Tsubasa Nakagawa

BLGLFlix editorial view

He has been working since he was four and acting on screen since he was nine. By the time he took this lead he had fifteen years behind him and was twenty years old. Child performers are common in Japan and rare in the rest of this catalogue, where the standard path begins somewhere between sixteen and twenty-two, and it produces a different kind of actor: someone whose technique was formed on film sets rather than in an agency’s training programme or a music group.

The NHK taiga credit is the one to notice. Taiga dramas are year-long historical serials and the most prestigious commission in Japanese television, cast with care and watched by an audience that has nothing to do with genre streaming. Somebody with that on their record taking a boys’ love lead on a commercial broadcaster is a fact about where the category now sits in Japan. It is not a place performers are warned away from.

The role itself is heavier than the format usually allows. Sui is a boarding-school student who was outed to the people around him and has built a mask and a joke to live behind since. That is not a misunderstanding to be resolved in episode eight, and it puts a real demand on someone who has spent most of his life being cast as a child.