Mysteries entry is a stunt-coordinating credit rather than a performance.