Anna Sawai Was Trained to Hold Back. Her Best Work Comes From Letting Go

Anna Sawai is crying. But she is not simply crying; she’s crying about another time she cried. It was at the 2024 Emmys, when the now 34-year-old became the first person to publicly identify as being of Asian descent to win the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Sawai received the Emmy (and the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award) for her work playing the translator Toda Mariko in FX’s Shōgun.

Sawai does not cry the way Mariko cries. Mariko is self-protective, and her tears are a rare resource reserved for private moments with the few people she trusts enough to be vulnerable in front of. Sawai’s tears are as common as her peals of giggles, ready for duty and prone to pouring out whenever she experiences any strong sensation, which is almost always. As Shōgun co-creator Rachel Kondo tells me, “Anna’s a crier because she’s a feeler.”

“I think it’s just when I get overwhelmed, I don’t know how to process the emotion, and then it just comes out as tears,” Sawai says on the roof of The London West Hollywood hotel in L.A. on a sunny Saturday in June. “But I think the tears are what kind of let me release everything that’s, like, boiling up.”

These eruptions distinguished Sawai within her family, which moved from New Zealand to Hong Kong to the Philippines for her father’s job at an electronics company, before settling in Tokyo when Sawai was 10. Her sister Reina naturally remembers lots of weeping—one time, Sawai tripped during a ballet performance, and the ensuing sobs were captured by her parents’ recording. Reina adds that Sawai has sometimes been “mischievous” and says she was always the loudest person in the house, though her sister does note, “We’re a pretty quiet family.” Sawai has seen her mother cry only three times, one of which was when she won the Emmy. (No actual drops left Mrs. Sawai’s welling eyes, though Sawai does start crying herself at the memory, in addition to her matryoshka doll of tears today over tears from that evening.)

Sawai walks me through a day off in her life—enjoying the waterfront view from her new home in a beautiful place she asks me not to disclose the location of; weight training; drinking two to three cups of coffee; texting with her group chat of college friends, “The Birthday Girls.” Then she gets anxious about the thought of her mom reading this and knowing she wakes up at 8 a.m. “I feel like the lazy one in my family,” Sawai says.

She spent years being trained to control herself—to live up to what she calls the stoicism of her family, the rigors of ballet training that she never quite mastered, and Japanese culture itself, where Sawai always felt like she wasn’t doing things the way people wanted her to, no matter how strong her drive was to be a “people pleaser.” But sitting here on this roof, unrehearsed, as Sawai succumbs to the emotions that go off like fireworks at any spark of stimuli, it feels obvious why she’s poised to become a movie star, with forthcoming roles as a grieving heist member in David Leitch’s How to Rob a Bank and Yoko Ono in Sam Mendes’s quartet of Beatles biopics. Maybe the quality filmmakers keep responding to isn’t just how Sawai disappears into a character, but how she has learned to let herself be seen.

There were detours on the path to productive emotional abandon. During college, Sawai entered the world of J-pop as the founding member of girl group Faky. Though she loves singing, Sawai describes the experience as the nadir of her life. “We really had no agency at all,” she says. “That’s just the way the industry is in Japan.” Sawai was informed where she’d be and what she would do when she got there. She was forbidden to write her own music, lest the management company not control every part of the process. In addition to the job being creatively unfulfilling, the pay was shit—Sawai only earned enough money to live through her three-year stint as a pop star by working as a cashier at the Abercrombie & Fitch in Ginza. She still remembers the smell of the cologne, now shuddering at the scent memory in her sleeveless polka-dot Reformation dress.

That’s when she came to a realization. She was working as a checkout girl in a retail job she didn’t want while she waited for her backup dream job to come through. “I had a crisis of like, What am I doing with my life?” Sawai says. “I’m not even doing the thing that I really wanna do.”

If Sawai was going to go for a career that was virtually impossible to succeed at, she might as well do what she had always wanted to: act, which she’d started doing at age 11 in a regional production of Annie and continued through “beginner-friendly acting lessons” that a previous management agency had provided around the time of Sawai’s first film role in Ninja Assassin. Acting was not a priority of the management’s plan for Sawai’s subsequent J-pop stardom.

Sawai’s incredibly strict contract was up for renewal, and she quit with a plan to move to L.A. to be an actor, but no work lined up or connections there.

She used her Abercrombie money to sign up for IMDbPro so that any interested representatives could reach out. Soon after, talent manager Jake Miller was enjoying a glass of red wine and tipsily watching Ninja Assassin, the 2009 film a teenage Sawai had a small but notable role in and which had fortuitously just been added to a streaming service to which Miller subscribed. (It featured stunts coordinated by future How to Rob a Bank director David Leitch—call it fate.) Miller went to Sawai’s IMDb page to check what projects she’d done since Ninja Assassin, saw that the answer was none, and sent a note to the Gmail address listed. He is still Sawai’s manager more than seven years later.

