James Saito

Forty years is a long time to be the best thing in other people's scenes, and James Saito, born in Los Angeles in 1955, has spent them doing exactly that. He is the original Shredder in the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the man inside the armour, which means an entire generation knows his physical performance without ever having heard him. On stage he won an OBIE for DURANGO at the Public Theater in New York, and he is a member of both the television and motion picture academies.

The screen career is a study in precision at small scale. He is the older insurance investigator at the end of Life of Pi, listening to a story and deciding what to write down. He is Takaori Osumi in The Devil's Advocate, the judge in Big Eyes, Minister Kishido in Long Shot, Dr Nagato in While We're Young. Each of those is a handful of lines, and in each he arrives with a complete idea of who the man is and how much patience he has left. Altered Carbon gave him more room as Tanaseda Hideki, a yakuza elder with centuries behind him, and he plays it with an amused, unhurried cruelty.

Later work has been warmer. Harry in Always Be My Maybe, Bob Lin in Love Hard, Kenji in Modern Love, Arthur Mori in Dash and Lily, Hank in Tigertail. Chen on Eli Stone gave him a recurring television role with room to be funny in. He is that useful thing, an actor whose presence signals to a director that this small part will be handled.