Sugo Araki is appearing in the drama series " Missing Persons Search Team: The Vanished Truth " (TV Tokyo, every Friday at 9:00 pm) starring Keita Machida . Since starting his acting career in 2022, Sugo has been cast in major drama slots such as TBS's Sunday Theatre and NHK's Asadora drama series. What have Sugo felt as he has built his career? We asked him about the role of "IT professional" Shimizu Toichiro, which he plays in this work, and his current thoughts on acting.
◇ Impression of Shimizu as an “IT professional”
The protagonist of "Missing Persons Search Team: The Vanished Truth" is Tatsuhiko Kinosaki (played by Machida), a former detective in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's First Investigative Division, who pursues the whereabouts of missing people who have disappeared without anyone knowing. He gathers a diverse range of professionals from various fields to join the private missing persons search team he founded, and the story depicts his efforts with the members of the search team to find missing people who the police are not investigating, as well as his "beloved wife."
Sugo's character, Shimizu, is a free-spirited, laid-back young man. He has zero motivation to work, but he accepts Kinosaki's invitation because it sounds interesting, and becomes a member of the team. He is an IT professional. Sugo says, "I wouldn't call him a lone wolf, but I think he's not a very social person."
"Shimizu is able to think and act on his own, so I think he's cool, since I usually rely on others."
He said that they are similar in their strong sense of curiosity, but he also feels that "I'm more of a broad-minded type, while Shimizu is the type who really pursues things." On top of that, he was conscious of showing Shimizu's free-spirited and laid-back side as an excellent hacker, and his tendency to not follow the crowd, through small movements on the job.
"When I was acting, I tried not to do the same things as everyone else. When everyone else was standing, Shimizu was sitting, when everyone was listening to Kinosaki's story, Shimizu was eating something, and so on. I wanted to bring out the "characteristic" side of Shimizu in these ways, so I always have in mind how to express a feeling of freedom and not being tied down by anything."
◇New discoveries through the role of Shimizu
It is said that Shimizu is also a very challenging role for Sugo.
"This is just my own opinion, but the roles I've played up until now have been passionate and show their emotions on their faces, so playing Shimizu, who doesn't show his emotions, but is somehow calm, yet has something hidden inside, was a first for me. When I watched the finished video, it wasn't the "me" I knew, so for someone who's used to acting by yelling and crying, it felt like a challenge all around."
Sugo said that he made some new discoveries through playing the role of Shimizu.
"Of course, I discovered new expressions, like, 'Oh, I make these kinds of expressions,' but because it's this kind of role, even a simple smile looks completely different from my previous roles. When a person who doesn't show their emotions much shows an expression, it can be taken to mean all sorts of things, so I felt that the way and timing of the expression was really important."
◇ Future challenges and goals
"The Missing Persons Search Team: The Vanished Truth" is Sugo's first drama after the Asadora"Omusubi," which he said "helped me to spread my existence to the world." It's been almost three years since he announced his acting career in June 2022, but what do you think is the most rewarding part of his job?
"I want to do more, I want to express myself, but there are many times when I don't know what to do. There are so many ways to do it, and even if the director and I are satisfied with it, I sometimes wonder afterwards if it was really the best way. But recently, I've started to find that time spent thinking is really interesting. It's painful to struggle and worry and suffer on my own, but I can still find it interesting because I feel like I'm "stuck" in acting. I've only recently been able to properly recognize that until now, I had unconsciously thought that way. In my first and second years, I was really desperate, and I'm still desperate now, but I've started to feel a strong sense of responsibility for the impact my acting has on the work, and I've started to feel that I want to continue doing this job for a long time."
Looking to the future, Sugo points out that he wants to "be able to make my acting more persuasive."
"I think that if you can project the human qualities you have cultivated in your everyday life onto a character, rather than just acting and becoming a character, then your words and the character will have more depth and weight, and that will make them more persuasive. I would like to become an actor who can incorporate human qualities into my acting, so that the audience can automatically feel the background of my performance."