Sawai interrupts herself after revealing details like this, worrying that she’s doing the wrong thing by being honest. She identifies this as her J-pop training taking over. “In the music industry, I was taught to always be like, ‘Oh, hello! My name is Anna!’” she says, putting on a voice and face with a disciplined cheeriness that is much more restrained than her usual warm expulsiveness as she imagines meeting a fan or being interviewed on camera. “That sense of when someone knows you, you’re like, I have to be proper and make sure that I don’t disappoint them, and be smiley and happy.”

While describing her journey from praying for side-character work in The Fast and the Furious franchise to getting offered major film roles without reading for them, Sawai tells another story that she worries is too revealing, about losing a much (to her) coveted role in John Wick: Chapter 4. Sawai’s manager informed her that she hadn’t got the part, and she told him she wanted to stop auditioning for the television show she’d already read for several times. He convinced her to go in one more time. After that final audition, she learned that she’d booked Shōgun, which she wouldn’t have been able to take if she’d gotten John Wick. It turned out it had taken so many tests because Kondo and her husband and co-creator Justin Marks were rewriting the role of Mariko based on what Sawai was doing with the part.

“It does feel like fate,” Sawai says. “Every job that I haven’t been able to get and then I cried over, now that I look back, I’m like, Oh, I’m glad that it didn’t happen, because otherwise I couldn’t have done this.” She caveats this by noting that your fate can change if you veer from the path that will lead you to it or fail to will it into existence; call it Sawai’s version of manifesting. Wow, Sawai thinks to herself sometimes. My belief brought me here.

Sawai’s confidence has led to this point in her career, with substantial parts in risky but rewarding projects. Shōgun possessed a number of factors that, on paper, don’t indicate an obvious hit: much of the dialogue is spoken in period Japanese and focuses on the intricacies of battle strategy and local politics. There is a lot of calligraphy and tea pouring. Sawai’s character Mariko is a translator, and there are many scenes where the same sentences are repeated with subtle differences as Mariko works a very specific brand of soft diplomacy. In execution, the show—and Sawai’s performance, particularly—is riveting.

This attraction to challenge includes Sawai’s next project, How to Rob a Bank, out later this fall. It seems impossible that at no point during production did anyone powerful find out what the movie was about—or even see the title—and say, “Sorry, absolutely not.” The movie takes on the ills of modern capitalism and its effects on the healthcare and financial systems. How to Rob a Bank is both radically anti-income inequality and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios, which is famously overseen by Jeff Bezos, whose yacht cost half a billion dollars. “So many billionaires are taking away things, or companies might take away things from people who literally don’t have a lot to give,” says Sawai, who is shocked by the wealth disparity in America. “I don’t understand why it’s gone so extreme. Like, it could have been stopped way before.” This would fall under the category of things Sawai would not have revealed when she was still in what she calls “Japanese talent mode” but is willing to say now.

Sawai and Nicholas Hoult are the film’s central love story, and share a kind of loss that Sawai finds an even more accessible emotion than the other readily available ones. Though she has little personal experience with death, seeing it depicted in art always makes her weep. “I feel like in my past life I’ve lost someone really important to me,” Sawai says. “A lover, a family member. I don’t know who it is, but I have grieved a lot in my past life.” Leitch cast Sawai after seeing her on Shōgun, and had not remembered they’d worked together until someone told him. She’s “just someone who can be completely still and you can’t look away,” he says. “That’s not something you can teach.” Though they’re still grappling in her mind, Sawai has learned to let the control she can never quiet work in concert with passion, rather than allowing her muscular superego to smother her id.

The anguish that the characters in How to Rob a Bank feel does not keep the movie from being extremely fun to watch. (So fun, apparently, that the studio moved the release date from September to a more desirable pre-Thanksgiving slot.) It was also a delight to make. While they were filming in Pittsburgh, Hoult, Pete Davidson, Sawai, and Rhenzy Feliz, the fourth member of the heist crew, would go out for meals and excursions to a local amusement park to build an esprit de corps. During dinners that also included John C. Reilly and Zoë Kravitz, Sawai noticed that the sum of their fame drew people to watch them eat and whisper about them. But it was only Davidson who would inspire them to call out: “Pete. Pete! Is that you, Pete?” This is so disrespectful, Sawai thought.

She doesn’t get stopped often—she wore wigs for her roles in Pachinko and Shōgun, which also entailed historically accurate styling that is very unlike Sawai’s layered lob and iridescent manicure. Her affect is also completely different than anything she’s done on camera, with the exception of one scene in How to Rob a Bank, in which she gleefully learns to make a hard U-turn in a car, screaming with the kind of laughter that rings across the pool deck during our conversation. Sawai says that when she’s in Japan, she almost never gets noticed; when she’s in the U.S., people usually ask, “Are you Cate from Monarch: Legacy of Monsters?”, the Apple TV Godzilla series she appeared on two seasons of. “People don’t recognize me, and I think that’s a blessing.”

