The 13 Assassins villain: why Takashi Miike handed the role to a J-pop idol
Lord Naritsugu is one of the nastiest villains in samurai cinema, and the man playing him spent the previous two decades in Japan's biggest boy band. How Goro Inagaki got the part, and what the casting does to the film.
Naritsugu does things in the opening twenty minutes of 13 Assassins that most directors wouldn't put on screen at all. The actor doing them was, at the time, one-fifth of the most successful pop group Japan has ever produced.
Gorō Inagaki, born 8 December 1973, joined SMAP for their 1991 debut and stayed until the group dissolved on 31 December 2016. The scale is hard to overstate: 33 number-one singles, more than 38.5 million records sold in Japan alone, and a weekly Fuji TV variety show, SMAP×SMAP, that topped the annual household ratings eight times. When Japan Society programmed 13 Assassins in 2012, it billed the character in the listing as "SMAP's Inagaki Goro". The idol wasn't incidental to the casting. It was the point.
What Naritsugu actually does
The film establishes him fast and without flinching, because the whole plot depends on the audience wanting him dead by the twenty-minute mark.
- The Mamiya clan — he personally murders a feudal lord's entire family. The lord commits seppuku in public in protest at the Shōgun's refusal to punish him.
- The Makino family — he rapes a feudal lord's daughter-in-law and murders his son, which is why Makino later helps block the highway.
- The woman with no limbs — a peasant who survived him, mutilated and unable to speak, produced as evidence to Sir Doi's investigation.
- The protection racket — none of it is punished, because the Shōgun is his half-brother and is about to promote him to the Shogunate Council.
Read more: 13 Assassins: who is the 13th assassin? Not a samurai — and, by the ending, possibly not even mortal
He is also, crucially, bored by it. Inagaki plays the whole part at a kind of polite standstill, which is what makes it work.
"Pop star Inagaki Goro oozes nefarious charisma as the handsome yet hideous villain Naritsugu," wrote Christoph Huber in Sight & Sound.
Why an idol was the right call
Miike cast against training throughout this film. Over half the actors playing the assassins couldn't fence or ride, and he wanted it that way — skilled performers, he told Ain't It Cool News in 2011, "probably would've ended up being something they were doing to look good or be beautiful, or to fall into the trappings of the stereotypical form."
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The same logic runs upward to Naritsugu. A character actor doing menace would have signalled the horror. An idol with fifteen years of accumulated public affection just stands there being beautiful while a man describes having his family slaughtered, and Japanese audiences had to reconcile the two. Inagaki's image had already taken one knock — he was arrested in Shibuya in August 2001 over an illegal parking stop that escalated, charged with obstructing and injuring a police officer, released when the Tokyo District Court rejected the prosecutors' detention request, and dropped from a Pokka coffee campaign within days.
The real Naritsugu was nothing like this
Matsudaira Naritsugu did exist. He was the 14th daimyō of Fukui, born 5 March 1811, married to a daughter of Shōgun Tokugawa Ienari, and he spent his short tenure ordering austerity plans while rebuilding the palace at Fukui Castle. He died in 1835, aged 25, probably of illness, without an heir.
"There actually was a real man, a real leader, named Naritsugu. But he wasn't the one who was the really violent person," Miike told EasternKicks in 2011.
What the role did for him
13 Assassins premiered in competition at Venice on 9 September 2010 and took four prizes at the 34th Japan Academy Film Prize — music, cinematography, lighting and sound recording. Kōji Yakusho was nominated for Best Actor. Inagaki wasn't nominated at all, which says more about how Japanese awards treated idols than about the performance.
In September 2017 he left Johnny & Associates with Tsuyoshi Kusanagi and Shingo Katori and formed Atarashii Chizu. He has played Beethoven in the stage production No.9 – Immortal Melody on and off since 2015.
For the record: since July 2025, the man who played one of samurai cinema's most sadistic lords has been playing Harry Potter in the Tokyo production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.