Quotes of the Day

Basically, Tadanobu Asano is terrified. Of becoming a superstar. And, of course, of not being a star. Of being famous and of becoming trapped in that fame. Of success, of the pressures of that success. Of failure. Of being cool, of being too cool and, inevitably, of no longer being cool. He is frightened that his cinematic success has been a matter of good luck rather than talent, and scared of what he might find out about himself if he tests that talent in search of greater cinematic success. He is crap scared, really, of who he might become if he tries to become someone great.

And he's also terrified of heights. That's what the 28-year-old is confronting right now, perched on the railing of Bangkok's Rama IV Bridge, staring down at the milk chocolate waters of the Chao Phraya River 15 meters below, his hands trembling. We're on the set of Last Life in the Universe, his new picture due to be released next summer, and Asano is realizing that before all that actor babble about career and art and acting and craft, there is the small matter of not dying during the 12th take of a still unfinished scene for a yet unsatisfied director. Asano crouches on the 10-centimeter-wide rail, turns his head and quietly confides, "This is the scariest thing I've ever done."

Which is a funny thing for him to say because much of his career in movies has been made by his ability to inspire fear. If Japan is usually a law-abiding society, then Asano, Japan's most promising actor, is its collective Mr. Hyde. He's the dark creature inhabiting repressed, frustrated Japanese psyches, who instead of bowing and kowtowing, is allowed to mutilate his way through twisted, dysfunctional, millennial Japan. In his 14-year, 30-film career, Asano has shot, stabbed, maimed, tortured and gone in for more than a little self-inflicted pain, and done it all wearing a benumbed expression and smug smirk. His gift has been that through all the deluded romantics, disloyal cult members and gay samurai he has portrayed, he has always remained recognizable as Japan's favorite ultraviolent, overmedicated son. If every culture gets the hero it deserves, then it's chilling to think of what it means for Japan to have settled on Tadanobu Asano as the man of the moment. And for Asano, being the center of that cultural vortex has inspired an even greater bout of vertigo than from standing on that Bangkok bridge.

Asano has made his reputation precisely by taking those sorts of risks, of stepping out onto that cinematic ledge and leaping into whatever a script has demanded. His jerky shrug and stolid willingness to ask how high when told to jump has made him the reigning poster boy for Japan's edgy, independent film industry. Unlike most Japanese movie stars, Asano has refused to do any of the ubiquitous TV game shows or sit down for tedious taidan with other tarento. He has played the loner miscast in his own profession. But what happens to the sullen prince of underground films when everyone from Nagisa Oshima to Shunji Iwai wants him in their movies; what about when the noir star is asked to become leading man bland? He's getting barraged with new scripts every month from filmmakers across Asia. Now his keep-your-distance faCade is starting to crack: once the Japanese Gary Oldman—Oldman happens to be Asano's favorite Hollywood actor—he's suddenly crossed into mainstream respectability. Nobody finds him too bizarre anymore: Japan's Gary Oldman has morphed into Heath Ledger.

And that's precisely what has him worried: real stardom. "If you're famous, you're not free," he says between takes in Bangkok. Thus far, Asano's career has proceeded with a rhythmic regularity that was comforting in its predictability. Asano's indifference to that professional progression may have stemmed from the fact that he never really wanted to act, but started making movies in the 1990s for a single reason: his family needed the money. If his lot in life was to be an actor, then Asano decided he would make the most of it, choosing strange roles, bizarre films, almost defying the movie gods to make him famous. As long as he was playing perverted peeping toms and chemically imbalanced yakuza thugs, he could blinker away the fact that he was improbably emerging as a teen pinup, taking up wall space next to Justin Timberlake and the guys from SMAP.

Asano has just climbed down from that bridge and is sitting on cracked steps leading up to a bronze, flower-laden statue of King Rama I. Incense sticks stuck into the shrine lend fragrant wisps of jasmine and lotus to the slightly fecal breeze coming off the river. He's been shooting for the past 11 hours, and the vacant stare he has trademarked through films like Electric Dragon 80000V, Picnic and next month's Woman of Water, seems deserved in this context: the guy's exhausted. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. A few strands of nascent chest hair poke out of his character's unbuttoned, steel gray salaryman special. "I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep," he says. Asano's reserve stems from easygoing confidence rather than insecure diffidence. He's had that phlegmatic cool from the start—it's reminiscent of the way certain kids in high school didn't have to actually do anything to earn their bitchin' reputations. And that's what his ostensible insouciance has inadvertently sold to the Japanese public—this idea that unlike the legions of manufactured teen idols and packaged rockers and cosmeticized TV talking heads trying desperately to win mind share and iconic status, his ascent has appeared effortless, like being the center of attention was his birthright.

