Kento Kaku 賀来賢人 on His Awesome New Netflix Show HOUSE OF NINJAS (2024) 忍びの家
Hello K congratulations on your new show House of ninja streaming worldwide on Netflix starting February 15 I’ve already watched all 18 episodes such a badass show uh Mr Kento as I understand it and you can crack me I’m wrong but as I understand it you were one of the
People whose idea was the basis for the story of this show what I want to know is where is this fascination with the world of ninjas or Shinobi coming from why have you been fascinated with them and why did you want to tell a story about Them for yes ninja is a very signature or proprietary of Japanese culture but I felt that uh gradually the Japanese people I wouldn’t say much as losing interest but we kind of forgot about this culture or the these people and um but if you go abroad over sees uh the um
Many people are interested in ninjas and Sumari and as a Japanese we kind of tend to or we have not really cared much about our culture so this was something that people abroad or uh the director Dave had made me realize and um n the ninja culture is an interesting culture
And I wanted I thought it would be wonderful uh to introduce it and bring it to uh the world to follow up on that uh Kento in in your preparation for this role to play your character Haru what type of martial art background did you have or was that something that you had
To train from scratch and and vigorously for how challenging was that physical preparation Not fres but practical action we aim for I did have uh some experience in action uh filming action sequences a few times but uh sword action was a first time for me for um for this show and so regarding the training and the prep um six months prior to uh filming I did some preparation and training and um for this
Show the action that we aimed for wasn’t a flashy action but we aimed for practical action and we wanted the action to be more grounded to feel more real So based on reality and uh we I worked a lot with our action coordinator and U worked on the D I made some um
Modifications too and um especially we have this um action sequence and the club where we’re not supposed to be noticed and that was a difficult scene but I think it’s a very interesting scene to watch awesome Kento in the midst of all the action at the heart of
House of ninjas is this awesome family drama the taara family the mom the dad the sister the grandma and of course haru’s little brother what was it like working with your co-stars to create that family Dynamics was it was that tougher or easier to do compared to nailing down the fight choreographies Boss For Well both aspects are uh very difficult and very important uh for the show and of course for action there’s some uh challenges and then but working on the family Dynamics we have these uh intricate details and we have there’s this uh delicate uh Expressions too but
On set what I had this impressive um a moment where uh M nobuko Miyamoto who plays Taki approached me on set one day and told me that the script is good and the cast is good and the crew is good so we just have to make it real the show
Will be defined by how real we could make this family uh and then so that’s why we talked about making it grounded and we didn’t want anything extra or to make it excessive but we basically explored uh working on how we could uh depict this family to be
Real awesome uh your character Haru is very stoic a man of a few words he’s very protective of his girl and his family but Haru internalizes things rather than expresses them what what was your process of embodying a character that is so so uh internalized so laser
Focused like that and do you and Haru share some things in common For for Talking about things instead of like having things in common um I was involved uh um in the process of working on the script from the beginning so um I went through the process of learning about how he’s I feel like I understood his feelings and I spent a lot of time
With this character because I was um with I was um present at the process of working on the script so my task was to how far I could understand this character and um I always thought about what would he do and um instead of having things in common I do admire and
Respect this character but when I think about hadu of course he’s very important but maybe the only a thing in common that I have is this character is that we both slouch we have bad posture I have this image of Haru slouching all the time so maybe that’s the coming that we have
Sh fun question Kento if ninjas existed today would you join them because I would be too scared to join that type of group but how about You um yes uh it is a scary to join them if they were existing uh today but it is they are very interesting and um ninjas you know history-wise they are supposed to be extinct or they are gone but it would be very thrilling if they still
Exist uh at this day and age and what if they were saving the world um you know in the shadows and it’s very mysterious and it’s very appealing that’s the reason why we wanted to work on the show hoping that our oversee audience would uh think that maybe uh they do still
Exist I love how uh because this story is set in the mar modern world in present day it’s not a period piece uh there’s this fine delicate balance of combination between traditional stuff like suken black outfits masks and sord but also the the technology there’s this character who’s a nerd you know doing
The computer stuff talk to me about the find striking that balance of um uh meeting the traditions of imaginations that we have about ninjas and setting them in the modern World AC well before we started shooting we had extensive uh discussions with Dave our director and um we see there are a lot of shows films existing as in the Ninja genre but we wanted to make a proper uh Ninja uh show and um in order just um we
Have to uh depict and portray the ninjas and ninjas are not Sorcerers or witches or they’re not spies they’re ninjas and um we had to think about their uh wardrobe of costume the action sequences and how much are we going to show from the traditional uh ninjas that we
Imagine and we have to think about uh Main in the traditional aspects but also because we are introducing it to the modern world like for example if the shuriken does not work in this modern setting um what should we do and for example the type of discussion we had
Was when we have the scene in the club like what if we use the AST like a shuriken for the ninja because one of the strengths that ninjas have is that they can use anything as weapons and if we basically explo explored on those elements and we thought that was very fun
All right uh for my fans at home everybody go check out House of ninjas streaming worldwide on Netflix starting February 15 Kento thank you for talking to me congratulations and thank so much
#kentokaku #houseofninjas #netflix
NOTE: I misspoke in this video. There are only 8 episodes on HOUSE OF NINJAS. Not 18.
Here’s my video interview with actor Kento Kaku about his new @Netflix show HOUSE OF NINJAS. Set in today’s Japan, this series tells the story of the Tawara family, the last ninja clan who abandoned their roots after a mission gone wrong
SUPPORT Rama’s Screen at https://www.patreon.com/ramascreen
Like me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ramascreen/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ramasscreen
The copyright act of 1976 under section 107, allows the use of copyrighted material for “fair use” purposes which includes , criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and research.