Age: 43
male
Ryuhei Matsuda (松田 龍平, Matsuda Ryūhei, born 9 May 1983) is a Japanese film and television actor. Matsuda's best known film roles include the young and desirable samurai Sōzaburō Kanō in Taboo and the rock star Ren Honjo in Nana. At age 15, Matsuda was offered the role of the desirable young samurai Kanō Sōzaburō in Nagisa Ōshima's 1999 film Taboo. The role helped boost him from an entirely unknown actor to a film star, earning him a Japanese Academy award "Newcomer of the Year", as well as "Blue Ribbon", "Kinema Junpo", and "Yokohama Film Festival" Awards for the "Best New Actor". Since appearing in Taboo, Matsuda has played a wide range of roles, from the high school student Kujo in the 2001 film Blue Spring to the rock star Ren Honjo in the 2005 film Nana. In February 2013, it was revealed that Matsuda would play the part of a Japanese gangster in the sequel to the 2012 Indonesian film The Raid, named Berandal. In 2020 portrayed Ryūnosuke Akutagawa in the film A Stranger in Shanghai. It depicts Akutagawa's time in as a reporter in the city.
In postwar Japan, a fiercely ambitious filmmaker named Akira Kurosawa finds his perfect screen alter ego in the wild, magnetic Toshiro Mifune. Together, they conquer Japanese cinema and change filmmaking around the world. But as success turns into obsession, their legendary partnership begins to fracture—and Kurosawa finds himself abandoned by an industry that once called him a master. Haunted by loss and pushed to the brink of self-destruction, he must decide whether there is anything left worth creating. Years later, a new generation of filmmakers raised on his work offers him an unexpected path back. THE EMPEROR is the story of a man who changed cinema, lost nearly everything, and returned to create his greatest battles one last time.
