Haruka Ayase's gift is for watching herself: a woman who has decided to believe and cannot stop observing the decision. Hirokazu Kore-eda has built two films on it. Given a passive part and nobody looking closely, she can go quiet in the wrong way.
Fi1m perspective
Early in Sheep in the Box (2026) there is a family meal at which nobody mentions the thing everyone is thinking about. A robot copy of a dead boy is at the table. Kore-eda leaves the camera on Haruka Ayase and lets the scene run, and her face does what the script has declined to do. She plays Otone Komoto as a woman who has decided to believe and is watching herself do it, and we were moved by that table more than we expected to be by anything in a film we otherwise found soft and unwilling to think hard. She is the best thing in it, and it is not close.
She has been a lead for a long time. She began as a model and gravure idol after a special jury prize at the 2000 Horipro Talent Scout Caravan, made her television debut in 2001, and broke through as the lead in Crying Out Love in the Center of the World (2004). From the mid-2000s she has been a leading actress in Japanese television and film: the title role in ICHI (2008), a blind masseuse in a historical action film; the cyborg in Cyborg She (2008), a science-fiction comedy; Saki Tachibana in the Edo-period medical series Jin (2009); Niijima Yae in the NHK taiga drama Yae's Sakura (2013); Balsa in Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, which had her doing stage combat. Then Sachi Kōda, the eldest of the sisters in Our Little Sister (2015), for Kore-eda, and Otone for him again.
The physical parts tell you one thing about her, which is that she does the work. But what we value is the other thing, the stillness, the sense of a person observing her own decision, and it comes at a price. She has drawn the criticism, for Real (2013), that handed a largely passive role she could not put much life into it, and without having reviewed the film we can see how that would happen. A performer whose method is watching needs something worth watching. Give her a script that only asks her to receive and she can look as if she is waiting for the scene to begin.
Kore-eda understands this. He shoots households and lets faces do the talking, and in Sheep in the Box Ryuto Kondo's soft daylight puts her and the machine child in the same warm room, so the strangeness has to come from her and not from the lighting. It does. Start with that film, for her, and forgive what is around her. Then hope somebody other than Kore-eda notices what he has now noticed twice.
Biography
Haruka Ayase is a Japanese actress and singer. Born Aya Tademaru on 24 March 1985 in Hiroshima Prefecture, she won the 25th HORIPRO Talent Scout Caravan in 2000 and was given her stage name.
She began her career as a model and made her acting debut in 2001. Ayase is known for roles in films including Cyborg She (2008), ICHI (2008), Our Little Sister (2015) and the 2026 science fiction drama Sheep in the Box, in which she plays Otone Komoto, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda.