Sawai recently saw a video of Kravitz and her fiancé Harry Styles, in which Styles was signing autographs for fans and Kravitz was turned the other way, prompting fans to express criticism for the way Kravitz was standing. Sawai thinks about what it would be like for strangers to have opinions about her personal life. “That’s not normal,” she says.

In addition to the blockbuster potential of How to Rob a Bank and Sawai’s A24 debut opposite Austin Butler in Enemies, she is taking on one of the most important characters in Sam Mendes’s Beatles films, playing Yoko Ono to Harris Dickinson’s John Lennon. It’s a role that feels like it was manifested by Sawai. In high school, during a mock interview to prepare for college admissions, Sawai was asked what she wanted to be: an actor, of course. They suggested she think about someone she’d like to play and connect that to something she’d studied in school. Sawai went home and complained to her mother. “I don’t know who to mention,” she said. “Every story that I know in Hollywood is so white.” Her mother said, “What about Yoko Ono?” Ono is a Japanese woman who, at the height of her fame, nearly everyone in the world knew and had an opinion about. It is undeniable that she has been the subject of a tremendous amount of racism and sexism, in addition to being apocryphally credited with breaking up The Beatles. Someone close to Sawai asked why she would want to play a person everyone “hates.”

Sawai and her team were looking into optioning a book about Ono when she learned Mendes was producing a film about the band. After several Zoom conversations, Sawai says Mendes told her he wanted her to read the script before signing on because “he knew how particular I was about her story.” Shortly after our interview, Sawai traveled to London to begin filming—she’s particularly excited to work with Dickinson. “He’s so genuine and authentic,” she says. “He’s the opposite of me, where I’m like, ‘Hi!!’, trying to please everyone.” Sawai, ever the preparer, has become friendly with Lennon and Ono’s son Sean, whom she has been texting with fact-checking questions about Ono’s real feelings about things, because so much of what she said in interviews seemed to be more performance than the kinds of personal revelations Sawai is afraid the world might want from her.

If Kondo and Marks had known Shōgun was going to be such a critical and mass hit that what was supposed to be a limited series got another season, they might have been tempted to alter the arc of Sawai’s character, who (spoiler alert) sacrifices her punctiliously orthodox life to die for an evangelical belief in what is right. Selfishly, they would have loved to keep working with Sawai. But, Kondo says, “I feel like we would’ve been clipping her wings by staying with us.” She believes Sawai, like Mariko, has a greater mission. “There are little girls out there who are looking to her to say, ‘That’s, that’s my North Star,’” Kondo says of a Japanese woman becoming so prominent in Hollywood. “She’s subtly changing the culture, and she’s shifting how we, as women of Asian heritage, see ourselves.”

Sawai is aware that the kind of celebrity Kravitz and Davidson and Ono have experienced is a potential byproduct of the high-profile work that is happening because of her self-belief. “I don’t think fame is a healthy thing for anyone,” Sawai says. Davidson affirms: “Fame sucks,” he says. But he clarifies that the kind of nascent stardom of Sawai is different than his own strain because she’s not in this to become a celebrity; the people who go up to Sawai on the street are doing so because they’ve seen her incredible acting and, possibly, her sobbing winningly at the Emmys while accepting the first of many awards for it. “She’s doing it right,” Davidson says. “And she should be proud. That’s the sweet spot, you know? Being in epic shit and being able to still be a person, and just, you know, once in a while getting a pat on the back from a fan.”

Sawai puzzles through what that kind of success will mean for her. How will she be able to maintain the internal freedom she needs when she’s people pleasing her way through the growing number of fan interactions that are attendant to movie stardom? She knows she can escape to her new home away from L.A., where she finds the constant industry chatter wearying, and go to plays and cry freely. She can travel with her mother, who has, thanks to Sawai, found joy in venturing away from the comfortable structure of her life in Tokyo and seeing the world, even if the elder Sawai still declines to verbalize this happiness—she’ll leave the theatrics to her daughter.

Then, right before we leave the roof, Sawai has an epiphany. She can use the training and rigor that she once found so constraining to protect herself from the celebrity she seems destined to become, Sawai realizes; she can act like the version of herself she once tried mightily to be to preserve her true and tender self. “That’s how I’ll stay sane,” Sawai says in wonder.

Stylist SK Tang | Hairstylist Anh Co Tran | Makeup artist Yukari Obayashi Bush | Manicurist Queenie Nguyen | Set designer Peter Gueracague