He wasn't always the coolest kid, he insists. He used to be a freak, the tall kid with the fair complexion, drawn features and very light, almost blond hair due to being one-quarter Caucasian. He's never met his American grandfather, Jim Owen, but he attributes his easy slide into the rebel persona to being a bit different from the start. "I want to meet him. I'm missing a character from my life," Asano says.

Asano's upbringing in the Honmoku area of Yokohama was classically post-hippie, pre-punk. "Not many Japanese kids get their ears pierced by their own mom when they're only 13 years old," Asano laughs. He was shoved into the back of his mother's car and driven around with Led Zeppelin blaring as mom scoured Kannai thrift shops for vintage clothes. His father was a painter who shunned Japan's salaryman conventions, even taking the first part of his son's name—Tada—from Japan's pop-art maestro Tadanori Yokoo. At school, the young, pale kid was taunted as gaijin but soon found his way into a tight-knit gang of misfits who shared his obsession with Sid Vicious and harbored the same dreams of becoming rock stars. "I had a small band, I played bass. Music was my thing," Asano recalls of his first garage band. "I was listening to the Sex Pistols, Deep Purple, Bob Marley, and I didn't give a f____ about acting." Asano still fronts a rock band, and playing music remains his greatest passion as opposed to his acting job. "He really longed to be Sid Vicious," agrees his father, Yukihisa Sato.

Sato, who is now his manager, had a surprising parental insight when he saw a photo of his son's high school band and realized that this spiky-haired lad was more than just a snotty-nosed kid with an attitude problem; he was also his meal ticket. "I might have had a business motive," Sato concedes of dragging Asano along to his first television audition when the boy was just 14 years old. At the casting call, the precocious Asano noticed that all the other would-be child stars were hamming it up and as a result, coming across as pretentious, juvenile versions of adult actors. "There were all these kids at the audition being rehearsed for the role, and they were overacting," recalls Asano. "That looked s____y to me. I wondered why they couldn't just behave and speak like normal." That's when Asano made a fateful decision: "I knew I didn't want to look as stupid as them. It was best to do nothing, just be natural."

That resolve, to appear to do nothing, has been Asano's vehicle to celebrity. Ironically, that ability, particularly as it was showcased in the movie that established Asano as one of the most terrifying men in cinema, also made his reputation as an actor, inspiring directors and producers to wonder how they could package this pretty boy gone bad. Ichi the Killer, directed by Takashi Miike, grossed just $1.6 million in Japan, but more important than the paltry box office was the buzz around one of the goriest films of the year. (When the blood-drenched Ichi was shown at this year's Hong Kong Film Festival, the audience was issued with barf bags.)

The film falls into a genre of movies peculiar to 21st century Japan: the bully picture, in which disaffected adults wreak revenge for having been beaten up by their childhood peers. Ichi takes that genre to its logical, ultraviolent extreme before finally collapsing under its own weight of gore and convoluted plotting. If it weren't for Asano, the film would be utterly forgettable. Dressed throughout the movie like a mixture of chimpira (junior yakuza thug) and Malcom McLaren circa 1978, the bleach blond Asano injects into his role a curious blend of bored stoner and homicidal maniac—equal parts Jeff Spicoli and Hannibal Lecter—all played behind a leer similar to that of his boyhood idol, Sid Vicious. He delivers his dialogue in a soothing monotone, like a Japanese baseball player doing a postgame interview or a sumo wrestler explaining his grips. It's a deeply cynical interpretation, this gaudily dressed punk talking casually about the psychology of inflicting pain—"You have to mean it. That's what makes it hurt." Yet in a contemporary Japan where the disconnect between language and reality has taken on Orwellian proportions—when was the last time anyone believed what a Japanese politician was saying?—it makes sense to stay cool when delivering the most chilling of statements. Directors can't get enough of this poster boy for Japan's lost generation. "Too many stars who work with him think the only way to better him is by acting as hard as possible," says Ichi director Miike. His advice: "Don't try and outact Asano. You won't."

