Hiroshi Abe

He stands straight. He is a tall man, and in a good suit with his shoulders back and his face set he looks like the man at the table who has already decided. In Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999) that is the whole of Mitsuo Katagiri: he runs the government's crisis agency from a boardroom, wants the creature dead, and says so in every scene he shares with Takehiro Murata's rumpled scientist. We spent 107 minutes waiting for him to do anything but glower, and he never did, and we came out irritated with the film for thinking the glower was a character. It is not. It is where Abe starts.

The stillness came with the job. He began as a model in the mid-1980s and made his film debut in 1987, and the height and the face that got him cast then got him stuck; by the early 1990s the work had thinned. A stage part in 1993 and film work in 1994 turned it round, and TRICK (2000), the long-running television series, made him. He played Jirō Ueda, a sceptical physicist, and the programme used his old modelling photographs against him for laughs. That is the trick, if you like: the same rigid, upright man, and somebody has finally noticed he is funny.

Hirokazu Kore-eda noticed something else. In Still Walking (2008) Abe is Ryota Yokoyama, the estranged son back with his family for a reunion, and he plays the resentment and its slow thaw through small gestures and silences rather than speeches. Kore-eda has used him four times, in a supporting part in I Wish (2011) and as another Ryota, Shinoda this time, in After the Storm (2016), and the method is always the same: put him in a room with people who know him and let him not say the thing. The man who stood there saying nothing in a Toho boardroom is standing there saying nothing in a family drama, and this time it means something, because Kore-eda has built a room in which not saying it costs him.

Hideki Takeuchi found the comedy in the same posture. In Thermae Romae (2012) Abe is Lucius, an ancient Roman bath architect who keeps time-travelling out of his own century, and he carries the whole joke by refusing to react to any of it as a normal person would. The sequel repeats the premise without deepening it, which nobody has blamed on him. Physicists, architects, detectives, family men: he is nearly always the rigid one, and the good films are the ones that give him something to soften towards.

He is still working, with Last Samurai Standing (2025) among the recent credits, and he still talks about building a character as the part of the job he enjoys. Preparing for Offbeat Cops (2022) he had about three months to learn the drums; "The first time I tried was a disaster", he said. Start with Still Walking, not with Godzilla. The suit is the same in both. The difference is what the director asked the man inside it to do.