Asami Usuda

Asami Usuda wasn't looking for the spotlight when she started posing for teen magazines in the early 2000s.

Her face fit the aesthetic standard of Seventeen magazine, and that was enough to fill fashion pages before she turned twenty. That phase gave her iron discipline in front of the camera, but the modeling role soon felt too small for her.

In 2003, she had her first real contact with television in the drama Kunimitsu no Matsuri.

It was a minor role.

But that shoot showed her that she needed something more than just standing still in front of a lens. So she decided her path would not be on the runways of Paris but on the sets of Tokyo.

The risk of fixed cameras

During 2006, she shot Umi de no Hanashi, and that's when the Japanese film industry started taking notes on her ability to hold the gaze. She wasn't the typical pretty face of Japanese pop who reaches film by accident. Her gestures had a contained roughness that several directors would later know how to exploit.

In 2009, she took part in Love Exposure under the direction of Sion Sono.

That nearly four-hour film was a trial by fire for any young actor in Japan. Usuda played Kaori with a mix of fragility and violence that definitively moved her away from the pages of Pinky magazine.

And the gamble paid off.

Because from that moment on, the scripts that reached her desk no longer asked only for a perfect smile. In 2010, she starred in Rambling Girl and proved she could carry the weight of a full story without the help of big visual effects.

Years later came Piece of Cake in 2015, where she handled the bittersweet romantic comedy genre. She did it without falling into the usual habits of Toho's commercial productions. She prefers working with silence rather than shouting, and that shows in the economy of movement she brings to the screen.

Maturity after the break

In 2017, she married musician Okamotoreiji, and her work pace changed dramatically. Before marrying, she took on three or four projects per season, but after her motherhood in 2018, she became much more selective about her television appearances.

That break was not a permanent retirement.

In 2020, she returned to film with Hold Me Back, playing Nozomi. In this film directed by Akiko Ohkura, she made audiences forget her advertising past and showed herself to be a character actress capable of holding three-minute close-ups without blinking.

During 2023, she joined the cast of the series The Days for Netflix. The production recreates the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and Usuda brought a necessary sobriety to a story loaded with technical tension and human drama.

In 2024, she premiered The Parades under the direction of Michihito Fujii. It's a story about limbo and unfinished business, in which she shares the screen with Masami Nagasawa and Kentaro Sakaguchi.

The film The Parades had a budget managed by Netflix and was shot mainly on location in Shizuoka Prefecture.