Isomura Hayato Defied Warnings, Won Japan Academy Prize, Now Judges TIFF Ethics

By Daniel Okafor

Isomura Hayato took the role everyone warned him against — and it won him the Japan Academy Film Prize for best supporting actor. The part was in "The Moon," Ishii Yuya's drama drawn from a real incident at a facility for people with disabilities. The events were still raw. His circle feared career damage.

He went ahead anyway. "So if I didn't take this role, I thought probably it's like I'm kind of running away from the theme or this subject," Isomura tells Variety. "I didn't want to deny like dignity or the meaning of existence that was depicted in this film."

That appetite for difficult material defines a career that hops between Netflix's global hit "Alice in Borderland," the "Tokyo Revengers" franchise and independent dramas such as Hayakawa Chie's "Plan 75" and Kishi Yoshiyuki's "(Ab)normal Desire."

What did the Ethical Film Award jury decide?

This year the pull landed him on the jury of the Ethical Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival, which runs through Nov. 4. He judged alongside three festival students. The jury inherited three nominees — an animation, a documentary and a realistic fiction feature — and picked one.

The prize went to "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming," German director Isabelle Stever's drama about gender set against Russia's war in Ukraine. Plenty of films tackle gender, Isomura notes. Pairing it with war was new to him.

"And in Japan, if you live in Japan, war is something far away," he says. "So, I could find, I could discover from this film new values and new kind of sensibility."

Deliberations came down to Stever's film and "Amadeo," a Brazilian animated feature set in 1830s Brazil, in which a young African man invents photography before the Europeans and uses it to help enslaved people win their freedom. The two titles stayed in contention until the very end. Isomura noted the student jurors' lens: whether a film leaves room for hope, and whether viewers walk out feeling lighter.

How does he choose roles?

Social themes, political ones included, weigh heavily. "If I can agree with the subject, of course I'll do the role, but even if I cannot agree with the subject, sometimes I'll try the role because I want a new way of thinking, a new point of view that, that I didn't have in the past," he says. That hasn't changed as his profile has grown.

Television gets a different calculation. Japanese TV drama can't go as deep into ethical territory as cinema, he says, so for series he weighs entertainment value. On blockbusters versus small films, he calls both creatively expressive — the peaceful answer — but personally finds that films like "The Moon" and "Plan 75" let actors and directors say what they actually think.

What he wants more of: Japanese entertainment carrying political satire and black humor. "We can find those kind of films in the United States, but not as much in Japan, because probably Japanese people are serious, so they're kind of dividing entertainment films and like social films," he says.

Can Japanese film go global?

International reach is a genuine pleasure, says the actor, who also stars opposite 2PM's Ok Taecyeon in the Netflix series "Soul Mate." Comments from overseas viewers make him want to thank them in person. "I'd like to like kind of battle with the world with Japanese films," he says.

On the industry's state, he wishes he had acted during the golden age of Kurosawa and Ozu, but points to Kore-eda Hirokazu and a wave of younger directors competing at international festivals. His prescription is blunt:

"If you think about Japan, I think we need more funds, more support from the from the government for the entertainment and for the films," Isomura says. "And I want the government to be more interested, interested in entertainment and films." He cites South Korea, where a change of government shifted the climate around film.

Isomura currently appears in Yoshida Keisuke's "Mentor," released Oct. 16, and has an unannounced film he expects will be released abroad. He wants to direct once his acting career settles. Meanwhile, he produces the Shizuoka Film Festival in his home prefecture, an annual event he started to give back and nurture film culture.

"There are less people in Japan who are going to movie theaters and see movies in with screen," he says. "So I wanted more and more people to see the movies in screen." A star lobbying for subsidies while building his own regional festival — that's the model Japan's film establishment may want to study.