Takuya Kimura

Takuya Kimura came out of SMAP, one of the best-selling boy bands Asia has produced, and did the thing almost no idol manages: he turned the fame into an acting career that outlasted the band. Through the late 1990s and 2000s he was the fixed point of Japanese television. Long Vacation in 1996, Love Generation, Beautiful Life, Hero, Good Luck!!, Pride, Engine: a decade in which a Kimura drama was less a show than a national appointment. A magazine's readers voted him the country's sexiest man fifteen years running, which says more about the scale of the fame than about the work.

The work itself is quieter than the persona, and the persona is the instrument. Kimura does not disappear into parts, and the directors who use him best know it. Wong Kar-wai cast him in 2046 for the held-back melancholy. Takashi Miike put the same stillness inside Manji, the immortal swordsman of Blade of the Immortal, and let the film bleed around him. Hayao Miyazaki hired the voice twice, first as Howl and later as Shoichi Maki in The Boy and the Heron, which is why a large number of viewers outside Japan have heard Kimura without knowing it.

He never left television, and he has aged into heavier material. Kohei Kuryu, the character he first played in Hero in 2001, has come back in a special and two feature films. La Grande Maison Tokyo produced both a special and a Paris-set film. Recent work runs to Oda Nobunaga in THE LEGEND & BUTTERFLY, Takeshi Mogami in Killing for the Prosecution, and a Japanese lead in the international co-production The Swarm. The idol career ended a long time ago. The drama career has simply kept going.