‘Sunny’ Star Hidetoshi Nishijima on Working With Rashida Jones and the Future of His Mysterious Character
variety.comMax Gao SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the entire first season of “Sunny,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
As a Japanese actor, Hidetoshi Nishijima often receives offers to play morally gray characters, such as samurais and yakuza members, who are defined by a particular profession and era.
But then he was approached for the role of a roboticist whose mysterious disappearance leaves his wife (and the clever robotic companion he designed for her) at the center of a criminal conspiracy in “Sunny,” Apple TV+’s darkly comedic, sci-fi thriller that just wrapped up its first season.
Nishijima — who starred in “Drive My Car,” the 2021 Japanese film that was nominated for best picture, and won the Academy Award for international feature — relished the opportunity to play an ordinary man who must wrestle with existential questions about what it means to be human. “Of course, his profession is a big part of this project, but the most important part is that he is a normal man and he falls in love with a woman, gets married and then builds his own family, and then he just faces this unexpected thing,” Nishijima tells Variety through a Japanese interpreter. “I think the important part of this show is that it talks about love and anxiety and the unknown, so this is basically a human story.
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