Tao Okamoto

Watch Mariko Yashida in The Wolverine (2013) and try to say what she wants. Isis Mussenden dresses her so plainly that she sometimes vanishes into François Audouy's dark wood and glass, and the script gives her a fiancé, a grandfather, a kidnapping and a romance with Logan that the writers have decided before the actors arrive. Tao Okamoto holds the frame, which is not nothing in a film this busy, but holding it is most of what she is asked to do. We found ourselves watching Rila Fukushima's Yukio, cheerful and lethal beside her, and having to think afterwards to recall what Mariko had done; that is the fairest measure of the part.

That debut is the only performance of hers we have reviewed, and it is where the shape of the career begins. She had modelled in Japan from the age of 14, moved to Paris in 2006 and New York in 2009, and was cast in The Wolverine from the catwalk with no formal training at all. She has said herself that "It was James [Mangold] who initially taught me everything I needed to know". What followed was a run of the parts Hollywood tends to give a tall, still, bilingual Japanese woman: Mercy Graves in Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Chiyoh in Hannibal (2015), Betty in The Man in the High Castle (2015), Hanaryo in Westworld (2018 to 2020). Alongside them came Japanese and international films, Manhunt (2017), Laplace's Witch (2018), Perfect (2019), none of which we have reviewed.

What she brings to these parts is what the modelling gave her: she knows where the camera is and how to move for it, and she is credible in a fight or a standoff without seeming to work at it. What the parts did not give her was conversation. Franchise and genre work asked her to be looked at and to be lethal, rarely to argue, and an actor who learned on set learns only what the sets contain.

The turn came around 2023, when she shifted her attention back to Japan and to directors rather than franchises, and it arrives on screen as Mari Morisaki in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden (2026), a lead built out of long talking scenes in French and Japanese. That is the opposite of everything The Wolverine wanted from her. She has also begun writing and directing shorts, including Sun & Moon, which tells you where she thinks the interesting decisions are made.

We cannot yet say whether the stillness in her first film was the actor or the parts. Hamaguchi is the first director to ask her for sentences instead of poses, and his answer will matter more than the ten years of armour and corridors before it.