Hiroyuki Sanada is the one man in a Hollywood fight scene who looks as if he could wait. He has lent stillness and a sword to other people's films for twenty years, and in Shōgun (2024) he got to stand at the centre of one.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the Osaka Continental sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) and count how often Hiroyuki Sanada runs. Keanu Reeves runs. Donnie Yen's blind Caine moves through the gallery by sound. Sanada's Shimazu walks, and when the sword comes out it is over in the time it takes everyone else to decide. He has done his own fight work since he was twelve, when he joined Sonny Chiba's Japan Action Club, and the stillness comes from that: a man who can do the fast thing and does not need to show you.
The career runs the opposite way to most. He was a child in yakuza films in the 1960s alongside Chiba, an action star in Japan and Hong Kong from the late 1970s, and only in the 1990s did he turn to parts that did not involve hitting anyone. Ringu (1998) was the first of those the West noticed. He played in King Lear with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999 and 2000, went home to make The Twilight Samurai (2002), and then The Last Samurai (2003) put him beside Tom Cruise as Ujio, and Hollywood decided what he was for.
What he was for, it turned out, was the sword. The Wolverine (2013), Mortal Kombat (2021): the parts are variations on one part, the warrior who says little and is on screen for ten minutes. Bullet Train (2022) is the worst case. The Elder arrives with an hour of neon and flashbacks already spent, and for a few minutes the film stops fidgeting, because Sanada does not fidget. Then it goes back to its train. We sat there annoyed on his behalf, and the annoyance outlasted the film, because it had found the one adult on board and given him a window seat.
Chad Stahelski does better by him. John Wick: Chapter 4 is his second film with Reeves, and Stahelski and Dan Laustsen give Shimazu a whole hotel and light every room so that we can see him in it. It is still a supporting part. It is a supporting part with a building.
Then Shōgun (2024), in which he plays Yoshii Toranaga, leads a Western production for the first time, and produced it as well, with a hand in how the period was shown. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. He told Rolling Stone in 2024, "The acting's first. And then all the other skills are just skills." He is past sixty and still does his own fights. Twenty years is a long time to be the best thing in other people's films.
Biography
Hiroyuki Sanada is a Japanese actor and martial artist. Born Hiroyuki Shimozawa on 12 October 1960 in Shinagawa, Tokyo, he began his career as a child actor in the mid-1960s and trained at Sonny Chiba’s Japan Action Club.
He appeared in numerous Japanese action films during the 1970s and 1980s before taking on a wider range of roles. Sanada is known internationally for performances in The Last Samurai (2003) as Ujio, The Wolverine (2013) as Shingen Harada, John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) as Shimazu, Bullet Train (2022) as The Elder, and Mortal Kombat (2021) as Hanzo Hasashi / Scorpion. He has also appeared in Avengers: Endgame (2019), the television series Westworld (2016) and Lost (2010), and the miniseries Shōgun (2024).
Sanada has received multiple awards in Japan, including Japan Academy Film Prizes, and international recognition such as a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy Awards.
