Ayumu Nakajima, the leading-man face Japanese TV kept casting as the wrong man

Ayumu Nakajima

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	October 7, 1988 Miyagi Prefecture, Japan
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Asakusa Kid
Awards	TAMA Film · Takasaki Film Festival

For one summer, Japanese viewers watched Ayumu Nakajima die gently on NHK’s morning drama and then turn up on Fuji TV as a banker who courts a schoolteacher for the sake of his career while keeping a mistress. The first role left people grieving for a fictional husband. The second set off a chorus of “kimoi”, creepy, across social media. Same unhurried baritone, same tall, composed frame. Directors look at Nakajima and see the reliable man, which is exactly why they keep asking him to play the one who isn’t.

The contradiction runs further back than his recent ubiquity suggests. Nakajima is the great-great-grandson of Kunikida Doppo, the Meiji-era novelist, and his given name borrows the second character of Doppo’s pen name. He was born in Miyagi Prefecture but grew up from the age of four in Oji, in Tokyo’s Kita ward. He played football through middle school and volleyball in high school, then studied literature at Nihon University’s College of Art, where he joined the rakugo club and performed comic monologues under a series of deliberately ridiculous stage names. He even qualified to teach Japanese in secondary schools.

He modelled instead, as a way in. In January 2012 he gave that up and went to auditions between part-time jobs. The break came from the most theatrical figure in Japanese show business: Akihiro Miwa picked him from roughly 200 hopefuls to play Amamiya Jun’ichi in his production of Yukio Mishima’s Black Lizard, and Nakajima, born on October 7, 1988, made his stage debut in April 2013, at 24. The following year he was a regular on NHK’s morning serial Hanako and Anne as Miyamoto Ryuichi, and his first film lead, opposite Akiko Kikuchi in Good Stripes, won him the best new actor prize at the TAMA Film Awards.

Then the momentum stopped. Nakajima has described his late twenties as years of being torn to shreds in rehearsal rooms, while he watched contemporaries who got no notes at all from the same directors quietly run out of work. “I used to be incredibly tense just being on set,” he told Daily Sports in January 2026. “I kept thinking: I mustn’t get it wrong, I want to be called back.” Japanese television had already fitted him for the handsome lead’s suit, and it had plenty of those. It took a decade to work out what else he was for.

The answer came from the festival circuit. Lou Ye cast him as Kajiwara in Saturday Fiction, his first foreign production, which competed at Venice in 2019. Ryusuke Hamaguchi gave him Kazuaki in “Magic (or Something Less Assuring)”, the opening story of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy: the man two friends discuss at length before one of them realises that the charming stranger is her own ex. The film won the Grand Jury Prize, the Silver Bear, at the 2021 Berlinale. That part, together with Satoko Yokohama’s Itomichi, earned Nakajima best supporting actor at the Takasaki Film Festival in 2022.

He has since become a regular presence in the new Japanese art cinema, usually a few names down the cast list. He is the teacher Okada in Neo Sora’s Happyend, a presence in Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia and Omaezaki Toru in Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, which competed at Cannes in 2025. Netflix used him as Nagase Shinpei in Last Samurai Standing and as Sudo Yutaka in Straight to Hell, its series about the fortune-teller Kazuko Hosoki.

Television caught up late, and then all at once. The second season of Disney+‘s Gannibal brought Goto Osamu, a figure of flat, frightening cruelty. NHK’s Anpan made him Wakamatsu Jiro, the ship’s engineer who marries the heroine and dies of illness. Fuji TV’s Learning to Love made him Kawahara Yoji, whose courtesy towards his fiancée is a performance in its own right; a Real Sound critic called it a double act, an actor playing a man who is himself acting. The praise is earned. But the story of his “range” flatters the industry more than it explains him. Both of those would-be husbands exist to orbit a heroine, and both parts are supporting by design.

The lead finally came in January 2026, in a late-night slot on TV Tokyo. In Yugo Sakamoto’s We Are Bad Barbers, sharing top billing with Takuya Kusakawa, he played Higure Ayumu, a former hairdresser caught up in the strange days of an underworld fixer, under a mullet he suggested himself. It was his first lead in a serial drama, nearly thirteen years after his debut. “What I think about all the time is how freely I can work, whether I can jump on an idea,” he said while it aired. The same year cast him as the warlord Azai Nagamasa in NHK’s taiga drama Brothers in Arms and, from July, second on the bill behind Yu Aoi in TBS’s Until the T-Shirt Dries, Miku Ubukata’s drama about two couples undone by a bus crash. He played Sonoda Itsuki, a widower who suspects his late wife of an affair with another woman’s missing husband, and promised during the promotional rounds to betray every expectation.

The film career is about to tilt the same way. Yukiko Mishima’s Otoko Tomodachi, adapted from Akane Chihaya’s novel and opening in Japan on November 6, casts him once more as the lover, Shinji, a married doctor, opposite Mayu Matsuoka and Ryo Narita. After that comes his first solo lead in a feature: Tabi Suru Renshu, Kohei Sanada’s adaptation of Yusuke Norishiro’s road novel, shot in April and due in 2027, with Nakajima as Keisuke, a novelist travelling with his niece. Hiroshi Ishikawa’s the blue we touch, also set for 2027, has him as Fujino, an HR manager. The face will keep getting him cast as the man the heroine should not trust. Over the next two years, two films will show whether a story can be built around him instead.

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