Ayumu Nakajima

#1On Ayumu Nakajima's first day filming the 2025 NHK morning drama "Anpan," he had to propose marriage.

#2There wasn't much time to ease into it. His character, Jiro Wakamatsu, and Mio Imada's Nobu had only met a handful of times in the story. Morning dramas move fast. In a fifteen-minute episode, relationships sometimes have to become convincing before the actors have had the luxury of building them slowly.

#3So the scene presented a strange problem.

#4Nakajima couldn't merely look like a man saying the right romantic words. Somehow, viewers had to believe that something between these two people had actually changed.

#5And during the take, Nakajima felt it happen.

#6He later said that it seemed as if Nobu, as played by Imada, opened her heart to Jiro. Feeling that from the person in front of him made something move inside him too.

#7He left the set exhilarated.

#8That might not sound like a particularly dramatic career milestone. An actor felt connected to another actor in a scene.

#9But for Nakajima, it was.

#10Because eleven years earlier, on another NHK morning drama, he had experienced almost the exact opposite.

#11Nakajima's acting career began with the sort of story that usually appears near the end of an actor's biography.

#12In 2013, he auditioned for "Black Lizard," the lavish stage production starring and directed by Akihiro Miwa.

#13There were roughly 200 candidates.

#14Nakajima got the role of Junichi Amamiya.

#15He was twenty-four and had been working as a model, partly because he saw modeling as a possible route toward becoming an actor. Now, before he had built much of an acting résumé at all, Miwa had chosen him for a major stage.

#16Miwa even told Nakajima that he reminded him of his younger self.

#17It looked like discovery.

#18Then rehearsals began.

#19Nakajima quickly realized that being noticeable enough to win an audition and knowing what to do once you had won it were two completely different things.

#20Miwa questioned him about what skills he actually possessed. Sword fighting? Japanese dance? Pantomime? Nakajima mentioned that he had done rakugo at university. Then, Miwa challenged him on that too: if he had performed rakugo, shouldn't he have more ways of using his voice?

#21Nakajima had to be taught how to stand, how to move, how to handle the words and intentions inside a scene.

#22Years later, he remembered the experience less as a glamorous debut than as a period when he kept disappointing people and discovering how little he could actually do.

#23He had been chosen from 200 people.

#24And almost immediately, he was learning how unprepared he was to be an actor.

#25One year later, Nakajima was cast in "Hanako and Anne."

#26Again, it looked like extraordinary momentum.

#27An NHK morning drama can make a relatively unknown actor familiar to an enormous audience. Nakajima wasn't hidden in the background either. He played Ryuichi Miyamoto, the young man who falls in love with Renko, played by Yukie Nakama.

#28Around him were actors with far more experience, including Kotaro Yoshida.

#29Nakajima thought hard about his character.

#30That wasn't the problem.

#31The problem was getting what he had imagined out of his head and into his body.

#32He could think about what a scene meant, what his character felt and what he wanted to express. But when the camera rolled, the result didn't necessarily resemble what he had imagined.

#33Viewers noticed.

#34During the broadcast, there were online comments describing his delivery as "棒読み"—as if he were simply reading the lines without enough feeling.

#35It wasn't a unanimous verdict, and it would be an exaggeration to say the entire country branded him a bad actor.

#36Nakajima didn't need anyone else to exaggerate it for him, though.

#37He has said himself that he wasn't good in the drama and that the reaction to his performance was poor.

#38The experience stayed with him for years.

#39Eventually, he would call "Hanako and Anne" a major trauma.

#40The fall hurt partly because the beginning had been so fast.

#41"Black Lizard" in 2013.

#42"Hanako and Anne" in 2014.

#43His first film lead, "Good Stripes," in 2015.

#44Magazine work.

#45A young actor could look at that sequence and reasonably assume that the next opportunity would lead to another one.

#46Nakajima did.

#47For a while, he thought things might simply keep going.

#48They didn't.

#49Work gradually became harder to come by.

#50Looking back, Nakajima has been strikingly unsentimental about why.

#51He wasn't good enough yet.

#52That distinction matters.

#53This wasn't simply a story about a promising actor destroyed by cruel comments on the internet. The criticism hurt him deeply, but there was something more difficult underneath it: he knew that he couldn't yet make his acting do what he wanted it to do.

#54If everyone else had simply misunderstood him, he could have dismissed them.

#55Instead, their criticism collided with something he already feared about himself.

#56Having little work gave Nakajima too much time to think about the work everyone else might be doing.

#57Actors of his generation were going to sets.

#58They were rehearsing.

#59They were being corrected, failing, trying again, learning what cameras and directors wanted.

#60And he wasn't there.

#61At one point, his days became bad enough that he would start drinking in the morning, sometimes around ten.

