Masaki Okada is handsome, eager and slightly off, and in Drive My Car he turns that into the film's best acting: a television star who cannot quite tell where performing stops. One film is not many, but it was enough to make us watch for the next.
Fi1m perspective
In Drive My Car (2021), Kafuku, the widowed director, casts a young television actor as Vanya and does not say why. Masaki Okada plays that actor, Takatsuki, a half-beat too keen in every scene. He is too good-looking for the rehearsal room, too quick to smile, and he wants to be liked in a way the older people around him have long stopped bothering with. For most of the film he is faintly wrong, and it is deliberate. Then, late on, he is given a long speech in the back of the car, held on his face, which we will not describe. Nishijima, listening, does not blink.
We had spent a good two hours quietly wishing him off the screen, which is what the film wants, and then he began to talk and we were not ready. It is the best acting in the film, and it works because of everything that came before it: the eagerness, the slight wrongness, the face that has been used to being looked at. Okada does very little in the speech. He lets the camera stay where it is and does not help it.
The career before that runs the way careers for faces like his tend to run. He began acting in 2006, with first film roles in 2007, among them A Gentle Breeze in the Village. The early work was youth drama and romance, and I Give My First Love to You (2009) made him a lead as a conventional handsome young man. The same year Confessions (2010) and Villain (2010) came along, and the young men got more troubled. Through the 2010s he moved across thrillers, period pieces and live-action adaptations, Gintama (2017) among them. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to a view of them. What is plain is that Hamaguchi looked at the pretty leading man and cast him as a pretty leading man, and then asked what was underneath.
That is where Okada is best: long stretches of talk, delivered plainly, with the conflict kept inside and nothing pushed out for the audience. He has said that meeting Hamaguchi changed him, that he "can't do this job or face acting unless I really face myself", and on the evidence of the car that is not just an actor being polite about a director. They have worked together once.
The risk for him is the obvious one. A face that good is a habit for casting directors, and a man who has been the handsome young lead since 2009 can spend a long time being asked to do it again. Start with Drive My Car, and stay for the back seat. Then we will see whether anyone else is prepared to use the face against itself.
Biography
Masaki Okada (岡田 将生) is a Japanese actor. He was born on 15 August 1989 in Tokyo and began his career in 2006.
Okada is known for roles including Yoshiteru Terada in Confessions (2010), Takuma Kakunouchi in I Give My First Love to You (2009), Kōshi Takatsuki in Drive My Car (2021), and Kotaro Katsura in the Gintama films (2017–2018). He has also appeared in television series such as Legal High (2012) and A Shop for Killers (2024).
He received several newcomer awards in 2009–2010 for his early film work. Okada is represented by Stardust Promotion and married actress Mitsuki Takahata in 2024.
