Shichinosuke Nakamura
Shichinosuke Nakamura is an actor, born 1983.
The screen work is the smaller part of Shichinosuke Nakamura's life, and knowing that changes how you watch it. Born Takayuki Namino in Tokyo in 1983, he is the second son of the kabuki actor Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII and performs as Nakamura Shichinosuke II. Unlike most kabuki actors, who commit to a single type of role for an entire career, he plays both tachiyaku, the male parts, and onnagata, the female ones, which is a rare and technically punishing way to work.
Film has used him for exactly one quality: stillness with authority behind it. He was Emperor Meiji in The Last Samurai in 2003, a young ruler in a film crowded with people telling him what to think, and he holds those scenes by doing almost nothing in them. Ten years later he voiced the Emperor in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and the casting logic is identical. Two emperors, both remote, both required to carry an entire social order in their posture.
The rest is small and varied: Kouichi in Install, Kita in the road comedy Yaji & Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims, a Japanese television ghost story in 2019. His real career remains on stage, where the discipline that shows up in a few minutes of film is simply the everyday standard.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Shichinosuke Nakamura
Almost everyone meets him through The Last Samurai, and his scenes are worth isolating from the film around them. Emperor Meiji has very few lines and each one has to sound like a state speaking rather than a young man, and a kabuki actor is precisely the right instrument for that.
Then The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, which is the finer film by a distance. He voices the Emperor, the animation gives the character a deliberately strange design, and the voice has to carry all that entitlement without ever raising itself.
Yaji & Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims is the wild card, a road comedy with nothing of the dignity of the other two, and Install is the small drama for anyone going through the full list. Isao Takahata and His Tale of The Princess Kaguya is the making-of and a good companion piece.