Takeshi Kaneshiro, Hong Kong cinema’s ‘most good-looking’ actor

The relatively conventional romantic comedy earned Kaneshiro the best leading actor trophy at the 2017 Golden Screen Awards, which took place in Los Angeles, California, and celebrates co-productions between China and movie industries around the world.

While hardly the most prestigious honour that an actor could dream of, it is the only film acting prize Kaneshiro has won in his entertainment career – something of a surprise given his immense popularity since the 1990s.

For many, his most memorable performances have been his collaborations with the Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai.

Just two years after Kaneshiro’s 1992 debut as a pop singer in Taiwan, he starred in Wong’s acclaimed film Chungking Express, in which his character He Zhiwu’s girlfriend breaks up with him on April 1.

Zhiwu saw it as a cruel April Fool’s Day joke to endure until his birthday on May 1. Over the span of a month, he bought one can of pineapple each day and told himself that the relationship would have really expired by the time he had 30.

To this day, Zhiwu’s monologue set off by the expiry dates of canned pineapples – “If memories could be canned, I hope they never expire; if there must be an expiry date, I hope it’s 10,000 years” – is still widely quoted in Hong Kong pop culture and cinephile communities.

The film plays with the concept of time and has been said to reflect the anxiety of Hong Kong residents before the 1997 handover of the city from Britain to China.

A year later, in 1995, Kaneshiro played a similarly quirky character in Fallen Angels, which Wong intended to be a loose continuation of Chungking Express.

In the late ’90s, Kaneshiro went to Japan to further his acting career, and starred in the television drama series God, Please Give Me More Time opposite actress Kyoko Fukada.

The 1998 production paved the way for his role in the 2002 Japanese film Returner and saw his popularity rise throughout East Asia as the handsome yet lovelorn “soft boy” of cinema..

One of Kaneshiro’s known confidants is Hong Kong filmmaker Peter Chan Ho-sun, a long-time collaborator who directed and produced some of the movies for which the actor is best known, such as 2005’s Perhaps Love – for which he was nominated for best actor at the seventh Changchun Film Festival in China in 2006 – as well as The Warlords (2007) and Wu Xia (2011).

“[Kaneshiro] is the most good-looking man I’ve seen in my life,” Chan told Edmund Lee, the Post’s film editor, in an interview in 2011.

“More importantly, he’s one of the rare examples [among actors] – and I don’t know what happened in his childhood – in that he always seems very fragile and insecure and deprived. He gets your sympathy.”

In a 2008 interview with the Post, Kaneshiro was humble about his good looks, and even said that his appearance was an obstacle.

“As an actor, your appearance can vary according to your character,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel as if my looks have overshadowed my performance and the hard work I put into my characters.”

At a moment when most movie stars would have chosen to ride the wave of success and take on more challenging, or perhaps even “award bait”, roles to advance their careers, Kaneshiro did not seem that interested in the fame and glory that could have followed.

After acting in more than two dozen films in the ’90s, he worked on only a dozen in the 2000s and a mere six in the 2010s. He has made one more film, Sons of the Neon Night, but it is still awaiting release five years after production on it wrapped up.

Production for the film, written, directed and produced by singer-turned filmmaker Juno Mak Chun-lung, began in 2017 and it was slated for release in 2019. However, a release date has still to be confirmed because of various post-production issues.

With some celebrities, such a decline in productivity is the consequence of a scandal, but Kaneshiro’s reputation has remained pristine since his 1992 debut.

In this case, it seems he simply enjoys his seclusion. Chan said on a talk show in 2022 that Kaneshiro’s focus was not on filming and the actor would “give 100 excuses, such as not wanting to film in places with no computer or internet”.

And if one were to try to convince him, it would take at least half a year and the working environment would have to fit his comfort zone, the filmmaker said.

Kaneshiro seems to have found contentment in working only when he wants to, and avoiding the pressure that comes with living in the media’s spotlight.

In one interview, the actor divulged that everyday life would make him happy enough. He also admitted that all he wanted to do was act and that he did not have much interest in the status that followed, which he thought was created by the public.

Born in 1973 in Taipei to a Taiwanese mother and a Japanese father, Kaneshiro grew up in Taiwan under the Buddhist influence of his mother’s side of the family and is known to have formally converted to Buddhism in 1997.

Despite decades of rumours that he is or was secretly married to a Japanese woman, Kaneshiro’s relationship status remains unknown to the public. He has said numerous times that if he ever were to marry, he would wish to protect his privacy.

Now 49, Kaneshiro is said to live in a small town in Japan – although, as with many aspects of this actor, few can say for sure.

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