Yuzu Aoki, the Japanese actor the industry keeps casting as a boy

Yuzu Aoki

Born	February 4, 2001 Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Minamata
Awards	MOOSIC LAB 2018 Best Actor

Japanese cinema has spent a decade casting Yuzu Aoki as the boy who has not yet decided who he is. He was the sullen middle-schooler who cannot say what he wants, or the young man watching the room from its edge. He played those parts well enough to become one of the faces of a whole strand of low-budget Japanese independent film. Now the mainstream has found him. In the space of a year he has turned up in a Toho football blockbuster and in the live-action remake of one of anime’s most loved romances, and Netflix has a series with him on the way. The question his career is asking is whether he can carry the same unease into rooms that size, and whether anyone will let him play a grown man while he does it.

Aoki grew up in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, and began working as a child, joining the youth theatre company Gekidan Himawari while still in primary school. The early credits are the ordinary apprenticeship of a Japanese child actor: one-off television roles, NHK-FM radio dramas, a voice in an anime feature and Japanese dubbing for Hollywood boys, among them the young Ford in Godzilla and Coop in Interstellar. Nothing in that list predicted the actor he became.

The first real role came at fifteen. In Shin Adachi’s 14 That Night, a comedy about middle-school boys and one night of failed adolescent bravado, he played Mitsuru Tada, and he has since named it as the film that turned his head toward acting as a vocation. Two years later Daigo Matsui cast him in Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops, a film about teenage actors whose stage play is cancelled, shot as a single unbroken take; his character simply carried his own first name.

The independent circuit took him in from there. Harika Abe’s Moonless Dawn, a film about three lonely teenagers, gave him his first lead, and the MOOSIC LAB festival, which pairs young directors with musicians, named him best actor for it in December 2018. Lead roles in Sacrifice and the shorts that followed made him one of the most recognisable faces in that scene. In 2019 he left Gekidan Himawari after nine years; at the start of 2021 he formally joined Humanité, the agency that represents actors such as Sakura Ando, a move that read as a statement of intent.

The film that pushed him beyond the festival circuit was A Girl on the Shore, Atsushi Ueda’s 2021 adaptation of Inio Asano’s manga about two middle-school students whose relationship begins as sex and never quite becomes love. Aoki and Ruka Ishikawa shared the lead, and Asano himself sat in on the auditions. It was frank material for actors that young, and Aoki’s Keisuke Isobe, a boy hollowed out by his brother’s death, earned him a nomination for the Sponichi Grand Prix newcomer award at the Mainichi Film Awards. The same year he appeared in Andrew Levitas’s Minamata, opposite Johnny Depp’s W. Eugene Smith, in a supporting role as Shigeru, one of the residents of the poisoned fishing town.

Television then made him familiar to a far larger audience. He joined the final stretch of NHK’s morning drama Come Come Everybody as Momotaro Otsuki, shared the lead with Ai Mikami in the MBS series Documentary of My Ex-Girlfriend Complex and joined Fuji TV’s Re: Revenge as Yuma Tendo. In cinema he kept choosing small films, among them Yumeki Kawakita’s Manami 100%, a film about a young man who cannot let go of his school crush. In 2025 he played Minato in the TBS series Then You Try Making It!.

There is a limit built into this career, and it is worth naming. Aoki turned twenty-five this year, and the parts the industry offers him have not aged at the same speed. In Yoshiyuki Okuyama’s live-action 5 Centimeters per Second he played Takaki Tohno as a high-school student, while Hokuto Matsumura took the adult role, the one the film is built around. In Yuta Shimotsu’s horror film New Group he was a schoolboy again, opposite Anna Yamada. And the biggest commercial film of his life so far, the live-action Blue Lock, cast him as Gurimu Igarashi, the comic-relief striker, in an ensemble led by Fumiya Takahashi. The film crossed ¥1.2 billion at the Japanese box office in its first month, which is the kind of number that changes an actor’s year, but it did so with Aoki in the margins. The fear for a performer of his type is familiar: the indie scene that made him prizes adolescent fragility, and the mainstream is happy to keep renting it for as long as his face allows.

He has pushed back where he can. In February 2026 he played Peter Pan on stage in Peter and Alice, John Logan’s play about the real children behind Alice and Peter Pan, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre. Talking about New Group, in which a craze for human pyramids spreads from a school to a whole town, he said his rule as an actor is never to treat his own reading of a character as the final word. His Yuu is the one student in a different uniform, the transfer pupil back from abroad who will not join the formation.

The rest of 2026 has kept him busy. He appeared in Chihiro Amano’s Magical Secret Tour, in Shuichi Okita’s Satoko Always alongside Kasumi Arimura and in the NHK drama Sasamakura as the young Hamada. On December 17 Netflix releases Quiztopia, Teruyuki Yoshida’s eight-episode adaptation of the satirical manga about a country governed by a quiz show, led by Takayuki Yamada, with Aoki among its sixteen newly announced cast members.

The project that may matter most comes later. Hiroshi Ishikawa, the director of Petal Dance, is returning after thirteen years with The Blue We Touch, produced by Bitters End, the company behind Drive My Car. Aoki plays Tomoki, an art student who cannot get his figure drawing right until a young woman, played by Erika Karata, agrees to sit for him. It is, again, a young man not yet finished, but this time the film is about what he makes. It is due in Japanese cinemas in 2027.

Tags: actors, Hokuto Matsumura, Anna Yamada, Yuzu Aoki, 5 Centimeters per Second, NEW GROUP