Goro Inagaki

Inagaki's career started before he was old enough to drive. His first major film credit — Saraba Itoshino Yakuza, in which he played Takashi Takanashi — came in 1990, when he was 16, and it announced something: this wasn't going to be a musician doing a vanity acting project (Wikipedia). The international work followed quickly. Private Lessons II (1993) cast him as Ken Soto, the male lead in a romantic comedy that also featured SMAP's Masahiro Nakai — an early sign that the group's crossover ambitions extended well beyond Japan (TMDB). Through the 1990s and 2000s, he kept building. Parasite Eve (1997), Hypnosis (1999), University of Laughs (2004) — a filmography that doesn't fit neatly into any single genre box. He also voiced a character in the One Piece feature film The Giant Mechanical Soldier of Karakuri Castle (2006) and portrayed Kamen Rider G in the 2009 TV special of the same name, which, depending on your relationship with tokusatsu television, is either a footnote or a highlight (Kamen Rider Wiki). The role that probably traveled furthest internationally, though, is Lord Naritsugu Matsudaira in Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins (2010) — a genuinely unsettling performance in a film that earned a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Hard to say if that score reflects how well Miike directed the ensemble or how specifically effective Inagaki was as the film's moral center of gravity, but either way, it's his highest-rated credit. After SMAP's 2016 dissolution — one of the more seismic events in Japanese pop culture that decade — Inagaki didn't slow down. He departed Johnny & Associates in 2017 and regrouped informally with bandmates Kusanagi and Katori as Atarashii Chizu (Wikipedia). On the film side, he's continued working into the mid-2020s: A Girl Named Ann arrived in 2024, and Bana-Ana is listed for 2026. He also contributed voice work to Children of the Sea (2019), though that film sits at a more modest 62% on Rotten Tomatoes — his lowest-rated credit in available data.