Ryo Yoshizawa

Yoshizawa started where a great many Japanese leading men start and most never escape: tokusatsu. He was Ryusei Sakuta, Kamen Rider Meteor, in Kamen Rider Fourze and the run of crossover films around it in 2011 and 2012, playing a suit hero in a children's franchise.

What followed was the manga-adaptation conveyor belt, and he was very good on it. Yuu Kusakabe in Wolf Girl and Black Prince, Kominato in Blue Spring Ride, Yuu Matsuura in Marmalade Boy, Uryu Ishida in Bleach, Shun Kaido in Psychic Kusuo. Two roles lifted him off it. Sogo Okita in the Gintama films let him play deadpan cruelty for laughs, and Ei Sei in the Kingdom series, four films between 2019 and 2024, gave him a boy king to age into a monarch. He was also Mikey in the Tokyo Revengers films, a gang leader with a child's face, which is precisely the quality directors keep hiring.

The serious work grew alongside the franchises. River's Edge and Living in Two Worlds are adult dramas that ask him to carry a film without a costume, and he does.

Then Kokuho, in 2025, in which he plays the kabuki actor Kikuo Tachibana. It became the highest-grossing domestic live-action film in Japanese history and won him the Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Actor in a Leading Role. For someone who spent a decade in a Rider suit and a school uniform, that is about as complete a reversal as the industry offers.