Ken Watanabe
Year Title Role Notes
1983 Taiyō ni Hoero ! Yūji Shimizu Episode 574
1986 Hanekonma Genzō Onodera Asadora
1987 Dokuganryū Masamune Date Masamune Taiga drama
1989 Oda Nobunaga Oda Nobunaga TV movie
1990-1992 Baian the Assassin Baian Fujieda
1993-1994 Homura Tatsu Fujiwara no Tsunekiyo Fujiwara no Yasuhira Taiga drama
1995-2002 Gokenin Zankurō Zankurō Matsudaira
2000 Ikebukuro West Gate Park Inspector Yokoyama
2001 Chūshingura 1/47 Cameo , TV movie
2004 The Vessel of Sand Shūichirō Imanishi
2009-2011 Saka no Ue no Kumo Narrator Taiga special drama
2018 Segodon Shimazu Nariakira Taiga drama
2019 An Artist of the Floating World Masuji Ono TV movie
TBA Tokyo Vice Hiroto Katagari Upcoming series
Filmography -- Television
Ken Watanabe (渡辺 謙, Watanabe Ken, born October 21, 1959) is a Japanese actor. To English-speaking audiences, he is known for playing tragic hero characters, such as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Among other awards, he has won the Japan Academy Prize for Best Actor twice, in 2007 for Memories of Tomorrow and in 2010 for Shizumanu Taiyō. He is also known for his roles in Christopher Nolan's films Batman Begins and Inception. In 2014, he starred in the reboot Godzilla as Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, a role he reprised in the sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. He lent his voice to the fourth and fifth installments of the Transformers franchise respectively, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight, as Decepticon turned Autobot Drift. He made his Broadway debut in April 2015 in Lincoln Center Theater's revival production of The King and I in the title role. In 2015, Watanabe received his first Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical at the 69th Tony Awards for his role as The King. He is the first Japanese actor to be nominated in this category. Watanabe reprised his role at the London Palladium in June 2018.