Asano hasn't remade himself for current cinematic tastes. It's more like Japan has now come around to appreciate Asano's starkly defined, low-key sort of screen presence. His first seven movies barely caused a stir, and it wasn't until he caught the eye of director Shunji Iwai and was tapped to play a mentally ill teenager in Picnic that his deadpan found its audience. The picture was a turning point for Asano in other ways: the female lead, singer Chara, eventually became his wife. "It was unusually hot that summer," Asano recalls, "and there I was in an unusual film, directed by an unusual director and met this very unusual woman." Chara has also specialized in offbeat roles, from a manic-depressive brat who dresses like a crow in Picnic to a Chinese hooker who becomes a nightclub singer in Iwai's Swallowtail. "The strange thing," says Asano, "is that when you get to meet and know her, you find she couldn't be more conventional. She's not wild at all."

Following Picnic, Asano zeroed in on weirder and weirder roles, culminating in Ichi and next winter's Akarui Mirai. "He's exactly like a Jekyll and Hyde," says Akarui Mirai director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. "You never know whether he'll give you intelligence or brute force," which is a bit of a challenge, Kurosawa admits. "It frightens me sometimes." Throughout his steady rise, however, Asano has remained a committed loner in the notoriously codependent Japanese film industry. Even on the set in Bangkok, he keeps to himself instead of leading the typical claque of assistants, stylists, photographers and publicists who trail after most Japanese celebrities. He helps himself to the catered buffet. He rarely cavorts with his co-stars or hits the town with the crew. When he's working in Japan, he drives himself to movie locations and back home afterward, even after a 12-hour shoot. Despite the bad boy image, Asano is terrible at the role of the scandalous celebrity: he doesn't drink, do drugs or even smoke. Instead, Japan's paragon of disaffected youth is a doting father who misses his kids when he's away on a shoot. Down deep, he insists, he's really a musician who just wanted to rock. These days he's playing lead guitar for a Tokyo-based band named Peace Pill. He says he would gladly leave films for the life of a musician or artist. "Actor," Asano says, "that's my least favorite role." And celebrity? Superstar? Cultural icon?

He doesn't even want to think about it.

At 10 p.m. on a recent Saturday night, the Shibuya On Air East club hosts the usual assemblage of punks, skinheads and wannabe models. A hard-core band named Safari is the main act, and tonight they have a guest lead singer: Tadanobu Asano. The shyest man in Japanese film walks onto a stage before 700 screaming fans. He's dressed in a white T shirt, Nike trainers and knee-length pink clamdiggers. The members of Safari are drinking beer and smoking cigarettes; Asano's hauling a bottle of Volvic mineral water. The blast of the first chords sets Asano raging. He doesn't so much dance as self-detonate, limbs flailing, chest twitching, legs bending. It's like the inner demons of every deranged character he's played have come together to rough up his body. He knocks into drums, speakers, drops his mike, picks it up, then throws it to the floor and tosses himself after it for good measure.

It's a striking change from his on-screen persona. The cool kid has become the class crazy, shouting nonsensical lyrics in a violent, machine-gun staccato. This is an act too, of course. This Chinese box idea of his aping a punk rocker excites Asano: "What if I'm an actor playing a musician?" he asks later. He's even adopted a different stage name for his solo music career. When he's onstage in apoplexy, he's no longer Tadanobu; he's Bunodata—a reverse scramble of the syllables in his name.

Despite his musical ambitions, Asano's persona as a rock star will unlikely match his success as an actor. And he seems determined to keep it that way—his latest composition is a decidedly uncommercial 60-minute song entitled Ants Being Trod On by People, which Asano hopes to turn into a video that will be his directorial debut. It's as if he relishes the anonymity of his feckless musical career. Up there, onstage, he doesn't have to be afraid of success or fame or becoming commodified and packaged and turned into yet another pop idol. He's up there, singing his heart out, trying his absolute hardest, just like those junior thespians he so despised at his first audition. It's as if he wants you to like him, and that's why you don't—not as a singer at least.

Asano is at his best when he doesn't care what you think. That's what makes him a joy to behold. But the inevitable next evolution of his celebrity means the whole world will be watching him. And how can he remain indifferent to that? He's on the brink of that sort of fame now; it's just a question of whether or not to jump.

• BRIAN BENNETT BANGKOK
• Tadanobu Asano has made a name for himself playing misfits and bad boys. Now he faces a wilder prospect: stardom