#62He has joked about just how unhealthy that period became, but the feeling behind it wasn't particularly funny.

#63He was watching people his age move forward while feeling as if his own clock had stopped.

#64By around thirty, the question was no longer just, "When will my next good role come?"

#65It was, "How long am I going to keep doing this?"

#66He wasn't earning much. He considered whether he should get a normal job. Having played in bands when he was younger, he even thought about working in a record store.

#67But there was an irritating complication.

#68He still loved movies.

#69He still loved theater.

#70And the more he watched, the more he liked them.

#71Even while failing at acting, he couldn't quite make himself stop wanting to act.

#72It would make for a cleaner story if Nakajima woke up one day, threw away the alcohol and devoted himself completely to training.

#73That isn't really what happened.

#74The drinking and the learning belonged to the same messy stretch of his life.

#75He could be discouraged and still go see a play.

#76He could feel left behind and still attend an acting workshop.

#77He could wonder whether he should quit and then find himself fascinated by a filmmaker.

#78Eventually, one conclusion became difficult to avoid.

#79If he simply sat with his mouth open waiting for work, work wasn't going to arrive.

#80So he started going toward people instead.

#81He went to small theaters.

#82He joined workshops.

#83If a filmmaker interested him, he might attend a talk.

#84He even showed up at film screenings and stage greetings so he could introduce himself to directors.

#85Part of it was training.

#86Part of it was networking.

#87But there was another part too: Nakajima was looking for places where the kind of acting he wanted to understand was actually happening.

#88There was never one teacher who fixed Ayumu Nakajima.

#89Miwa had taught him form: the body, the voice, the discipline required before an actor could claim to be expressive.

#90Miwa also left him with another instruction: in the end, act with your heart.

#91But Nakajima still had to figure out what that meant in practice.

#92Working with British theater director David Leveaux gave him a very different experience. Nakajima had become accustomed to trying to reproduce whatever he thought a director wanted.

#93Leveaux asked him to try what he wanted first.

#94That freedom was unsettling.

#95It was also useful.

#96Actor Yoshimasa Kondo taught him something else almost accidentally. When Kondo spoke a line to him, Nakajima felt that the words were genuinely being said to him.

#97It was a simple realization with difficult consequences.

#98A line wasn't merely something to deliver well.

#99It had to reach another person.

#100And then Masanori Tominaga gave Nakajima something he had been missing for years: permission to sound like himself.

#101In the 2019 drama "Hitori Camp de Kutte Neru," Tominaga didn't ask Nakajima to disappear into a director's predetermined answer.

#102He wanted him to create acting that felt like Nakajima.

#103For someone who had spent years worrying about whether he was performing correctly, that was liberating.

#104Nakajima tried things more freely.

#105And they were accepted.

#106He began to feel something he had rarely felt earlier in his career.

#107Maybe this way of doing it was okay.

#108The result mattered beyond one production. Other filmmakers saw what he was doing, and one job began to lead more naturally toward another.

#109For years, Nakajima had been moving through workshops and small creative circles without any obvious breakthrough.

#110Now some of those relationships were starting to become visible on screen.

#111One of the directors he had encountered through that world was Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

#112Hamaguchi already knew Nakajima from a workshop before casting him in "Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy."

#113That detail matters because Nakajima wasn't suddenly discovered from nowhere.

#114He had spent years putting himself in rooms where filmmakers could see how he worked.

#115Hamaguchi's approach to actors also suited a different version of Nakajima from the nervous beginner who had tried to manufacture the "correct" performance.

#116For Hamaguchi, casting wasn't merely a contest to determine who could demonstrate the most impressive acting. Fit mattered. Communication mattered. The feeling that this was someone you could actually work with mattered.

#117"Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy" went on to win the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2021.

#118And something changed for Nakajima afterward.

#119His name traveled more widely among Japanese filmmakers.

#120Offers increased.

#121The film didn't magically teach him how to act. By then he had already spent years discovering what he couldn't do and trying different ways of fixing it.

#122What the film did was make that accumulation visible.

#123Nakajima later became emotional while speaking at the Takasaki Film Festival about workshops. To him, they weren't just classrooms.

#124They were places where actors could meet directors, where new work could begin, where someone whose career appeared to be going nowhere could still find another route.

#125Even then, Nakajima's change wasn't a single overnight breakthrough.

#126Film directors began noticing him before a broad television audience did.

#127That second shift arrived more clearly in 2024 with "Extremely Inappropriate!"

#128Nakajima played Yasumori, a middle-school teacher.

#129He wasn't introduced as the overwhelming centerpiece of the series. But as the drama went on, his peculiar presence, comic timing and relationship with the other characters started attracting attention.

