Anna Sawai has just landed in Los Angeles when we speak. Despite the nearly 12-hour flight from Tokyo, the actor is bright-eyed and cheerful. When I ask where home is for her, she grins. “This is a really difficult question for me,” she says. Sawai, 32, moves between Japan, where she was raised, and Hollywood, where work has increasingly brought her since her breakout roles in the shows Pachinko and Shōgun.
This cultural schism in her personal life is reflected on-screen. The Apple TV+ adaptation of Pachinko, the 2017 best-selling novel by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee, tells the story of four generations of a Korean family living in a deeply racist Japan. Sawai plays Naomi, a young businesswoman who faces sexism in the male-dominated workplace. The series includes dialogue in Korean, Japanese, and English. Meanwhile, in Shōgun, FX’s enormously popular TV adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 novel, Sawai plays a 16th-century translator who helps a lord converse with an English “barbarian.” The show moves back and forth between Japanese and English.
Sawai has been training for these starring roles for almost two decades, even if she didn’t exactly know it. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, she was raised in Yokohama, Japan. At five, she joined her older sister in ballet lessons. “She’s been a big inspiration to me,” says Sawai. Those classes sparked a love of music and performing.
At 11, Sawai beat out 9,000 kids in Tokyo for the lead part in a TV production of the musical Annie. At the time, it was singing, not acting, that interested her.
Sawai turned toward acting five years later, in 2009, when she landed a role in the film Ninja Assassin.“That’s when I realized that acting was where I wanted to go.” It was too late, though. By then, she was already preparing her J-pop debut as the lead singer in the five-member girl group Faky. Under strict contract, she had to shelve acting for a decade.
Sawai recalls having no creative freedom as a member of Faky. The group was signed to the record label Rhythm Zone, which was a part of a leading media company in Japan and took total control over the group’s decisions. “We wanted to write the lyrics and whatnot, but they wanted to use their own people. And so it wasn’t really our choice,” Sawai says.
“It was a difficult time for me,” she says. “I felt like I wasn’t in control, even though it was my own life and own career.” Her involvement in the J-pop group even forced her to turn down a Suicide Squad audition in 2015. Sawai made the hard decision to leave Faky two years later so she could pursue acting. “I think now, because of [those experiences], I am much more comfortable being who I am.”
After a few smaller roles, Sawai landed Pachinko, which first aired in 2022. More parts quickly followed, including ones in Apple TV+’s 2023 Godzilla series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and, most recently, Shōgun, which racked up 25 Emmy nominations, including Sawai’s own, for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.
Now Sawai is returning to her role as Naomi, a young, Harvard-educated businesswomen, in Pachinko’s second season. Sawai tells me she’s especially excited to explore her character’s Japanese roots. “In Season Two, I actually didn’t have any English lines.”
Naomi wasn’t in the book that inspired the show, which gives Sawai a bit more flexibility in her portrayal of the character. This season “we get to see her personal side a little bit more, and we get to know about her family.”
As she looks forward to future projects, Sawai shares a lesson she learned from the actor Tom Hiddleston: “Learn it, know it, forget it, do it.” She tells me she’s had a screenshot of that quote saved on her computer ever since. “I’m going to apply that to my next thing.”
Season Two of Pachinko premieres on Apple TV+ on August 23
Zack Hauptman is an Editorial Intern at AIR MAIL
