There are actors who win awards and ride the wave carefully, choosing safe follow-up projects that protect a newly elevated reputation without risking too much of it. And then there are actors who win awards and immediately say yes to a giant monster franchise, a samurai epic sequel, and a biopic role portraying one of the most scrutinised and controversial women in the history of popular music — all at the same time.

Anna Sawai is very much in the second category. And if her trajectory over the last eighteen months has not yet convinced you that she is one of the most compelling screen presences working in television today, the projects she is currently attached to absolutely should.

In a recent interview that touched on everything from giant monsters to feudal Japan to the legacy of The Beatles, Sawai opened up about the extraordinary confluence of projects currently defining her career — and offered some genuinely fascinating insights into how she approaches roles that carry the weight of history, expectation, and in one very particular case, the passionate opinions of millions of music fans worldwide.

The Monarch Return: Back to Monster Country

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was one of the more pleasant surprises of recent prestige television — a Apple TV+ series set within the MonsterVerse franchise that managed to be genuinely character-driven and emotionally engaging rather than simply an extended advertisement for giant creature chaos. Sawai’s performance was central to why the show worked as well as it did, grounding an inherently fantastical premise in recognisable human feeling.

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The news that she is returning for more Monarch will delight fans of the first season who were left wanting more — both of the monster mythology and of the human stories woven around it. The MonsterVerse, which includes the Godzilla and Kong film franchises under the Legendary Entertainment banner, has been steadily expanding its television presence, and Monarch represents its most sophisticated attempt yet to tell stories that work independently of the spectacle.

What the new season will bring narratively has not been fully revealed, which is exactly as it should be. But the confirmation of Sawai’s return is the single most important piece of casting news the show could have delivered to its audience.

Shōgun Season 2: Returning to the Role That Changed Everything

If Monarch was the show that introduced Anna Sawai to a broad international audience, Shōgun was the show that made her a genuine phenomenon. The FX and Hulu production — based on James Clavell‘s landmark 1975 novel — was one of the most acclaimed television events of 2024, winning multiple Emmy Awards including Outstanding Drama Series, and earning Sawai herself the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series — a historic win that made her the first actress of Asian descent to win in that category in the award’s modern era.

Her portrayal of Toda Mariko — a complex, deeply conflicted woman navigating impossible loyalties in sixteenth-century feudal Japan — was the kind of performance that gets discussed in terms of its craft rather than simply its entertainment value. The stillness she brought to scenes of enormous internal tension, the precision of her physical performance, the way she communicated entire emotional landscapes with the most minimal of expressions — it was acting of a genuinely rare order.

Shōgun Season 2 arrives, then, with the full weight of that critical and popular success behind it, and with an audience that is both enormously enthusiastic and enormously demanding. The question of how the story continues — and what becomes of the characters who survived the first season’s devastating conclusion — is one of the most anticipated narrative questions in prestige television right now.

Sawai has spoken about returning to the role with a mixture of excitement and the particular kind of gravity that comes from understanding what the character means to the people who connected with her. Toda Mariko is not just a television character to many viewers — particularly to audiences of Japanese heritage who rarely see themselves represented in prestige international drama at this level. That responsibility is not lost on Sawai, and it shows in how she talks about the work.

Playing Yoko Ono: The Role Nobody Saw Coming

And then there is Yoko Ono.

If you wanted to design the single most challenging biopic casting decision in contemporary entertainment, you might struggle to top this one. Yoko Ono is one of the most written-about, argued-about, and fundamentally misrepresented figures in the history of popular culture. For decades she was cast, unfairly and often viciously, as the woman who broke up The Beatles — a reduction so absurdly simplistic that it would be almost comical if it had not caused genuine damage to her reputation and legacy for the better part of fifty years.

The reality, of course, is considerably more interesting. Ono was — and at 92 remains — a pioneering avant-garde artist, a conceptual art innovator, a peace activist, and a deeply significant figure in John Lennon‘s creative and personal life. The biopic project in which Sawai will portray her represents an opportunity to finally tell a version of this story that is not filtered through the lazy mythology of Beatles fandom, but that actually grapples with who Yoko Ono was and is on her own terms.

That Sawai has been asked to take on this role — and that she appears to be approaching it with the seriousness and research-driven commitment she brings to all her work — is genuinely exciting. She has spoken about the weight of playing a real, living person: the ethical responsibility of representation, the importance of understanding rather than simply performing, and the particular challenge of portraying someone whose public image has been so heavily distorted by decades of mischaracterisation.

The film, which is still in development, is already generating the kind of advance discussion that suggests it will be one of the more culturally significant releases whenever it arrives. The combination of subject matter, the current moment of reappraisal around Ono‘s legacy, and Sawai’s proven ability to inhabit complex, historically grounded female figures makes this a project worth watching very closely.

The Anatomy of a Breakout

What makes Anna Sawai‘s current moment so fascinating to observe is not just the quality of the individual projects — it is the range. Monarch is genre entertainment at its most ambitious. Shōgun is prestige historical drama at its most exacting. And the Yoko Ono biopic is something altogether different again — contemporary, politically charged, and carrying the particular emotional weight that comes with portraying a living person whose story has never been told fairly.

Most actors at this stage of a breakthrough would be looking to consolidate — to pick one lane and stay in it long enough to build a specific, bankable identity. Sawai appears to have no interest in that approach. She is, instead, doing what the genuinely great ones always do: following the work that scares her, taking the roles that demand everything she has, and trusting that the audience will follow wherever she goes.

Born in New Zealand and raised between there and Japan, Sawai brings to her work a genuinely bicultural perspective that enriches every role she takes. She understands what it means to exist between worlds — between languages, between cultural expectations, between the version of yourself that different people project onto you and the version you actually are. That understanding is, perhaps, exactly what makes her the right person to play Yoko Ono — a woman who has spent her entire public life navigating precisely that kind of impossible in-between space.

The Emmy is on the shelf. The monsters are waiting. The samurai story continues. And somewhere in the world, a blonde wig — metaphorically speaking — is about to become the most interesting piece of casting news in Hollywood.

Anna Sawai is just getting started. Pay attention.