#130Years later, when Japanese television programs described Nakajima as a late-blooming actor who finally broke through around thirty-five, "Extremely Inappropriate!" was one of the works used to mark that change.

#131The sequence was becoming almost backwards from the career he had expected in his twenties.

#132Back then, a huge television role had arrived before he was ready.

#133Now he had spent years in smaller films, theaters and workshops before television audiences began noticing him again.

#134Then came the offer that carried more history than any ordinary casting decision could.

#135NHK wanted him back in a morning drama.

#136In "Anpan," Nakajima played Jiro Wakamatsu, the man who marries Nobu.

#137It was his first morning drama since "Hanako and Anne."

#138Eleven years had passed.

#139But the old experience hadn't simply faded.

#140Nakajima has said that preparing for Jiro made him realize how much of the earlier trauma was still inside him.

#141There were reminders of the past on set too.

#142Kotaro Yoshida, one of the formidable actors Nakajima had worked opposite in "Hanako and Anne," was part of "Anpan" as well.

#143Nakajima was happy to see him again.

#144He was also a little frightened.

#145By then Yoshida was not merely a respected actor but also an accomplished stage director, and Nakajima admitted that some part of him wanted Yoshida to recognize how much he had grown as an actor.

#146Nakajima never claimed that Yoshida finally gave him some perfect stamp of approval.

#147Wanting it was enough to reveal what the reunion meant.

#148There was another connection to 2014.

#149Director Tsuyoshi Yanagawa had worked on both "Hanako and Anne" and "Anpan."

#150Nakajima wasn't merely returning to the same type of program.

#151He was returning in front of people who had actually seen the actor he used to be.

#152Jiro created an unusual acting problem.

#153He was almost too decent.

#154He understood Nobu. He supported her. He tended to say the kind thing.

#155Nakajima worried that if they weren't careful, Jiro would stop feeling like a human being and start feeling like a convenient collection of virtues.

#156So he brought the concern to Yanagawa.

#157The director understood what he meant.

#158That exchange was small, but it showed how different Nakajima's position had become.

#159When he was younger, he had often been the actor desperately trying to work out how to execute what someone else wanted from him.

#160Now he could identify a problem in a role, articulate it and work through it with the director.

#161And then, on day one, he had to propose to Nobu.

#162This is why that first day mattered so much.

#163Eleven years earlier, Nakajima had thought intensely about his acting and still felt unable to express what was in his head.

#164On "Anpan," the crucial moment wasn't happening only in his head anymore.

#165He was watching Mio Imada.

#166He felt something change in her performance.

#167That changed his.

#168Instead of deciding in advance what emotion he needed to display, he felt himself responding to what another actor was giving him in real time.

#169For Nakajima, the scene felt connected.

#170He went home delighted.

#171By the time "Anpan" aired, Jiro was receiving warm reactions from viewers. His character trended on social media.

#172Nakajima was suddenly seeing the reach of a morning drama from the other side.

#173For years, much of his work had been in films that played in relatively small cinemas. Now enormous numbers of people were reacting to a character he had made.

#174It should have been perfect closure.

#175It wasn't.

#176Nakajima has said he is still afraid of checking reactions online.

#177Asked whether he had overcome the trauma of "Hanako and Anne," he did not give the satisfying answer a redemption story would want.

#178No.

#179He thinks it will probably remain.

#180That changes the meaning of his return.

#181"Anpan" wasn't the moment he defeated the past and stopped caring what anyone thought.

#182The past came with him.

#183In fact, Nakajima believes it was part of the reason he prepared so seriously for the role.

#184And when he looks back at the first morning drama now, he can imagine an uncomfortable alternative.

#185What if everyone had simply accepted him back then?

#186What if the acting had been praised before he had really learned how to do it?

#187Nakajima has said he probably wouldn't have studied acting this much.

#188That doesn't make the failure pleasant.

#189It doesn't make the years of insecurity, drinking and wondering whether to quit secretly good.

#190It means something more complicated.

#191The thing that hurt him most refused to disappear, so he kept having to answer it.

#192He answered it in small theaters.

#193In workshops.

#194In conversations with directors.

#195In roles where someone finally told him to act like himself.

#196In films that taught more people his name.

#197And eventually, eleven years later, in another NHK morning drama.

#198The clearest sign of how far he had come wasn't that viewers suddenly liked him.

#199It happened before any of them saw the episode.

#200On his first day back, Nakajima looked at the actor standing across from him, felt her performance change, and discovered that his own performance could change with it.

#201For the first time, the thing he had imagined and the thing happening between two actors didn't feel so far apart.

#202These days, Nakajima says acting is fun.

#203The old wound is still there.

#204But so are all the things he learned because he couldn't simply pretend it wasn't.