Cover Dean Fujioka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
Dean Fujioka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
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Japanese actor, model and singer-songwriter Dean Fujioka, who was in Hong Kong for the Asian Film Awards in April, talks about his return to the city and what keeps him motivated in playing different roles
Over the course of Dean Fujioka’s decades-long career, he has forged a reputation as one of Asia’s most dynamic actors. Thrillers, crime, mystery, action-adventure, sci-fi and romance: the 44-year-old Japanese actor has done it all, and also worked as a producer, director, model and singer-songwriter.
He attended the Asian Film Awards in March as the event’s ambassador. He told Tatler he was “truly grateful to return to my starting point”—he spent time in the city in his 20s, where he appeared in a music video for local singers Edison Chen and Denise Ho’s 2005 Canto-pop song Lao Si, Lai Si and made his film debut in Yan Yan Mak’s 2006 August Story.
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Above Dean Fujioka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
Dean Fujioka (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
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His Hong Kong experiences opened his eyes to the world of storytelling, through both music and film. “The people I met taught me the technique of storytelling, filmmaking and scriptwriting,” he says. “But the most important core value I learnt in Hong Kong was why we need to continue telling our stories and trying our best to share the life lessons, moral compass, social issues, personal narratives and emotional conflicts.” The wide range of characters he played and people he met while living in Hong Kong, as well as his experience of living in a subdivided flat in Wan Chai, developed his curiosity for discovering and telling stories about people from all walks of life
He took this attitude with him as his career developed and took him on adventures to Taiwan, Japan and even an Indonesian jungle. He has appeared in dozens of films and television programme since then, many with unexpected challenges. Some of the roles were physically demanding, such as the 2022 action film Pure Japanese, for which he had to learn martial arts; others, such as his 2007 Taiwanese series Corner with Love and the 2024 multicultural horror film Orang Ikan required the native Japanese speaker to learn Mandarin and English respectively. “Picking up new languages is equal to learning about the character,” he says.
He approached each of these challenges with a positive mindset. “Every time I learn something from my characters, I develop not only my skillset and technique as an actor, [determining] how to make them vivid on camera; I also learn something as a person. That’s the fun part of acting: you get to play someone else’s life and experience a perspective you [would otherwise] never get to know.”
Above Portrait of Dean Fujioka (Photo: Carlos Hui)
Portrait of Dean Fujioka (Photo: Carlos Hui)
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In Orang Ikan, the cast and crew were shooting deep in the rainforest of Java, the terrain and climatic conditions of which made for a trying process. “It was more like making a documentary film than a feature,” he recalls with a chuckle. “I got to see the true colours of our team members from different cultures when the situation got tough—some of us were locals; some were from cities like Tokyo; others were from the west. And we had different solutions and approaches when there were conflicts. I learnt so much about managing a project and working with people from different backgrounds.”
Twenty years into his acting career, Fujioka says the biggest lesson he has learnt from the industry is what it means to be creative. “Innovation is not about the technology, machines or devices. It’s more about the new potential, values and perspectives that will be found in the relationships and encounters with different creatives.
Credits
Photography Assistant: Carlos Hui
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
