Mayu Hotta, the actress Japan keeps casting beside the heroine

Mayu Hotta

Photo: Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 2, 1998 Shiga Prefecture, Japan
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Rurouni Kenshin: The Beginning
Awards	Yokohama Film Festival Best Newcomer · Elan d'Or Award, Newcomer of the Year · Academy Award

The NHK morning drama Blossom is already on air, and in its latest casting announcement Mayu Hotta is not the heroine. She plays Sayoko Mori, a writer modelled on the novelist Fumiko Hayashi, one of the peers who push Shizuka Ishibashi’s protagonist to take her own writing seriously. It is her third morning drama, and once again she is not the woman at its centre. Anyone who has followed her career will not read that as a demotion. With Hotta, the second chair has become close to a method.

The habit started with a schedule clash. Hotta reached the final audition for the lead of Warotenka, an NHK morning serial, and had to pull out because the dates collided with a film she was headlining. NHK called back and offered her the heroine’s younger sister, Rin, opposite Wakana Aoi. “More than anything, it was frustrating not to be allowed to try,” she said later, adding that not going is part of the reason she is where she is now.

She came to that audition from Shiga Prefecture, east of Kyoto, where she was born on April 2, 1998, and spent roughly ten years in classical ballet from the age of six. She credits the ballet with the expressiveness she still relies on, and with a stubborn dislike of losing. The decision to act came in junior high school, after watching the live-action Rurouni Kenshin. In 2014 she reached the final round of auditions for the film Solomon’s Perjury and missed out; the same year she won the WOWOW Drama Award at the Amuse talent agency’s audition festival, which led to her debut in WOWOW’s Themis’ Sentence.

The years that followed belonged to manga adaptations and to one specific kind of part. In Hayato Kawai’s Kaguya-sama: Love Is War and its sequel Kaguya-sama Final: Love Is War, opposite Sho Hirano and Kanna Hashimoto, she was Ai Hayasaka, the heroine’s attendant who spies, schemes and changes identity on command. In Nippon TV’s Mr. Hiiragi’s Homeroom she was one of the students held hostage by their teacher. Then came the role with a private history attached: Ikumatsu in Keishi Ōtomo’s Rurouni Kenshin: The Beginning, opposite Takeru Satoh, inside the franchise that had made her want to act in the first place.

Period drama changed how the industry read her. In Kōki Mitani’s taiga The 13 Lords of the Shogun she arrived mid-season as Hina, the second wife of Shun Oguri‘s Hōjō Yoshitoki, a protagonist hardening episode by episode. The following year NHK gave her the centre of a story. In Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Fumi Yoshinaga’s alternate Edo where a plague has reversed the order of power between the sexes, Hotta played Tokugawa Iemitsu, a young woman forced to rule under a dead man’s name, opposite Sota Fukushi. Much of the audience saw for the first time what she could do with rage held under protocol.

The recognition followed quickly. Tsugaru Lacquer Girl, Keiko Tsuruoka’s quiet film about a daughter learning the lacquer trade from her craftsman father, played by Kaoru Kobayashi, gave her a lead in cinema and earned her the Best Newcomer prize at the Yokohama Film Festival. An Elan d’Or newcomer award came in the same season. Then TBS cast her in Antihero, its Sunday-night legal thriller led by Hiroki Hasegawa, as Asuka Shinomiya, the young lawyer at his side. The role won her the Television Drama Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Here is where the story gets less tidy. For a large share of the Japanese public, Hotta was a face before she was a performer: five years as an exclusive model for the fashion magazine non-no, and an advertising roster, from ice cream and beer to a bridal magazine and a railway, that most leading actresses would envy. Japan has a long tradition of “CM queens” whose screen careers bend around their endorsements, and the leads Hotta has been handed on network television, in romance and family dramas such as Every Precious Moment and Colors of Sisterhood, have tended to come and go without much noise. Her strongest notices keep arriving in the supporting slot. Whether that reflects an industry that keeps placing a lead in second position, or an actress whose best register is the chair beside the heroine, her filmography has not yet settled. Hotta has her own account of the problem. She has said she once concentrated so hard on delivering lines faithfully that she “forgot to act with her heart,” and that she now builds characters from the parts nobody sees: the pain behind them and their fear about what comes next.

The past year has been unusually dense. She joined TBS’s Mr. Mikami’s Classroom early in 2025, took a role in the school-legal drama School Lawyer that summer, left non-no after five years and, from October 2025, co-hosted Nippon TV’s travel programme Another Sky with Koji Imada before stepping down with the broadcast of September 26, 2026. On screen, 2026 has brought an NHK special in the Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan universe, Nippon TV’s summer mystery Ichijigen no Sashiki and the films Kimi no Quiz and I Don’t Know You.

The largest of them opened on September 18. In The Village of Eight Gravestones, Takashi Shimizu’s new adaptation of Seishi Yokomizo’s novel, with Matsuya Onoe as the detective Kosuke Kindaichi, Hotta plays Miyako Mori, the beautiful widow who guides the young heir into the cursed village. It is one of the most charged female parts in Yokomizo’s work, and earlier screen versions made Miyako the dark centre of the story. The film has been selected for the Sitges festival in Catalonia.

She has also described a change in how she thinks about the job. A holiday abroad around her tenth anniversary in the business taught her, in her words, that “resting is not the same as standing still,” and that she does not live for work but works because she has a life.

The calendar stays full. On November 13 Prime Video premieres Glico With Landmines, the adaptation of Yugo Aosaki’s prize-winning game-of-wits novel led by Nana Mori and Aju Makita, with Hotta as Esora Ukita. On February 11, 2027, she voices the lead of the animated feature ghost/end of night. And six mornings a week, somewhere in Blossom, a writer modelled on Fumiko Hayashi is waiting to share a scene with the heroine. On present form, that may be the best seat in the house.