Actor

Ken Watanabe

33 credited titles on WatchWise

Ken Watanabe (born October 21, 1959) is a Japanese stage, film, and television actor. To English-speaking audiences he is known for playing tragic hero characters, such as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi in Letters from Iwo Jima and Lord Katsumoto Moritsugu in The Last Samurai, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Among other awards, he has won the Japan Academy Prize for Best Actor twice, in 2007 for Memories of Tomorrow and in 2010 for Shizumanu Taiyō. He is also known for his roles in director Christopher Nolan's Hollywood blockbusters Batman Begins and Inception.

Ken Watanabe in one minute

Strongest genre

Thriller

$336M · 100% hit rate

Biggest hit

Inception

$839M

Standout efficiency

17.3x

Cooley High · gross ÷ budget

Commercial performance

Associated lifetime gross

$704M

Combined reported budget

$201M

Gross / budget

3.5x

Bankability Index

42 / 100

All figures are associated, not attributed — box-office numbers are sourced from TMDB and Wikipedia (reused under CC BY-SA), shown in US$, and weighted by billing prominence. Coverage varies by title; figures are estimates, not audited trade data.