Rinko Kikuchi: Movies, Awards & Box Office

Rinko Kikuchi (born Yuriko Kikuchi on January 6, 1981 in Hadano, Kanagawa) is a Japanese actress who broke international barriers by becoming the first Japanese performer nominated for an Academy Award in half a century, earning a Best Supporting Actress nod for her haunting turn as the deaf teenager Chieko Wataya in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). The youngest of three children, she was discovered at age fifteen inside Tokyo’s Laforet Harajuku mall by a talent scout, prompting her to abandon a conventional school path and embark on a modeling‑to‑acting career. Kikuchi debuted in 1999 under her birth name with Kaneto Shindo’s Will to Live, and quickly attracted festival attention with Kazuyoshi Komori’s Sora no Ana (2001) and Katsuhito Ishii’s whimsical The Taste of Tea (2004), the latter screening at Cannes. Her breakthrough at Hollywood brought a cascade of eclectic roles: she appeared in Mamoru Oshii’s cyber‑punk animation The Sky Crawlers (2008) and the live‑action Assault Girls (2009), before starring opposite Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz in Rian Johnson’s English‑language caper The Brothers Bloom (2009), where she spoke only three words. In 2010 she embodied Naoko in Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, a performance that premiered at the Venice Film Festival. After a brief but high‑profile relationship with director Spike Jonze, Kikuchi returned to genre cinema as the resilient pilot Mako Mori in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013), a role she prepared for by intensively studying English through the TV series The Voice. Kikuchi’s later work demonstrates her versatility: she led the off‑beat indie Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014), earning an Independent Spirit Award nomination; she recurred in the second season of HBO’s Westworld; and she currently portrays journalist Emi Maruyama in HBO Max’s Tokyo Vice (2022‑present). In addition to acting, she explores music under the alias Rinbjö. Married to fellow actor Shōta Sometani since 2014, the couple share two children born in 2016 and 2018. In 2024 she served as the navigator and poster icon for the 37th Tokyo International Film Festival, cementing her status as a cultural ambassador.