Toko Miura does almost nothing on screen and makes all of it count. In Drive My Car she plays a driver so still her passenger cannot feel the car move, and by the third hour she is the one we are watching.
Fi1m perspective
Misaki Watari drives a red Saab down a grey expressway with her cap pulled low, and the first thing her passenger says about her is that he cannot feel the car move. That is Toko Miura's performance in Drive My Car (2021) in a sentence. Hidetoshi Shinomiya and Lee Tae-hun shoot the car from the back seat by day, two faces in the mirror not looking at each other, and Haruki Koketsu puts her in one dark jacket for the whole three hours. She hardly speaks and hardly moves. It takes about an hour to notice how much she is doing.
She has been at it a long time. Miura won a commercial audition at about five or six and started acting in 2002, moved to Tokyo after elementary school, and spent the years to 2020 in supporting parts, Saori Yokota in Lesson of the Evil (2012), Hiroko in Romance Doll (2020). She sings too, and can be heard on the soundtrack of Weathering with You (2019). Then Ryusuke Hamaguchi put her in the front seat opposite Hidetoshi Nishijima and the same quiet was, for once, the point. I Am What I Am (2022) gave her a first lead, as Kasumi Sobata.
The women she is cast as are reserved, and the films are about waiting for them to say what they have been carrying. She has spoken of starting so young and finding she could not always get out what she meant, and that this "made me become really careful about how I choose my words." It shows. We spent the first hour of Drive My Car treating her as part of the car, and by the third we were watching her more closely than anyone else on screen, without being able to name the moment that changed; she had not raised her voice or her eyes, only let a little more through in the mirror each time the camera went to it. Misaki is from Hokkaido, and so is Miura, which may be one reason the character's reticence never reads as a trick.
The risk is plain. An actor this still needs a director who will hold the shot and a script that trusts a silence, and Hamaguchi gave her both; they have made only the one film together. I Am What I Am asks Kasumi, by most accounts, to be oddly blind to what the people around her want, which is a writing problem rather than an acting one, and we have not reviewed it, so we will leave it there. She will be offered the quiet girl again and again. Directors who want her to say more should first be sure the film needs it.
Biography
Tōko Miura (Japanese: 三浦透子) is a Japanese actress and singer. She began her career in 2002, appearing in television dramas and commercials as a child before moving to Tokyo after elementary school.
Miura is known for her role as Misaki Watari in the 2021 film Drive My Car. Other film credits include Lesson of the Evil (2012), Romance Doll (2020) and The Last 10 Years (2022). She also contributed to the soundtrack of the 2019 animated film Weathering with You.
