Naoko Mori

Watch the early episodes of Torchwood (2006) for the person at the edge of the frame. While Jack Harkness stands on tall buildings and Gwen Cooper flinches at her own decency, Toshiko Sato is at her desk, doing the job. Naoko Mori plays her with a stillness that is easy to mistake for absence, and for a long stretch the scripts make exactly that mistake. We said when we reviewed it that she was underused, and we felt a small, unreasonable relief when Toby Whithouse finally wrote her an episode: the relief of watching a good actor handed something to do, and taking it without fuss.

The career behind that moment is longer than the Doctor Who audience tends to know. She was seventeen when she played Kim in the West End Miss Saigon in 1990, the first Japanese national to lead a West End musical, and she has been in British television since 1992. There is Sarah, recurring across several series of Absolutely Fabulous (1992), parts in Casualty, and a place among the eight shut in one room in Brian Dooley's The Smoking Room (2004). In the two comedies she is not the one the joke lands on. The jokes in Absolutely Fabulous belong to Saunders and Lumley, and Mori's job is to be there, plausibly, while they happen. It is harder than it looks and nobody thanks you for it.

Toshiko came to Torchwood by way of a guest part in Doctor Who (2005), and the two series she spent on the programme are where her habit as an actor is clearest. She plays competence without asking to be admired for it. The limitation is the one the parts impose rather than one she brings: she is cast, again and again, as the supporting figure, the technically skilled one, the one who helps, and often as a Japanese woman in a British or international setting, so the writing turns to her late if it turns to her at all. When it does, as Whithouse's episode shows, the quiet has been storing something.

Since Cardiff she has taken that stillness to bigger screens and colder places: Yasuko Namba in Everest (2015), Asako Nakayama in The Terror (2018), where for once the storyline was hers to lead, and The Boys (2025). We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here. What we will say is that the pattern of Torchwood need not repeat. The next person to cast her would do well to write the episode first, rather than remembering to halfway through the second series.