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Show Kasamatsu Isn’t Trying to Make Smoking Look So Cool
The Michael Corleone of Tokyo Vice on perfecting the cigarette etiquette of the period, Backstreet Boys karaoke, and why he ad-libbed a crucial scene.
As Akiro Sato, the enforcer turned leader of the Chihara-Kai gang, Kasamatsu is the gravitational pull at the center of Tokyo Vice, connecting the yakuza underworld with the journalists covering them, the cops chasing them, and the nightclubs benefiting from their patronage. A dashing figure with tattoos peeking out beneath his well-cut suit and a cigarette perched between his lips, Kasamatsu gives Sato the kind of coiled, poised presence that attracts everyone from Ansel Elgort’s reporter, Jake, to Rachel Keller’s hostess, Sam. The show often lingers on his face to capture the ways organized crime’s ruthlessness weighs on Sato: his raw grief while weeping over the body of his murdered mentor Ishida, or the shocked panic of bleeding out from an attack by one of his yakuza colleagues in season one’s cliffhanger.
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